Chapter 5: Gold-Embossed Lies

The elevator doors opened on the forty-first floor and Zoya walked out and stopped.

Faiyaz was in the reception area — jacket folded over one knee, dark hair a little too effortlessly perfect, the kind of easy, unhurried charm that never seemed to need an entrance. Whatever he'd been reading on his phone lost his attention immediately.

He looked up when she appeared.

"Hey, beautiful," he said.

"When did you come?" she asked flatly.

"Mm. Good to see you too." He smiled.

"I'm doing great, by the way. Thanks for asking." He raised his brow.

She rolled her eyes at him. "I have a doctor's appointment."

"Mrs. Zeigler?" He stood. "I'll take you."

She opened her mouth.

He followed her gaze.

"Zoya." Quietly. "Let me take you."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she picked up her bag.

"Fine," she said.

Dr. Sheryl Ziegler's office smelled like white tea and expensive silence.

Zoya sat in the chair that didn't require her to be "Lead Counsel." She didn't have to hold her shoulders a certain way here. She just had to exist.

"Having those nightmares again?" Dr. Sheryl asked, her pen hovering over a notepad.

"Worse." Zoya watched a bird on the windowsill, her fingers curling into the fabric of her trousers. "Since the trial date was confirmed. Every night."

"Tell me."

"It's the same. Running. Darkness, shadows. Losing them." She paused, her throat working as she forced the word out. "Th—."

She stopped.

Dr. Sheryl looked at her for a moment. She noticed Zoya's hands.

"And him?"

Zoya's jaw moved once. A sharp, rhythmic twitch. "He's in the dream. He's always in the dream."

"What does he do?"

"He looks at me with such hatred. Disdain." She pressed her lips together until they turned white. "He's never loud in the dream. That's somehow worse. He just... looks at me. Like I'm something he made a terrible mistake believing in."

"He's here, in LA," Zoya said, her voice brittle. "I've been preparing for months, but I don't think I have anything left in me to face him."

Dr. Sheryl said softly. "You have to be easy on yourself. You can tell me everything, Zoya. You know that."

"I am trying." Zoya looked away.

"I know." Dr. Sheryl signed a pad, the scratch of the pen loud in the quiet. "I see it."

Zoya looked at the window. Her throat moved once. Her fingers tightened once in her lap. Then relaxed.

"The dosage. I need you to increase it."

Dr. Sheryl paused. She looked at the fine tremor in Zoya's hands. She wrote the prescription.

She came out of Dr. Sheryl's office and Faiyaz was where she had left him — leaning against the car, phone in hand, not pretending he hadn't been watching the door.

He looked at her face.

He didn't say anything.

The drive to Joseph's manor was a heavy, held silence. Halfway there, Zoya's phone buzzed — UAE. Zayed Al Mansoor's people. She listened for ninety seconds, her face turning into a mask of stone.

He had found nothing. Good.

When they pulled into the drive, the front door flew open.

Riyana launched herself from the porch. Faiyaz caught her mid-air, spinning her until she shrieked, steadying her as she launched into him, already laughing. "Hi princess! Did you miss me?"

"Yesh!" Riyana grabbed his face with both hands. "I missed you. I have a cat."

"I know. I've met Brownie."

"Mommy said you're busyyyy." She pouted.

"I'm back now. For my princess." Faiyaz's heart warmed.

"She's MY cat. And a dog. Can you play with him? Jack is Mommy's dog, but Mommy is scared of him."

Zoya stood in the doorway, her bag over her shoulder. "I am not scared of Jack."

Riyana looked at her with great patience. "Mommy. He licked your hand and you jumped and screamed."

"That was... I have borderline OCD, and he came to lick my shoes."

"It was a scared noise," Riyana insisted.

Faiyaz bit his lip, his shoulders shaking.

"Don't," Zoya warned.

"I'm not doing anything," he said, his voice suspiciously steady. "Mommy is brave. Just... not with animals."

"Yeah!" Riyana laughed.

Zoya glared at Faiyaz, then looked at her daughter. "Thank you, baby. That's very helpful."

⸻

The Kitchen

In the kitchen, Zoya moved with Melissa in a practiced dance. Sleeves rolled up, stirring pots, finding the spice without asking.

"You look thin," Melissa said.

"I look exactly the same."

"You look like you haven't slept since the year began." Melissa handed her a spoon. "Six days, Zoya. Whatever happens in that courtroom — six days and the waiting is done."

Zoya stirred the pot, watching the steam rise.

The waiting is never done. There is always the next thing. The next file. The next morning, where she wakes up with his voice echoing in the rafters of her mind.

"Yes," Zoya said. "Six days."

⸻

In the Mansoor manor,

The air smelled of old leather and the sharp cologne Zayed Mansoor had worn for forty years.

Raiyan sat in the study. He hadn't been in this room in years. Everything was the same — the amber light, the heavy oak desk, the silence that felt like a threat.

Zayed looked at him. Even at rest, Raiyan looked like he was vibrating with a silent, lethal energy.

"So, you finally came," Zayed said. "After two and a half years. For us? For the case? Or for her?"

Raiyan didn't flinch.

He looked at a photograph in the corner of the desk — Liyana at eighteen months, her dark curls messy, her eyes a haunting echo of the woman he was trying to destroy.

"My home is in London," Raiyan said, his voice a jagged rasp. "With Liyana. I'm only here for the case."

Zayed leaned back, his gaze searching Raiyan's face for the crack in the armor. He noted the way Raiyan's knuckles turned white against the armrest.

"She has caused enough damage," Raiyan continued, his lip curling into a sneer he couldn't quite suppress. He looked like a man built of hard angles, the kind of handsome that didn't invite you in — it demanded your surrender. "I won't let her ruin what you've built. Not this time."

"Good," Zayed said simply.

He closed the file. The meeting was over. Neither of them moved to embrace. They simply stood, two men built of the same stone, preparing for a war that had been brewing for years.

Raiyan walked out without looking back. He needed to see Liyana.

⸻

Same night, across LA,

At night, after dinner, Zoya was looking for the Henderson brief in Joseph's study.

She found something else.

It was half under a file on the corner of the desk. Cream paper. The kind that had been touched many times and carefully preserved. She almost missed it.

She didn't miss it.

She picked it up. It didn't belong there. That was the first thing she noticed.

Mr. Raiyan Al Mansoor and Ms. Zoya Al Fayez.

Their wedding invitation.

She looked at it.

The card was still perfect.

And somehow, that was what hurt the most.

Because perfection meant it had never changed. Cream paper, gold-embossed lettering, thick and deliberate — like it had been designed for permanence rather than reality. Two years had lived inside Joseph's desk drawer, and still it looked untouched, still it looked like something that should have lasted longer than it did.

She held it between her fingers a little too long, like if she stared hard enough it might finally say something honest back to her.

Mr. Raiyan Al Mansoor and Ms. Zoya Al Fayez.

A name that once felt like it had weight.

A name that was supposed to mean forever.

Her jaw tightened, then let go. Whatever it was, she was too tired to name it.

*I wish the marriage had lasted like this,* she thought, almost absentmindedly, and the thought didn't come with tears or drama, just a dull clarity that made it worse.

The marriage hadn't even made it to two years.

The card had done better than they did.

She set it down carefully — too carefully, like even letting go needed permission now.

Joseph found her in the study.

She was standing at the bookshelf. Not reading. Just standing. The way she sometimes stood in rooms — present but somewhere slightly behind her own eyes.

She turned it over. Turned it back.

Joseph watched her from his chair and said nothing. He rarely filled silence when silence already had something to say.

"You still kept it," she said, and she hated how normal her voice sounded saying it, as if she wasn't holding something that used to mean everything.

"Yes. Just the things I don't want to forget how they felt."

He said it like it wasn't an answer, just something he had learned about himself too late to change.

She didn't ask why. She already knew why. He had kept their wedding invitation.

Which meant even now, all these years later, in a house in Los Angeles far from the garden where they'd stood among white lilies and peonies and meant every word — Joseph still thought this mattered.

She looked at her grandfather.

"I'm going to win this case," she said, because saying it out loud made it feel less like something breaking inside her and more like something she could control.

"I know. The case is against his grandfather, not him, Zoya," he said.

"To me, it's the same thing, Grandpa." She stopped.

That made his expression falter, just slightly, before he caught it. He didn't try again.

He exhaled.

"Goodnight, Grandpa," she said.

He watched her leave. He looked at the card on his desk. He left it exactly where she had put it down.

She stepped out into the hallway.

Her Call to the Bar photo hung first — Middle Temple, wig and gown, a pride in her own eyes she barely recognized in herself anymore.

Beside it, another: her laughing with friends, Oxford days. Someone's arm slung over her shoulder, a version of herself that hadn't yet learned what it cost to keep smiling.

A whole wall of them, actually. Years of her—from high school to Edinburgh, Oxford, and finally her Call to the Bar. Every achievement, every milestone, carefully framed and hung with the kind of care that only came from someone who believed she was worth remembering.

Joseph never forgot a single milestone.

Then Riyana's.

She looked away.

Too much.

She walked faster. Past the foyer. Through the French doors. Into the garden.

The cold hit her first.

The memory hit harder.

Four years back.

Middle Temple. London.

The Great Hall.

Before everything had weight.

Before everything broke into the shape it became later.

She was standing in her wig and gown with the other newly called barristers and feeling — underneath the ceremony, underneath five hundred years of institutional gravity — something clean and private and entirely her own.

She had done this.

And for once, it didn't feel like survival dressed up as success.

Nobody had handed it to her. She had built it from scratch, from Edinburgh to Oxford to here — it hadn't been a paved road. But it was hers.

Joseph was in the gallery.

She found him before she found anyone else.

He was sitting very straight, the way he always sat, and looking at her with the expression she had known her whole life. The one that said: I always knew. And I am still moved. I am always proud of you.

She mouthed: thank you.

He mouthed back: your mother would be proud.

She looked away before it could reach her face.

Later that night, her phone rang.