Chapter 202

• The lights of the city broke the stark emptiness of the plain as they drove closer to it.
• Arni was still struggling within himself to justify his intense and uncharacteristic reaction to the fact that Orla had been absent from the palace on his return.
• That he had automatically expected she would be there and had been so infuriated when she was not had been bad enough, but he might have dismissed those feelings as being caused by the ongoing sexual challenge she represented to him. However, explaining his own sense of aloneness and the emptiness of the building without her in it was something else again, and something for which he could not find any logical reason.