𝔇𝔞𝔴𝔫 𝔱𝔬 𝔇𝔲𝔰𝔨 (The Legacy Duet - 2)

Scintillae

𝕯ressed all in black, his shoulders so broad they cast an ominous shadow over the polished wood floor, he surveyed me with the expression of a king who'd stumbled upon a peasant infected with the plague. His lip was curled. His eyes were narrowed. His nose was stuck so far up in the air, I wondered if he'd come to just to look down on me.

He was frighteningly huge. And his appearance...

Despite all the gossip and rumors, I had not been prepared. The spare Mughal I'd seen in passing years ago had been surrounded by eager admirers, most of them female. A second son and the Mughal Dynasty's resident playboy, he'd been born into privilege and wealth and had been handsome and fit, if somewhat standoffish.

What had reduced him to this... a shadow of himself?

Nothing could have readied me for the bleak vista of his face with its sutured lines and grisly lack of uniformity. A serrated tear ran diagonally from his upper right brow, across the bridge of his nose and cheek, down to his left jawline. It screamed of untold agonies, and the unprofessional stitching over poor cautery had only made the end result doubly macabre. I knew he lived in Islamabad- I read the papers - but had heard so much talk of him being unsociable and hermitlike, I thought it unlikely he'd ever be in his office to listen to me.

Now here he was. All six-foot-scowling-three of him.

Taimoor Ali Haider Mughal stood at the end of his office, glaring at me like I had made a rude comment about his mother.

"Maybe don't stare as much?" Affandi muttered from beside me, closing the door with a muted click. "I am getting a little jealous."

I was trying not to, but it was impossible to drag my gaze away. From all the way across the room, I felt the weight of his gaze, the sudden shocking force of it, as if he'd reached out and seized me around the throat. My breath caught in my throat as if it was controlled by his presence. At my small gasp, his eyes burned with an unholy muted grey flame, holding me in a glower that seemed better suited to hell.

The slight scruff on his jaw made it obvious he didn't shave on anything resembling a regular basis, and his hair, as black as his expression, curled over the collar of his jacket and fell across his forehead in a way that suggested it hadn't seen a pair of scissors in years. The man had the look of something wild and dangerous you might run across if you were out for a midnight stroll in the woods.

Crap.

I couldn't control the dread running through my body. His nostrils flared as if he could sense my unease, and suddenly, I felt like prey, well and truly snared by something far bigger and far more dangerous than me. I spared him a final glance, skating over his marred face. He was waiting for me to do more, I realized. To flee. To scream. To swoon at his beastliness.

And he was, indeed, beastly. Heartbreakingly so.

Except for the lower right side of his jaw and his lips. Those were intact. Full, unscarred, masculine. Odd that his mouth felt like the only safe space in the ragged landscape of his face. Even those strangely cold grey eyes didn't seem so intense at the moment, inscrutable as they were. Or perhaps I was fooling myself to make my goal more palatable. To cover the awkwardness of me just barging in unannounced, I made myself move forward when all my instincts were telling me to turn around and find a safe spot to hide in.