“It’s okay, baby.” His voice was a gentle murmur. “I promise you, everything’s going to be okay. I want you to go with Tariq for now, though. He’ll take care of you until I’m finished here. Will you do that, Paige? Go with Tariq, sweetheart.”

“No! I want to go home.” Her fingers curled demandingly into the long, cotton tuniclike shirt he wore as she forced her eyes to focus, forced herself to find whatever little strength was left in her legs. “Call Khalid or Papa. They’ll come for me.” She wasn’t about to stay here a moment longer than she had to. “This is insane. Get me out of here.”

Her vision was finally clearing, the dizzying blurriness slowly evaporating to focus on the tormented, tortured expression on his face.

Black eyes glowed in feral rage as his face seemed curved from stone into lines of brutal disillusionment.

“Go with Tariq, first, Paige.” He gripped her arms and eased her from him before moving her in Tariq’s direction.

“No. I won’t leave you alone with him.” She stared up at him, seeing the pain in his eyes, the grief in his face, and she knew he had to be inconsolable with rage. She couldn’t leave him alone with this madman. “What if it’s contagious?”

His gaze turned back to hers, a subtle glimmer of bemusement glowing in the wicked, night dark depths. “What is contagious, hellcat?”

“His insanity,” she whispered back at him, at once hearing the ludicrous suggestion, yet the need to make light of the situation couldn’t be fought. That was her. Take it seriously and she could end up sharing Abram’s fate herself. Azir Mustafa could drive a saint crazy, she guessed. And poor Abram, he lived with the old bat.

He had to hate this. This place, this room, it wasn’t Abram. The way he was dressed, the expression on his face, it wasn’t the man she knew. He would never countenance abusing a woman, or kidnapping one.

He was as arrogant as the wind itself, as the very desert that raised him, but he wasn’t the vicious monster his father obviously was.

“I’m certain it’s not contagious,” he promised. “But go with Tariq for now. I’ll take care of everything and I’ll join you soon.”

“You beg a whore to do as you ask?” Azir cracked behind her. “How you have fallen, my son.”

Paige refused to glance back at him, rather she continued to stare up at Abram, willing him to leave with her, to refuse to risk himself in his father’s demented company.

“Now,” his voice was nearly silent, but there was no mistaking the dark command that filled it. “Go with Tariq.”

Tariq Mustafa. She knew him. There were times he had come to America with Abram and visited with Khalid and her family. He had smiled. He had “almost” flirted a time or two, but Abram and Khalid’s displeasure had been clearly apparent.

This time though, his expression was hard, cold, as though he had no idea who she was. There wasn’t so much as a glimmer of recognition as he took her from Abram.

Her lips thinned, her displeasure unable to hide. He had no business lingering here when they needed to make plans. When they needed to get her out of Saudi Arabia.

“Come on.” Tariq wasn’t flirting with her this time as she forced the strength in her legs to walk to the door. He acted as though he didn’t know her, as though he had never met her. And she would find out why the minute Abram joined them.

Abram watched as Tariq drew Paige from the room, eased her around the doors and led her up the hall to his suite. Dark, emerald green eyes stared back at him, defiance and anger reflecting in her gaze before she disappeared.

He turned back to Azir, though God knew he didn’t want to. He could feel the killing rage rising inside him, threatening the control it had taken so many years to develop.

For a moment he wondered if she could be right, if the Mustafa legacy of blood, death, and insanity, wasn’t actually a contagion that infected each generation after the other.

Staring at his father, he felt nothing but the overwhelming hatred that he was in danger of allowing to spill from the depths of his soul.

He stared at his father, and he saw nothing but the ragged, agonizing pain his first wife had felt as she died, the fear of his second wife as she died with their unborn child, and his own fear when he had learned that Paige’s life was in danger.

“She’s the very image of her mother, isn’t she?” Azir stated calmly, as though he hadn’t just been throwing that vision across the room with enough strength to kill her if her head were to strike the floor when she fell.

The calm, almost rational tone of his voice only incited the icy rage burning inside Abram.

“Why is she here?” He could only barely force a semblance of calm in his voice.

Azir smiled. A mocking, triumphant curve of his lips as he stared back at Abram.

“She is my insurance, my son, and the gift I would grant you for your birthday. Tell me, do you think her mother is worried? Perhaps certain who has taken her daughter and imagining the many ways I could make her suffer for her mother’s crimes?”

The pleasure Azir clearly felt at the thought of the pain only a mother could feel filling Marilyn Galbraithe, sickened Abram.

“I will be returning her home—” he began.

“Then she will die.” Azir’s voice hardened, becoming gravely and tinged with anger. “The moment you leave the walls of the fortress with her then the guards will haul her back and I’ll have her stoned for her mother’s crimes. She is no virgin. She was checked for such innocence as she lay unconscious. Convincing the Matawa to order the stoning will be no hardship.”

Abram stared back at his father in shock and disbelief. Surely even Azir wasn’t that insane. To take such an action would only cause the royal family to be forced to take action against them.

“Don’t do this,” he ground out, his fists clenching, adrenaline surging through him and demanding blood. Azir’s blood. And he would be well within his rights to spill it. He should simply do it. How much better the world would be without Azir Mustafa’s presence. “She’s done nothing to deserve this.”

“But her mother has,” Azir snapped back, his grating tone rasping against Abram’s nerve endings. “She committed adultery against me in her false marriage to another man. She stole my son and turned his heart against me even as she and her American courts ripped from me my right to have him returned to me.”

Azir’s expression twisted with fanatical fury. “My precious Marilyn. She turned Khalid against me, and because of him, you have turned against me. I blame her for the atrocities Khalid has committed against God in his sexual depravity and I blame her for the deaths of your brothers. And her daughter will now pay the price.” He was screaming. Staring back at Abram, the rage infecting not just his sanity, but also his control over himself.

“They were no brothers of mine!” As far as Abram was concerned, this was the last straw for Azir. He would never again claim blood relation to Azir or to the bastards who nearly killed him and Khalid. The same two men had created the situation Abram now found himself in. “Had they still lived when I claim the province from the King’s emissary, then I would have ordered their death’s myself.”

Azir glared back at him, his expression working furiously, his face brick red with fury. The old bastard had never been rational where Ayid and Aman were concerned, no more than he had been rational where Marilyn was concerned. Rational or sane.

“You and Khalid were responsible for the deaths of their wives and still you would hate them for their retaliation?” Azir questioned him incredulously, as though he himself had had nothing to do with their vocation or their wrath. “They lost what they held dearest. Chaste, faithful wives and you bemoan a whore who willingly shared her body between you and Khalid as though she were no more than a bitch dog in heat? I should have turned the two of you over to the Matawa the moment I discovered your perversion instead of believing that you would learn your lesson with your wife’s death.”