His fingers itched to push into the pocket and jerk it free. But the military-issue P90s Jafar and his lieutenant carried were still aimed squarely at Paige rather than at Abram.
Abram let his gaze slide to his father, Azir. The old man was staring at Paige with such a gleam of crazed hunger that suddenly, Abram understood exactly how Azir could have realized his son’s attraction to her.
Azir had developed a fixation on Paige that Abram had missed.
How the hell had he managed to miss it?
As he eased from the bed a small, lonely sigh slipped from her. She shifted beneath the thin sheet as though searching for his warmth.
Trying to keep the movement slow, unthreatening, he pulled the comforter bunched at her knees up to her shoulder.
Azir moved faster than Abram could have expected.
Before he could counter the move, Azir, for all his girth and normal slowness, managed to strike with cobra swiftness and jerk the comforter from his grip.
Abram stared back at him through the dim light of the room, hatred and murderous rage rising inside him.
“Before I die…” He kept his voice barely audible, but even he heard the resounding promise in it. “I will kill you with my bare hands. Hear me, old man, because I swear to you before God, you will pay for what you have done in this life long before you meet Allah.”
Azir’s eyes narrowed, but Abram saw the flicker of fear in the depths for the briefest second.
“Let’s move,” Jafar ordered him. “We’re leaving the house, and you will be going with us. Ensure, Abram, that no one stops us. We have proved to you that we can get past Khalid’s defenses, and that we can access your woman. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can escape again without consequences.”
“That is why you shot Khalid rather than me.” He smiled mirthlessly. “How you have changed, Jafar.”
Jafar’s eyes narrowed. “No Abram, I have changed not at all, I promise you this.” Mocking, condescending. Was his cousin actually attempting to convince him that he had never dreamed of the freedoms they had both enjoyed while attending college in the States, or that both of them hadn’t, at one time, enjoyed their membership in the Sinclair Club?
“May I dress?” he asked sarcastically.
“By all means.” Jafar shrugged. “Dress well, cousin. Your return to the fortress will be noticed, and we would prefer it appears voluntary.”
Abram dressed without hurrying, though he didn’t move with deliberate slowness either. But he needed the time, he needed a moment to think.
There was a message in Jafar’s words, he could feel it. He’d once known this cousin as well as he had known Tariq. At least, he had thought he had.
They had attended American college together, they had shared lovers, gotten drunk as young men, and grew into their maturity as friends.
They had both joined the Sinclair Club at the same time, joining Tariq in the conspiracy to lie and deceive to cover the funds used for their membership fees.
Was Jafar still a member?
“Stop dawdling.” The order came from the lieutenant rather than Jafar.
Abram almost froze for a second, his gaze sliding to the other man. Abram buttoned his shirt mechanically, knowledge rippling through his mind. He began to piece together the answers that had eluded him over the years as he attempted to identify the commander of the terrorists moving into the Mustafa province.
When Jafar had disappeared several years before, supposedly moving into the mountains to aid one of his father’s elderly friends, Abram hadn’t suspected anything. He had never considered, not even for a moment, that his cousin had been in Iraq working to attack the king to whom he’d once vowed his loyalty.
Abram had believed Jafar was the commander they had been searching for, but that answer hadn’t felt right. Ayid and Aman had hated Jafar almost as much as they had hated Khalid and Abram.
This was why it hadn’t felt right. Because Jafar wasn’t the commander he had searched for. It was this man. The one that stared at him with steady, dead eyes. No emotion. No sense of anything but the evil that filled him.
He turned back to Jafar, the warning in the other man’s eyes suddenly shooting through him.
The warning was like a shiver of death racing over him.
He knew his cousin.
He did know him.
And he knew how he worked.
How the fuck had he managed to forget over the years?
He’d messed up, Abram admitted. He’d messed up so damned badly when he had immediately assumed Jafar was exactly what he had claimed to be when he returned, after Ayid’s and Aman’s deaths.
He should have known better.
“Let’s go.” Jafar jerked his head toward the door as Abram finished lacing his boots.
“We take the girl.” Azir didn’t move. “She goes with us.”
“No.”
Everyone stared back at Abram as the word came from him, the sound of it sharp, filled with determined fury and murderous intent.
“She goes.” Azir’s smile was cold, calculating. “I will have her as well.”
“The hell you will,” Abram growled.
“We go now.” The other man moved between Azir and the bed, the command in his tone unmistakable now. “The girl is a liability now. We will come back for her if we must.” The last sentence was uttered, intended to be audible only to Azir, but Abram had always had damned sharp ears. The instinct honed over the years as he moved secretively through the fortress castle.
“Did they promise you Paige for your cooperation?” Abram asked him then. “Is that why you accepted the deaths of your sons so easily, Azir? Because you believed you would have Marilyn’s daughter?”
“She was created for me.” Azir breathed out almost reverently. “Born to come to me.” He turned back to Abram. “And you thought you could steal her from me, as they stole her mother from me.”
He was even more crazed than Abram had believed.
“We have to go,” Jafar hissed. “Dawn is too close and there’s no way we’ll get past the security agents if we don’t move.”
“Azir.” The lieutenant’s voice was filled with dangerous warning. “Now.”
“Not without her,” Azir refused, his tone grating.
“You’ll have to kill us both then. Tonight,” Abram warned them all. “If you try to take her, then I won’t go two steps from this house with you. I’d rather see her dead than see her suffer beneath your hands.”
It would be a horrible choice to make. A choice Abram knew he couldn’t make. It wasn’t possible.
“We don’t have time for this.” Jafar’s voice was imperative now, as though he were losing patience as well as courage.
Another piece of the puzzle came together. Jafar never lost patience.
It was all a game.
His gaze sliced to his cousin. Jafar was how aiming his rifle more toward Azir and the lieutenant than at Paige. The lieutenant’s back was to the bed, and Azir had no weapon at all.
“You lie!” Azir turned to Abram furiously. “You would bleed forher. You would die for her. You would never have the strength to steal her life from her.”
“I would kill her before I allowed you to take her,” Abram promised him. “Because her death at your hands would be far worse.”
Azir’s expression twisted furiously. “She would resign herself to her fate.”
“As her mother did?” Abram sneered back, setting his hatred and rage free as he fought to keep his voice lowered. “As my mother did? Did you think I would not remember how you killed my mother before my eyes, you old bastard?” he snarled. “That I wouldn’t always carry the image of your hands around her neck, squeezing the life from her body?”
Azir blinked back at him as he obviously fought to remember the event.
“We go now,” the lieutenant, no, the commander said. “Now, Azir. We can’t take the girl with us.”