After Wakdar found out from Nazo that the trial had been rigged, he was overcome with rage. His pious father, always going on about the sanctity of the trial, had replaced the lady with a lion. Yaqut didn’t stand a chance.

Wakdar swore to exact his revenge, to avenge his murdered best friend.

But how could he?

Against his own parents, the Badshah of Marghazar and the Wali of S’vat, the most powerful people in all the tribal lands? How easy it would be for him to slip into their rooms in the dead of the night. A quick slit to each of their throats.

Painless, soundless. Wakdar could manage it too easily.

But no matter how wretched Ghazan and Bazira Miangul were, they were his blood, and there was nothing more sacred than blood.

He would not raise his sword against them.

So he had to leave. It was the only way.

He waited until his wife’s labor pains began, waited for the marble palace to be in a frenzy, until he could slip away. He couldn’t bear to leave his child or his wife, but it had to be done. He had no choice.

He would send for them when he could—he had enough allies to manage it. He knew his daughter would be cared for until then, until he returned for her.

Wakdar had to leave. He couldn’t live with the murder of his best friend, who had been like a brother to him. Moreover, Wakdar could not live with who his father was becoming, a man blinded by his vendetta against the Luhgam Empire.

But his parents knew him too well.

“Don’t be a fool,” his father said the night he caught Wakdar in the midst of escape, harsh face ablaze by moonlight. “Go back to you daughter and wife.”

“Kill me if you must,” Wakdar replied, resolute. “But I will not return.”

So they were stuck, neither party willing to break the sacred bond between them.

“Beta, please don’t do this,” his mother pleaded, tears in her eyes. “Do not leave your family.”

“I have made up my mind,” Wakdar replied, turning to leave. “Khudafiz.”

Anger flashed across his mother’s face, and for a moment, he did not recognize her. “If you leave now, do not think we will spare your wife,” Bazira declared. “Her relation to this family will be severed entirely.”

“You wouldn’t,” Wakdar had replied, ignoring his mother’s dramatics. He kept walking. It was this, perhaps, that had forced her to swear to it.

“I swear to Allah I will,” his mother said, voice steel.

His mother would never break an oath made to Allah, Wakdar knew. But he had sworn to Allah as well that if he stayed, he would kill his parents for what they had done.

So he was faced with a fatal choice: his wife or his parents?