The sky over Marrakech was too bright for a city on edge. Heat shimmered off the sandstone walls and made the cobblestones sweat. Maeve Byrne tilted her head back as if daring the sun to blind her. It wasn't the heat that bothered her…it was the performance.
The international summit had turned the city into a stage. Security checkpoints bloomed like weeds. Uniforms gleamed. Politicians paraded into the Palais des Congrès wearing their best diplomatic smiles, while the press swarmed like flies. She stood among them, pen in hand, recording everything, caring about nothing.
Her editor had wanted a hard-hitting piece on "cooperation in North Africa." Maeve wanted her paycheck.
She shifted her weight, scanning the crowd of journalists. Some scribbled furiously. Others craned for photographs, hoping to catch the Moroccan prime minister shaking hands with a European official. She caught herself rolling her eyes. Politics was theatre, and everyone here had bought a ticket.
She wasn't fooled.
It was a gift or maybe a curse. She'd been born in Dublin, raised in the shadow of rain and cheap whiskey. Her father had been absent always...ever since her mother died, he went bankrupt and was barely at home, her mother had died when she was eighteen, and Maeve had long ago decided fairy tales were for idiots. Love wasn't real. People left. That was the only truth that ever held.
Her colleagues knew her as Maeve Byrne: sharp-tongued, merciless with deadlines, always the last one to leave the newsroom. What they didn't know... what no one could know... was that she was also S. J. Marlowe, the anonymous author of novels that had somehow clawed their way to international bestseller lists.
She wrote them in secret. She fed her soft heart to fictional men who could never exist: dangerous, beautiful, devastating. Men who didn't flinch at the world's weight. Men who loved with fire and cruelty.
And yet... here she was, standing in Morocco, notebook in hand, heart quietly barricaded.
A murmur rippled through the press. Cameras rose like weapons. The prime minister emerged, flanked by guards. Behind him trailed men in suits, their smiles sharp enough to cut. Maeve scribbled down a few lines, though she already knew what she'd write: staged unity, brittle promises, the usual farce.
But then, something changed.
It was small at first. A low vibration under her shoes, a mutter in the crowd. The shouts beyond the barricades sharpened, voices slicing through the heavy air. Security stiffened. Maeve glanced over her shoulder. The demonstration that had been brewing outside the summit was no longer peaceful.
She heard glass break.
The crowd surged forward. Guards barked into radios. A tide of protesters spilled toward the square, carrying banners that tore in the hot wind. Their anger was a living thing. Maeve had covered enough unrest to know when the ground was about to crack open.
"Oh! God," she muttered, snapping her notebook shut.
Reporters scattered. Some clung to their cameras, others bolted for the safety of the building. Maeve should have followed, but instinct drove her sideways instead. She ducked into a narrow street, hoping to outpace the chaos.
The noise swelled behind her: the roar of bodies, the crash of barricades, the sting of tear gas drifting on the air. Her lungs burned. She pressed her bag to her chest and pushed forward, weaving through twisting alleys that stank of spice and smoke.
She didn't stop until the noise thinned.
Maeve slowed, her breath ragged, sweat sticking her shirt to her spine. The alley she had stumbled into was strangely quiet, cut off from the storm outside. The sudden silence unnerved her more than the riot.
That was when she saw him.
At first, he was only a shadow at the far end of the alley. A figure in black, motionless, watching. The air shifted around him, as if the heat itself bent to his presence. He stepped forward, and she felt her pulse leap.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. His face was half-hidden by a scarf pulled high, but his eyes… God. They locked on hers, dark as obsidian, unblinking.
Maeve's throat went dry.
She knew that face... or rather, she had written it.
It was impossible, and yet the resemblance was so sharp it stole her breath. He looked like the man she had created in her novels, the one who haunted readers across continents. The one she'd dreamed of and damned herself for. The ruthless prince, the phantom lover, the dangerous king.
Azlan.
No. She shook her head hard. It couldn't be. He was fiction, a ghost she'd birthed in loneliness. And yet here he stood, alive, real, terrifyingly solid.
"This can't be..."
The words cut through the silence, low and rough. His accent was sand and steel, unplaceable yet familiar.
Maeve blinked, frozen.
She wanted to speak, but her tongue had deserted her. Her pen, her armor, was still clenched in her hand.
Pathetic weapon.
"You look like…" The words slipped out before she could stop them. Her voice trembled. "You look like him."
A pause. A tilt of his head. Something unreadable flashed in his eyes.
"Who?"
Her chest tightened. No answer came.
The riot's noise surged again, closer now. The alley seemed to collapse with the sound of shouting and boots against stone. Maeve turned, panic sparking.
A hand closed around her wrist.
His grip was iron, unyielding, pulling her toward him.
"What..." Her voice cracked. "Let me go!"
But he didn't. He leaned down, close enough that she felt the heat of his body, close enough to catch the shadow of something dangerous in his eyes.
"You want to live?" he asked softly.
Her heart thudded against her ribs.
"Then come with me."
The alley exploded with sound as the riot spilled in. She saw flashes of torches, heard the crash of boots and fists. The stranger tugged her into the deeper shadows, his presence swallowing hers whole.
And in that heartbeat, Maeve Byrne realized she wasn't escaping anything.
She was being taken.
And that was how she met the man everyone feared... the one they only called Al-Sayid.