✵ featured ~
❝Once upon a time in Baghdad, a street girl teaches the Khalifa of the kingdom why a king needs a queen.❞
✵
Started: June 5, 2021.
Completed: March 30, 2022.
✵
cover by @xniftykayx
featured on wattpad historical fiction, undiscovered...
The only heaven I'll be sent to is when I'm alone with you.
— Hozier
✵
Him
"So we've a change of plans. I don't think I can wait any longer."
His vizier looks up at him from the papers in his hand, disapproval clear as a crystal in his orbs. "We're barely able to clean the mess you've already created. You want to give me more to deal with?"
"It was accidental before. But now I've tricks up my sleeves." He leans back in his chair and grins. "You don't trust me? I've been a good boy so far."
The old man only glares at him. "You'll blow your cover like this."
He shifts his attention to the fire burning in the lantern, flickering, close to dying before flaring up, giving out light he cannot help staring into. What good is the world to him if she's not part of it?
"For her, anything."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Her
What did she expect a man raised as a soldier to do with a sword? What did she expect to happen in a battlefield or on training grounds? Definitely not children's play. Whether she had a chance before to see him against an opponent or not shouldn't surprise her now when he's in front of her, unchained, in a form he was born to be raised in. He's a soldier, she tells herself. No. Not just a soldier, but the best of them all, a general worthy of his title. He's a man with a sword and he's bound to use it. Yet her heart shudders with every strike of the blade in his hand.
Eskander. Noura cannot blink. Ruthless.
She doesn't need Hafez to give her a description of the general to her. He's presenting to her in flesh and bones who he is. And this side of him scares her. She swallows thickly.
"General Eskander?" Hafez says his name as if making a decent definition for him in his head, weighing his words before speaking, "He's an exemplary fighter, an uncompromising general, and a hard-headed, sharp-witted man."
No where in his speech Hafez mentions to her what she's used to seeing of him. Kind, considerate, compassionate and patient. She scolds herself mentally and closes her eyes. He had told her he was a simple man to her but a general at the palace. She isn't supposed to be sketching a comparison between his two polarities. This is who he has to be here. And it's about time she opens her mind to the fact that all along when she was getting to know him as one person, there was an another side to his personality too which he couldn't possibly had shown to her when she was in Isfahan and he'd come home every once in a while. Neither is he a naive boy anymore she grew up with. He has grown up into a man too-- a different man she's only getting to know now.
"I'll cut off your head from your body and tear you limb to limb," Eskander growls, and if Noura was shocked before, now she's terrified. "I'll drink your blood and leave your flesh for the vultures and dogs."
