Chapter 3: Zoya Reyes

CHAPTER 3

"Two financial outlets picked up the lawsuit this afternoon," Michael said from the seat beside him, tablet open. "The summit's press team has it on their question list."

"Take it off." Raiyan watched the gray lake slide past the window. "Nothing on the broadcast, nothing in my press package, and nobody asks me about it."

"Done." Michael's pen moved across the screen. "Harrison also filed our opposition to the motion to compel yesterday afternoon."

"Good. Whatever Zoya—" Raiyan cleared his throat. "Whatever Zoya Al Fayez has against Mansoor Corporation, I want all of it." He paused. "Everything."

Michael's pen stopped over the screen. "Personal as well?"

"Everything," Raiyan said again, his eyes still on the window. Still Al Fayez, he thought, and he kept watching the lake.

"Sir, one more thing." Michael turned the screen so Raiyan could see it. "The export credentials on the files copied from our system trace back to someone inside litigation. Not IT, not the board. Our own side."

Raiyan's gaze didn't leave the lake. "Who."

"We're narrowing it," Michael said. "Whoever it was knew exactly which files to pull."

"So she has someone inside," Raiyan said, still not turning.

"We don't know that it's Ms. Al Fayez, sir," Michael said carefully, and Raiyan stayed quiet long enough that Michael glanced up from his notes.

"Find that person," Raiyan said at last. "Quietly. I want a name before anyone else does."

Michael nodded. "And the Al Fayez case?"

"Stays exactly where it is." His voice didn't rise, and it didn't need to. "That's still the one I care about."

Michael nodded once more and started typing.

Inside, the summit filled the hotel's glass ballroom with low voices and champagne nobody was drinking. Heads turned as Raiyan crossed it, and a woman in emerald silk turned too, and stayed turned, and he didn't notice.

Two men were waiting for him at the far end of the terrace, which meant they had planned it. Anselm Voss ran chemicals and Étienne Delacroix ran shipping, and both had sent very sympathetic notes the week the lawsuit broke.

"Raiyan." Voss held his hand a moment longer than necessary. "We were just saying how unfortunate this is. All that attention, with the quarter closing."

"Terribly," Delacroix agreed, smiling. "If your people are stretched, I'd be glad to take the Rotterdam terminal off your hands. At a fair price, given the circumstances."

So that was the weak spot they thought they had found. Raiyan smiled, took a glass from a passing tray, and didn't drink from it. "That's generous of you both," he said, his voice staying low and warm. "Anselm, how is the Antwerp inspection going? Third one this year, I hear. They always find something in the second week. Drainage, usually."

Voss's smile thinned, and Raiyan turned to the other man. "And Étienne, your Genoa merger. The one that can't clear without my family's vote." He tilted his head, almost kindly. "I'd hate for a lawsuit to take up so much of my attention that I forgot when it comes up."

The corner of the terrace had gone very quiet.

"A lawsuit is just paper," Raiyan said gently. "If it made you think I'm distracted, I'm flattered by the attention. I'd only ask you not to mistake it for weakness. I remember everything. Enjoy the evening."

He walked back through the ballroom without looking behind him, and somewhere at his back someone let out a long breath.

Michael fell in beside him. "Four minutes," he said.

"They were already afraid." Raiyan handed his untouched glass to a waiter. "I only gave them something specific to be afraid of."

He gave his keynote twenty minutes later, and not one person in the hall asked what he intended to do about the woman suing him, because by then nobody would have dared.

It was past midnight when Armaan set the file on the desk in the hotel suite and left without being told to.

Raiyan didn't open it right away. He stood at the window with his jacket off, looking at the black water of the lake, and told himself he would only skim it, because any man would have wanted to know exactly who he was up against. Then he sat down and opened it.

It was thorough, because he had asked for thorough: the firm in Los Angeles, the three cases, the three wins, the trade-press profiles that called her relentless and meticulous and unusually hard to rattle. He read it the way he read everything, fast, taking in the details, and by the third page he realized he had slowed down. Somewhere on the fourth page another thought occurred to him, and he put the file down.

Harrison knew there was history, but he didn't know how much, and Michael knew even less. The moment either of them learned the rest, Harrison would move to have her removed, and one phone call to Harrison or one to the right reporter would mean that by Monday every headline would be about her instead of the case. Raiyan picked up his phone and looked at it. He could end this with one call, and he didn't want it ended.

He set the phone face down on the desk. The thought stayed anyway, a headline, a name, her face when she read it, and he put it away carefully, to keep.

The last page of the file was a photograph taken a few days ago outside a courthouse, and he looked at it longer than he had looked at the rest. She was mid-sentence with her hair pinned up and a briefcase in one hand, completely absorbed in whoever she was talking to. She looked well. She looked like someone who slept through the night, and that was the part he couldn't forgive.

He caught himself searching her hair for a flash of gold, and he closed the folder and picked up the phone again. "Armaan."

"Sir," Armaan said, answering on the first ring.

"I want to know where she is," Raiyan said. "Where she eats, when she works, who she sees. Every day."

There was the briefest pause on the line before Armaan asked, "Her residence, sir?"

"Not the house." His voice was perfectly calm. "Nobody goes near the house."

"Understood," Armaan said.

"Zoya…" His mouth was on hers before she knew how she had got there, slow and certain, the way he used to kiss her when neither of them had anywhere else to be. She could taste coffee on him, and under it was cedar and something warmer than cedar, the scent she would have known in the dark or in a crowd. His hand lay spread against her waist with his thumb resting along her ribs, and she leaned into the heat of him and thought, There you are.

Then his thumb pressed down. At first it was small enough to pass for part of the kiss, but his fingers tightened around her waist and kept tightening until the warmth became something that would leave marks, and when she tried to pull back, he didn't let her. He lifted his head, and his eyes were the same eyes, and nothing behind them was the same.

Then the floor tilted, and the bedroom was gone.

She was running through a corridor that smelled of gasoline and wet earth, and her heels rang on the concrete, quick and uneven. It was the sound that used to carry her toward him, and now it carried her away. She couldn't get enough air, and no matter how hard she ran, her legs wouldn't move the way she needed them to. She could feel them somewhere ahead of her, both of them, close enough that she thought she could reach them, and then suddenly they were gone into the shadows.

She turned too late, and Raiyan was there. His fingers closed around her wrist and her pulse hammered under his thumb, and she watched him feel it while nothing in his face changed. In the dream he never shouted, and somehow that was worse. He just stood there holding her wrist, looking at her as though he had already decided there was nothing she could say that would change his mind.

"Look what you did to us," he said, his voice low and flat.

Zoya tried to answer, but nothing came out, and his grip tightened, and she knew he didn't believe her anyway. Then small arms locked around her neck from behind.

"Mommy," a small voice said against her ear, and her hands flew to her stomach and found nothing there.

At ten past six, a plain white van turned onto Zoya's street and parked two houses down with its headlights off. The sprinklers hadn't come on yet, and somewhere a dog walker whistled, thin and far away.

A man got out wearing a navy postal jacket and a cap, with a satchel on one shoulder. He walked the way mail carriers walked, brisk and unbothered, and anyone who saw him would not have looked twice, but mail did not come at six in the morning.

He stopped at the gate of the villa, and inside, Jack began to bark, hard and without pause, a sound far too big for the quiet. Jack loved everyone and had licked every stranger who had ever crossed the threshold, and upstairs Zoya, finally asleep after days of hardly sleeping at all, didn't stir.

The man took a single cream envelope from the satchel. It was handwritten, with no stamp and no return address, and he paused over the name before he let it go. Zoya Reyes. Not Al Fayez, and nobody had addressed anything to that name in almost three years.

He slid it into the mailbox set in the wall. Then he crouched beside the big potted plant at the gate, turned back a leaf with one gloved finger, and pushed a small black camera, no larger than a matchbox, in among the stems. He angled the lens toward the front door, and a red light blinked once and went dark.

He stood, touched two fingers to the brim of his cap, and walked back to the van. By the time the sprinklers came on he was gone, and in the leaves beside the gate a lens the size of a seed watched the door while Jack was still barking inside.