Free Exquisite Captive by Heather Demetrios Page A

she whispered. “I have to go.”
    No price was too high for her freedom—she’d find out what Raif wanted later. Tufts of golden smoke began swirling at her feet.
    “Do you know Habibi?” Raif asked.
    It was the center of expatriate jinn life, an underground club where Earth’s exiled jinn smoked hookahs, traded news and information, and sang the old songs from their land.
    She nodded.
    “Go there when you have the bottle.” He pressed a piece of paper into her palm.
    When Nalia looked at it, she couldn’t help but laugh. “You have a cell phone?”
    A corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s like magic without all the strings attached.”
    The lights illuminating the back porch went out. It was time to go, past time to go. She pictured Malek ascending the marble staircase, walking down the thickly carpeted hall. She shoved the phone number in her pocket and willed her body to begin evanescing. The smoke whipped strands of hair into her face and Raif stepped back, watching her.
    “Good luck,” he said. His eyes held a desperate hopefulness, but the rest of him was a puzzle she’d have to put together later.
    Nalia kept her eyes on him until the smoke unraveled her, throwing her into the night sky in a burst of perfumed evanescence. She was cloud and wind and moon, fragmented, yet suddenly whole. For just that brief moment, all she knew was the feel of the cool night on her skin and the closeness of the stars. Then she was gone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ..................................................................
6
    SHE WAS JUST IN TIME .
    As Nalia evanesced into her room, she heard Malek’s steps outside her door and then his soft knock a second later. She hurriedly kicked off her shoes and pulled back the covers of her bed, then she crossed to the door and opened it.
    “Did I wake you?” Malek asked, his voice hushed.
    “Would it matter if you had?”
    Malek frowned. “Hayati . . .”
    She left the door open for him and crossed the room, putting as much distance between them as possible. Rather than irritating him, it seemed that these days, the more Nalia pushed the boundary of acceptable slave-master behavior, the harder he tried to please her. Which didn’t make any sense at all.
    Dying shadows stretched across the dark room, painting the walls in swaths of purple and midnight blue. Nalia wished she’d thought to turn on the light. The room felt dangerous. Malek closed the door behind him, his eyes lingering on her. Even though he’d been hosting a party for hours, he didn’t look the least bit tired. The only indication that he was through entertaining for the night was the open collar and rolled-up sleeves of his crisp white shirt.
    Malek’s eyes fell on Nalia’s dress, crumpled on the floor. “You hate my parties, don’t you?” he asked, a smile in his voice.
    She leaned against the thick, carved bedpost at the end of her bed. Like everything in the room, it was old and expensive.
    “Yes,” she said. “But you’ve always known that.”
    He laughed, soft and low. “You’ve never made a secret of it, that’s true.”
    She could see the outline of her bottle under his shirt. She wanted to throw her hands out and yank it off him, but the bottle’s magic made it physically impossible to touch the chain when he wore it. Then there was their bond. The magic that tied Nalia to Malek would protect him from her—it had every time she’d tried to hurt him. And Draega’s Amulet just made him that much more impervious to real harm. Pain, yes. But if Nalia inflicted it, she would be doing it to herself—of course, she had a high tolerance for pain. That was one of the first things she’d developed as a Ghan Aisouri.
    Could she stun him, throw Malek against a wall like she did a year ago? It wouldn’t injure him, but maybe it’d give her enough time to grab the bottle and then . . . what? He’d find her, just like he had last time. After his