Captured (erotic) (#5, 101 Nights)

Chapter One: Alisha

Two weeks later

Nijala is nothing like what I expected. I kinda like it here. For the first time in my life, I’m not worried about how I’m going to pay the rent, where to find my next client, or whether or not Tony is going to fuck me up again.

Not that those issues don’t still exist, just that I feel too far away for them to touch me. I like this sense of peace, and I’m not willing to think about what happens when it’s gone, and my horrible world comes back to smother me.

That said, I’m making preparations for the inevitable. Natalie always teased me about being ready for every kind of apocalypse there is. I can’t plan as well as usual, but I’ve got a stack of money waiting for me at a Western Union near the palace and only one shot at getting to it. I can’t risk George discovering my intentions. My plan is to find her, grab the money and disappear.

With any luck, it’ll happen soon, in shah allah – God willing – as the Arabic speaking natives of Nijala say.

It’s just after sunset, and the air smells of ocean, exhaust and the jasmine necklaces being sold by eagle-eyed children on every street corner. The evening prayers finished blaring around the city fifteen minutes ago, and those shops and markets that closed for the prayers are reopening. Traffic jams the streets. There’s an entire language built around horn blasts, one I found annoying until I realized it resembles the language of hackers: precious ones and zeroes that appear indecipherable on the surface and yet are filled with all the life in the universe to those who understand them. I can’t always interpret the language of the horns, but I figured out which one means I can cross the street without being hit.

As much as I love the luxury of the palace, I don’t fit in with Elijah’s stuck up family or the flood of people that always seem to surround them, ready to dismiss anyone who can’t grant them a royal favor. George won’t even look at me, though he’s tried more than once to permanently attach one of his security team members to my hip.

I glance around. The sidewalks are packed with people. No six foot four white guy is visible among the throngs of olive-skinned Middle Easterners, so I’m assuming the guard put on my ass by George hasn’t managed to track me down yet.

Content, I meander through the streets to an evening market supplying food for the late night meal and trinkets for any tourists wandering off the massive cruise ships docked at the Nijalan port nearby. There’s a billboard plastered on the wall of one building, and I stop to smile at it the way I always do.

“Hi, Natalie.” There’s more than one building-sized display of her in the city, and the tourist traps are littered with pictures of Natalie with a crown Photoshopped on her head. I may hate her fiancé, Elijah, but I can totally see her as a queen. She deserves a royal life.

The Nijalans love my best friend and haven’t even met her yet. Every time I come to this spot, I imagine how much more they’ll love her when she’s found, and how much she could do for them, if she were to stick around. As much as I like it here, this place needs someone like Natalie. The wealthy live in an enclave around the palatial estate while the rest of the city exists in abject poverty. The division runs deeper than the walls that shield the wealthy from everyone else. It’s like a first world and a third world country being crammed together in one city. The contrast is stark and depressing.

Despite this, the people are incredibly generous hosts who don’t mind me wandering down their streets and never fail to invite me in and share what food they have. Before Nijala, I believed Western media and how it painted Arabs and the Middle East. I assumed I’d be the next American to be beheaded on live television.

Fourteen days in, and I not only have my head but I’m also not afraid to roam the streets alone after dark and wander into the houses of strangers for dinner.