{a wattpad featured story-- 6/29/18 -- 7/20/18}
an HTBC book of the month for November 2018
cover by the talented ellis ( @rubyruins )
❝the night has a thousand eyes, and the moon knows all your secrets.❞
--in which a young woman bravely defies the...
❝I am closed up like a house. There is nothing here for you, nothing in this place.❞
--Catherine M. Valente, The Oracle at Cayucos
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YOUR FATHER wants to see you.
In another life, another time, perhaps before all of this betrayal, she would have welcomed him with open arms, sobbing into his shoulder like a child again. Perhaps she would have asked his advice, perhaps she would have taken his hand and escaped into the growing blackness.
Perhaps they would have fled to another country, boarded his vessel and started a new life.
Perhaps she would have seen him.
But perhaps meant nothing to those with whom it had lost its meaning.
Her father wanted to see her, yes.
But she did not want to see him.
"He is not my father," she said, and the untruth of it stung her tongue like a desert scorpion. Had she not said that he was only a few moments before?
What about my father?
It mocked her now.
"But sayidati, he says that he is. He says he knows things about you that no one else could ever know, that he has raised you, has made you the way you are now. And he says that you cannot deny it–"
"I cannot?" Now the honey and ichor and the godlikeness returned, like a dog to its master. "If he presumes to make amends for the way that he treated me"–the way he simply gave her up to the enemy, though she did not plan to voice those words–"he will have to go on his knees and beg before me like I am his sultana."
Because I am.
She did not voice those words either.
The boy nodded, though the fear of returning to her baba without the desired news was etched into his brow.
"What shall I tell him, sayidati?"
She straightened, looking the boy as if she was a mistress buying slaves at the market. She was not, but it was almost comforting to pretend.
"Tell him..." She hesitated. In her mind's eye she could see herself at his knee, playing in the gardens, trying to catch a butterfly that would not stay still for its would-be captor. She heard him call her, the very breath that it took an adoration in itself.
Habibti.
No. She would not let him toy with her like this, she would not let him think that he had won.
