What about Kasim?
That was a war for another time.
First, I had to finish this one.
40
RASHID
The photograph arrived at 11:52 PM.
I was in my study, reviewing financial documents, trying to focus on anything other than the war I was losing. My phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen.
It was Prentice.
I opened the message.
And the world stopped.
An ear. Severed. Bloody. Still wearing the diamond earring I had given Farah for her twenty-first birthday.
Her mother’s earring. The only piece of jewelry I had kept after Amira died bringing our daughter into this world. I had saved it for twenty-one years, waiting for Farah to be old enough to appreciate its significance.
“This belonged to your mother,” I had told her when I presented it. “She would have wanted you to have it.”
Farah had cried. Had hugged me tighter than she ever had before. Had worn those earrings every single day since.
And now it was covered in her blood. Attached to a piece of flesh that had been sawed from her body.
Four words accompanied the image.
Your move, old man.
I stared at the screen. At my daughter’s ear. At the diamond catching the light, glinting red with blood.
Something cracked inside me.
A sound escaped my throat. Inhuman. Guttural. The sound of a man watching everything he loved being destroyed.
I swept my arm across the desk. Papers flew. The lamp shattered against the wall. The computer monitor crashed to the floor.
Not enough.
I grabbed the bookshelf and pulled. It toppled forward, spilling decades of carefully collected texts across the hardwood. First editions. Religious manuscripts. Philosophical treatises. All of it meaningless now.
I put my fist through the window. Glass shattered. Blood ran down my knuckles. I didn’t feel it.
My cane connected with the antique globe I had purchased in Morocco. It exploded into splinters. I swung again, destroying the chess set, the crystal decanter, the framed photograph of Farah at her college graduation.
“PRENTICE!” The name tore from my throat like a curse. “YOU DARE?—”
The cough seized me mid-sentence.
I doubled over, the cane clattering to the floor, both hands flying to my mouth as my body convulsed. The fit was violent. Relentless. Each hack felt like it was tearing my lungs apart from the inside.
When it finally passed, I looked at my palms.
Blood. So much blood. Mixed with the blood from my cut knuckles, streaming down my wrists, dripping onto the destroyed remains of my study.
