Black curls. Green eyes that do not change when the rest of him does. Pale olive skin, Belgian on one side and Moroccan on the other, and he has never once let either half apologise for the other.

He flirts the way other men breathe. Tangier, Tetouan, wherever the road takes them — a line for every checkpoint guard, every tourist’s daughter, every woman who crosses his path long enough to notice the green eyes noticing back. It costs him nothing. That is the point of it, and everyone around him accepts and adores, Elena does not.

She pays him no heed.

Not coldness. Worse than coldness — indifference. She has Novi Sad still sitting in her chest like a stone she hasn’t agreed to put down, and Karim’s charm slides off that stone the way rain slides off. He tries anyway. Keeps trying. Not because he expects it to land. Because trying is what he does, the way breathing is what he does, easy and unexamined.

Then the miles start counting for something.

Not the flirting. The bullets. The stretch of road between one checkpoint and the next where charm is worth exactly nothing and a steady hand is worth everything, and Karim has both, and Elena watches him choose the second over the first without being asked. Watches him again. And again, until the watching becomes something else without either of them naming it.

End of Book II. Not seduction. Consequence.

Tarmo arrives after. Karim does not fight for territory that was never his to claim. He steps back the way he stepped forward — without ceremony, without needing anyone to notice the cost of it — and stays exactly where he has always been: in her vicinity, at the edge of the frame, present without being owed anything for his presence.

He is gives it to Mitra, once, in Book III. Later, in Azad, to Esme. He does not repeat either. He is madly in love with a woman who belongs only to herself, and he has made his peace with that arithmetic before anyone asked him to — no twist required, no bitterness collected and cashed in later. It is simply how he loves: entirely, without accounting, without demanding the door stay shut to everyone else.

There is a stallion asleep in him that not even Asdar smells. Not until Book V, Part 4. Karim does not know what he is carrying any more than the road knew where it was leading, all those miles, all those bullets, all that charm spent on strangers while the one thing worth keeping rode beside him and said nothing.

Green eyes, before the shift and after. That much never moves.

Karim, from a different angle

The checkpoint guard laughed at something Karim said, waved them through without checking the trunk. Elena didn’t ask what he’d said. She never did.

“You could thank me,” Karim said, easing the car back onto the road, sunglasses pushed up into black curls.

“For what. Existing loudly?.”

“For getting us past a man with a rifle using nothing but charm.”

“I’ve seen you use it on a wall once. The wall wasn’t impressed either.”

He laughed — the real one, not the one he gave checkpoint guards — and let it go, the way he let everything go, because trying and failing cost him nothing and trying and succeeding cost him nothing either. That was the arithmetic of Karim. Elena had stopped doing the math on him months ago.

She was looking out the window at nothing. Novi Sad was out there somewhere behind her, several borders back, sitting in her chest exactly where she’d left it — not healed, just carried.

Three checkpoints later, there were no guards. Only men who didn’t ask questions and didn’t want to.

The first shot came from the ridge. Karim didn’t shout, didn’t flinch in any way she could name — he just moved, hand flat on her shoulder, pressing her below the dash before she’d even registered the sound as gunfire. His other hand was already on the wheel, and the car was already turning, and none of it looked like the man who talked his way past checkpoint guards. It looked like something underneath that man, something that had been there the whole time, unused.

“Stay down,” he said. Not gentle. Not performing anything for anyone.

She stayed down. She watched him instead — the line of his jaw, the green eyes flicking to the mirror and back to the road, steady in a way his mouth never was. This went on for four minutes that felt considerably longer. When it was over, he pulled the car onto the shoulder and sat there with both hands on the wheel, breathing like a man who’d just remembered he was allowed to.

“You didn’t run,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Running was an option?”

“You could have taken the fork. Left me at the last town.”

He looked at her then, and for once there was no line ready, no checkpoint-guard smile.

“I know,” he said, and started the car again.

She didn’t say anything else that day. But she didn’t stop watching him, either — not the way she’d once refused to see him at all, but the way you watch weather change, slowly, and then all at once, without ever catching the exact moment it turned.

Karim has been part of the cast since Book II. Most of what he carries, he’s never said twice.

He’ll be back in his own register soon enough.

Irena Phaedra.

More of Karim, the series hub is.

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.