Read Online Last Safe Place, The by Ninie Hammon - Free Book Online Page A

anything even remotely like this. Had he merely reacted to a threat to his master? Maybe. Or was it more than that? Could it be that his animal senses responded to the presence of evil?
    “Heel, P.D.,” she said, and the dog immediately turned away from Yesheb and moved to a spot beside her right leg. Though no longer growling, P.D. never took his eyes off Yesheb.
    “See you in court on June 26,” Yesheb purred. “I’ll pray for rain. And I wouldn’t plan any more little trips if I were you. I’ve convinced the prosecutor—he and several of the circuit judges were dear friends of my father’s—that you didn’t just assault me. You tried to kill me.”
    She stepped around Yesheb out into the flow of human traffic in the concourse, didn’t turn when he called out to her.
    “When that attempted murder charge is filed against you, my sweet Zara, you’ll be stuck right here until I come for you.”
    Y ESHEB ’ S CALM IS only skin deep. Below it is a fury as finely tuned as an ice pick, a single, clear high note of rage that he could focus on her back and stab through sinew and tissue and bone right into her heart. He could kill her with his anger alone. He does not need the kind of weapon they look for here with their X-rays and scanners.
    He can’t do that, of course. She is his bride, his beloved. He cannot kill her. But he can make her pay. He will extract a high price for all that she has done to him, a high price indeed.
    He’d been fantasizing about it in the hospital, lying in bed in agony because he had refused pain killers. He could not allow his senses to be dulled even for a moment. He is accountable. He is being watched.
    As he lay sweating on the crisp, white sheets, gritting his teeth to keep from moaning, he had occupied his mind by considering what would be a fit punishment. Many came to mind—all of them involving tools like bolt cutters and tin snips. Disfigurement arouses him in ways beauty never can. Many more would surface, brought to mind by the heartbeat throbbing of his broken bones held in place by temporary splints. Though the fracture had not been displaced—the bones had not moved—his foot was so badly swollen the orthopedist said it would be a week before the splint applied in the emergency room could be replaced by a cast.
    “I do a good job?”
    Yesheb looks up into the face of the grinning hip-hop process server.
    “Splendid.”
    “When she saw what it was in her hand she ’bout had a cat.” The young man continues to babble, pumped about sneaking into an airport to deliver a summons. “That old man, his eyes was this big.” He pauses. “Say, he wasn’t that boy’s daddy was he? The kid was mixed, but surely …”
    Mixed.
    That’s what his family had thought Yesheb was. Among other things. When he was born—a blonde, blue-eyed child to Iranian parents—it seemed obvious that his mother had shamed his father by bearing a son who could not possibly have been his. A son about whom there were whispers anddark rumors even before he was born, a son who engendered terror—even as a tiny baby.
    Yesheb’s whole family had been long dead before he understood it all. He learned the truth from an old servant who confessed to eavesdropping on a conversation between Anwar Al Tobbanoft and his wife’s doctor while Yesheb was still in his mother’s womb.
    Serena Al Tobbanoft had been carrying twins—two distinct heartbeats. And then there was only one heartbeat. The doctor told his father that one of the twins was dead.
    “How did my son die?” his father demanded—certain that his firstborn would be a son and heir.
    “One of the twins … absorbed the other.”
    “Absorbed the other? What does that mean?”
    “It means,” the doctor told him quietly, “that one of your unborn sons has eaten his brother.”
    Though the old servant feared retribution for eavesdropping, and even worse punishment for the awful news he had delivered to Yesheb, he’d been surprised when