Sweet Revenge Read Free

with the sound of her mother’s even breathing and the thoughts of tomorrow, Adrianne imagined. When she was grown, a wornan instead of a girl, she would put on her veil. One day a husband would be chosen for her, and she would be married. On her wedding day she would wear The Sun and the Moon and become a good and fruitful wife.
    She would give parties for the other women and serve them frosted cakes while servants passed trays of chocolate. Her husband would be handsome and powerful, like her father. Perhaps he would be a king, too, and he would value her above all things.
    As she drifted toward sleep, Adrianne curled the ends of a lock of her long hair around her index finger. He would love her the way she wanted her father to love her. She would give him fine sons, many fine sons, so that the other women would look at her with envy and respect. Not with pity. Not with the pity they showed to her mother.
    The light from the hallway roused her. It slanted in as the door opened, then fell in a harsh line across the floor. Through the gauzy netting that surrounded the bed like a cocoon, she saw the shadow.
    The love came first, in a frustrated burst she recognized but was too young to understand. Then came the fear, the fear that always followed closely on the love she felt whenever she saw her father.
    He would be angry to find her here, in her mother’s bed. She knew, because the talk in the harem was frank, that he rarely visited here, not since the doctors had said Phoebe would bear no more children. Adrianne thought perhaps he wanted only to look at Phoebe because she was so beautiful. But when he stepped closer, fear rose up in her throat. Quickly, silently, she slid out of the bed and crouched in the shadows beside it.
    Abdu, his eyes on Phoebe, pulled back the netting. He hadn’t bothered to shut the door. No one would dare to disturb him.
    There was moonlight over her hair, over her face. She looked like a goddess, as she had the first time he had seen her. Her face had filled the screen with its stunning beauty, its sharp sexuality. Phoebe Spring, the American actress, the woman men both desired and feared for her lush body and innocent eyes. Abdu was a man accustomed to having the best, the biggest, the costliest. He had wanted her then in away he’d never wanted another woman. He had found her, courted her in the manner a Western woman preferred. He had made her his queen.
    She had bewitched him. Because of her he had betrayed his heritage, defied tradition. He had taken for his wife a Western woman, an actress, a Christian. He had been punished. In her his seed had produced only one child, a girl child.
    Still, she made him want. Her womb was barren but her beauty taunted him. Even when his fascination turned to disgust, he wanted. She shamed him, defiled his
sharaf
, his honor, with her ignorance of Islam, but his body never stopped craving her.
    When he buried his manhood deep in another woman, it was Phoebe he made love to, Phoebe whose skin he smelled, Phoebe whose cries he heard. That was his secret shame. He might have hated her for that alone. But it was the public shame, the one daughter only that she had given him that caused him to despise her.
    He wanted her to suffer, to pay, just as he had suffered, just as he had paid. Taking the sheet, he ripped it aside.
    Phoebe awoke, confused, with her heart already pounding. She saw him standing over her in the shadowed light. At first she thought it was her dream in which he had come back to her to love her as he once had loved her. Then she saw his eyes and knew there was no dream, and no love.
    “Abdu.” She thought of the child and looked around quickly. The bed was empty. Adrianne was gone. Phoebe thanked God for it. “It’s late,” she began, but her throat was so dry the words could barely be heard. In defense, she was already sliding backward, the satin sheets whispering beneath her as she curled into herself. He said nothing, but stripped off