Chapter 27 · Untitled Chapter

The gaze he fixed on me across the private wing was deliberate, devoid of surprise. He sat opposite me in the sealed silence of the room, tracking every breath I took just as surely as he had tracked every shift of deceit in the hall beyond.

Before the silence between us could deepen, heavy, hurried footfalls echoed outside the locked door of the wing—not the measured stride of an invited guest, but the agitated shuffle of an elder unwilling to accept his dismissal.

Abu Fahad had not left the house.

His voice drifted through the heavy timber of the door, sharp with injured pride and the desperate presumption of blood kinship. "Mansour! You cannot sever twenty years of commercial representation with a clerk's dispatch. Open the inner corridor. I am your uncle; we do not settle family covenants behind locked cedar."

I froze, the hem of my black Abaya caught between my fingers. The elder uncle was pacing just beyond the threshold of the private wing, the rustle of his heavy Bisht audible against the stone walls outside. In any traditional Najdi home, an elder uncle's presence commanded open doors and unhesitating deference, but this wing belonged solely to Mansour.