“What are you going to do?”
I didn’t answer.
I got back in the Bentayga. Started the engine.
I thought about the man who’d taught me everything I knew. Who’d shown me how to channel my rage into precision. Who’d made me pray five times a day even though I wasn’t Muslim because he said it built discipline. Who’d turned a fat, stuttering thirteen-year-old into something lethal.
And I thought about what he’d become. What he’d always been, underneath the bow ties and the spiritual affectations and the fatherly advice.
A predator.
Just like me.
If Rashid wanted a war, I’d give him one. And unlike the last time, I wasn’t going to show mercy. I wasn’t going to negotiate. I wasn’t going to trade hostages and walk away.
This time, only one of us was walking away.
I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward that secluded mansion in NoVa.
Time to pay my old mentor a visit.
3
MEHAR
The woman in the mirror had a rose tattoo climbing up the side of her neck—thorns and all, blooming from her collarbone toward her ear. She had a tiny diamond stud in her nose that caught the bathroom light. Her chestnut brown skin glowed against the blonde balayage sweeping through her dark hair, a color her ex-husband Ahmad would have called “whore paint.”
Good. Let him roll over in his hospital bed.
I traced the rose with my fingertip, remembering how Serenity sat next to me while the needle carved this new identity into my skin. We’d gotten matching ones, hers on her wrist, mine on my neck. We considered ourselves sisters in survival. Two women who’d escaped their cages and were learning how to fly.
Eight months ago, I arrived in DC with bruises hidden beneath my hijab and fear woven into every breath. That woman was gone now. Dead. Buried somewhere between Ahmad’s blood on my hands and the first time I pulled a trigger and felt something other than terror.
I used to pray five times a day. Used to wake before dawn, perform wudu with cold water, press my forehead to the floor and whisper words I’d memorized before I could read. Usedto believe that if I was good enough, quiet enough, obedient enough, Allah would protect me from the monsters of this world.
Turns out, the monster was the one making me pray.
These past months living with Serenity had been everything Ahmad told me I didn’t deserve. Freedom. Joy. Chaos. We’d been partying like the world was ending and rebuilding ourselves from the ashes at the same time. Club hopping on weekends. Spa days during the week. Shopping sprees where I bought everything that would have been forbidden—crop tops and mini skirts and heels so high I had to learn how to walk all over again.
I was twenty-six years old and learning how to be a woman for the first time.
But that was before last night. Before the grand opening. Before I watched my sister get dragged away in handcuffs for a murder she didn’t commit.
I gripped the edge of the sink, my reflection blurring as tears pricked my eyes.
Zainab was in jail. Pregnant. Terrified. And I was standing here staring at my transformation like it mattered.
Get it together, Mehar. She needs you strong.
I splashed water on my face, dried it with one of Justice’s fancy towels, and headed downstairs.
Justice’s housewas chaos in the best way.
Dream was running around the living room in mismatched socks, her pigtails bouncing, screaming something about not wanting to wear the pink dress. Storie was at the kitchen table, earbuds in, scrolling through her phone with the bored expression of a twelve-year-old who was too cool for everything.
And Justice was in the middle of it all, a coffee cup in one hand and a hairbrush in the other, looking like he was one tantrum away from losing his mind.
“Dream, baby, we talked about this. The pink dress is for picture day?—”
