Slave to Passion by Elisabeth Naughton

like him. It was deep, gravelly, aroused. He cleared his throat, tried to kill the lust now simmering hot inside. Couldn’t.
    “How?”
    Holy Allah, this close, when she tipped those eyes up, he realized just how mesmerizing they really were. Like miniature swirling galaxies, alive with light and life. A light he’d gone so long without.
    “I was captured by a sorceress who bound me to the opal.”
    “A sorceress?”
    He nodded, not entirely sure why he was telling her the truth, needing to share it for unknown reasons at the same time. “One who commands an army of Ghuls.”
    “Zoraida?” she asked in surprise.
    “You know of her?”
    Eyes wide with wonder darted back to the opal. But she didn’t touch it again. And his pulse beat hard, waiting. Wanting …
    “I’ve heard stories. About her power over those in the Wastelands.”
    “Where are you from?”
    “The Northern Rim. My parents were…are”—she corrected—“farmers. They live in a small village. As children, we were taught to be on the lookout for Zoraida or any from her army.”
    “And you’ve never seen her?”
    “No. The only outsiders we ever encountered were…”
    Her words trailed off, and a bleak look filled her soft eyes as she focused on the waterline at his bare chest.
    Highborns . She didn’t need to say the word for him to understand. “How did you end up in Jahannam?”
    She sighed, a heavy sound he felt in the bottom of his own chest. “Zayd—the highborn who brought me to you that first day—came through our village. I was selling vegetables in town with my younger sister. As soon as I recognized him for what he was, I knew we needed to leave. My sister and I rushed home. But he was already waiting.”
    Of course he would have been. Nasir had noticed the way the highborn had eyed her in his cell. A predatory look of ownership. The prick had seen Kavin for what she was—beautiful, young, and innocent—and pounced.
    “My powers weren’t very strong then,” she went on. “I’d only just learned to teleport, wasn’t very good at it, and my younger sister had yet to come into her gifts. If I’d been thinking, I’d have taken her somewhere else, but I was afraid. And I thought we’d be safe at home.”
    “What happened then?”
    Kavin continued to study his chest. “My parents spoke with him in hushed whispers. He kept looking at my sister, and I was afraid he was there for her. She was only a child. And then my father announced that I would be leaving with Zayd.”
    A trick. The highborn had pretended to be interested in the child to get Kavin’s parents to offer her instead. The entire thing singed a new path of anger through Nasir’s stomach. That a parent could so easily give up one of his own… That the highborns in this land had the right to take anything they wanted…even a person…
    “My mother told me I had to go willingly. That if I didn’t, they’d take my sister too. And she assured me I’d be safe. So I went. Even looked at it like it was an exciting adventure. Zayd was…pleasant, at the start. And the city was so different from what I’d known. But then...then he brought me here.” She sighed again and lifted her arm from the water, looking around the barren room. “To all of this. I don’t even know if they miss me.”
    Pain radiated from her body as she lowered her hand into the water. A pain that rivaled his own. She’d been enslaved just as he had been. But in her case, it had been done by those who were supposed to protect and love her. Something that was a thousand times worse than what he’d been through.
    “Zoraida captured my older brother, Tariq,” he said before he could stop himself. Before he even thought to try. “As heir to the Marid throne, we were frantic to find him.”
    “Heir? Then that means you’re—”
    “Was. Here, I’m nothing more than a slave. No different from you.”
    Her gaze searched his, soft, so full of emotion, the hard, protective barrier he’d