Page 214 of Royal Rebel

Her former bodyguard roared. “I must kill her!” he shrieked. “Imust!”

Imara’s other guards ran in, moving to help secure Jekem.

Imara clutched Desfan’s arms that were locked around her waist, her vision hazing. Relief, fear, panic—it tangled inside her, choking her.

Then Desfan cursed raggedly. “No,” he rasped. “No.”

The raw pain in his voice—the desperate agony—made her stomach twist.

He pulled her fully into the sitting room and set her in the nearest chair. She barely got a look at his face—pale and terrified—before he dropped to his knees in front of her, his shaking hands clutching her arm. One of his hands sported a deep cut that still leaked blood, and that crimson streak was all she could see.

Then she noticed the thin trail of blood on her inner arm.

In a daze, she blinked at the light scratch marring her skin. There was pain, she realized. But it was slight. Far too slight to deliver death—except for the poison now in her blood.

Poison.

Desfan had heard her warning. That’s why he trembled. He knew she was dying. He seemed more sure of it than even she was at this moment, because everything inside Imara rebelled.

She wasn’t dying. Shecouldn’tdie. Not from such an infinitesimal wound. Dying now would be pathetic. And wrong. So fates-blasted wrong.

She hadn’t told him she loved him.

Desfan’s head jerked over his shoulder. “I need a physician,” he thundered. “Now! The princess has been poisoned!”

Footsteps pounded away.

Jekem was sobbing in the bedroom. She couldn’t make out his words, but she assumed Karim had disarmed him.

Desfan must have known the same. “Karim,” he bellowed. “I need to know what poison he used!”

Finally, Desfan looked at her.

Fates, he was beautiful. Even frantic and terrified, his brown eyes were completely arresting. Every plane of his face, every hard line and swath of brown skin, begged to be touched. His lips were set harshly, and a muscle feathered along his jaw. “Did he tell you?” Desfan asked, urgency sharpening his words. “Imara, what poison did he use?”

Imara stared at him, unable to look away. Unable to register anything but the fact that the fates had at least given her one last moment with him. “You came just in time,” she breathed.

The skin around his eyes tightened. “What?”

Her free hand moved without thought, and her fingers curled around one of his trembling hands—the one that wasn’t bleeding. “I love you,” she whispered. “I know I can’t, but I do. I need you to know that, before . . .”I die.

She couldn’t say the words, but she knew Desfan heard them anyway.

Too many emotions flashed across his face; she couldn’t register any of them. Then resolve hardened his features. “You’re not going to die.”

She almost managed to smile. “You may be serjan, but you don’t command the fates.”

His gaze darkened. “I amnotlosing you.”

Tears stung her eyes, pain welling in her chest and cinching her throat. “I was never meant to be yours.”

His fingers curled more tightly against her skin.

Skyer shoved into the suite. She didn’t know how he’d known to come, but he looked livid, so he seemed informed on events. He cut across the room and crouched beside Desfan, one hand balanced on Imara’s uninjured arm. “What happened?” he seethed. “A man in the hall said she was poisoned?”

Desfan stiffened, but didn’t get a chance to reply; Karim strode into the sitting room, his focus landing Imara. “Do you feel sick? Faint? A burning in your wound?”

Imara felt far too much in this moment. With Desfan and Skyer both touching her, both looking at her with such intensity, her entire body was burning. But . . . She glanced over at Karim. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t feel any of that.”

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