The incident
1664 Words
Fifteen years.
Siraj is fifteen now.
If anyone had seen him for the first time that morning, they would never have guessed what he looked like.
His shoulders were straighter. His gaze was steady. That beautiful, sharp Korean face was no longer hidden behind silence. He walked with quiet confidence through the school doors, his backpack hanging carelessly, his earphones in, his jacket half-zipped.
There were still cracks in the glass, of course. The trauma doesn't go away—it hardens. It smooths over. Siraj didn't like noisy crowds. He wouldn't let anyone walk too close behind him. And he still hated hospitals with a quiet fire in his chest.
But now he talked. He joked, even. He sometimes smiled—though not carelessly.
Daniel had done everything he could to give him this normalcy. A private school with a new name. Protection. Safety.
And for years, it worked.
Until today.
It started after lunch.
Siraj had just left the cafeteria, putting his earphones back in, heading toward literature class. A hallway most students avoided for its eerily quiet nature during class. He loved it. The quiet.
He didn't see the man until it was too late.
Not a student.
Old. Too fast.
One moment, Siraj was walking.
The next—
A hand grabbed his collar, yanking him back.
Steel sank into his side.
Hot. Deep. Like fire beneath his ribs.
The earphones fell from his ears.
He gasped, staggered, his eyes wide open.
The man didn't speak. He just looked at him—sunglasses, shaved hair, a snake tattoo wrapped around his neck—and muttered a single word before disappearing down the hallway:
"A letter to Daniel."
Siraj slumped against the wall, clutching his side.
He couldn't breathe. The warmth dripped onto his fingers. Blood. A lot of it.
He slid to the floor, his heart pounding, his vision blurred.
A teacher screamed. Someone called an ambulance.
But Siraj didn't hear.
He was falling unconscious—
from the pain.
from the heat.
to a single thought pulsing through his mind:
Daniel. He's coming for Daniel.
Elsewhere
Daniel was in the middle of a briefing.
His men were gathered in the operating room, maps were displayed on a screen, and intelligence was flashing.
Then his phone rang.
Hana's voice.
Very loud. Trembling.
"Siraj... he's been stabbed."
For a moment, Daniel didn't breathe.
The entire room fell silent.
He left without a word.
He hurried out of the palace, to the car, his voice steely on the phone.
"Which hospital?"
He didn't blink the entire drive.
He didn't feel the way.
Just a fire in his chest.
He was just a boy.
The hospital smelled of disinfectant and blood.
Not the blood Daniel was used to—battlefield blood, backroom blood, blood that dries under fingernails after a murder. No, this was different.
This was Siraj's blood.
The child Daniel had raised, protected, and preserved for ten years. The child he had lifted from the wreckage of abuse and silence. Now, Siraj was fighting for his life behind the heavy steel doors of the operating room.
Siraj's wound was torn and soaked—his white school uniform stained with green was now a crimson map of violence.
The knife had pierced him deeply—just under the ribs, tearing through the muscle and touching his liver. A lot of blood had been lost by the time the ambulance arrived. His skin was pale—not sickly pale, but a horrifyingly pale gray, as if all warmth had fled. His lips were blue. His breaths were shallow. His eyelids fluttered, as if he were resisting the temptation to faint.
Now, he lay under the cold surgical lights, tubes in his arms, the doctors moving frantically, their voices jerky and rapid.
"His blood pressure is dropping—"
"Get more O-negative blood!"
"He's not stabilizing—move, move—"
"His heart rate is irregular—"
Behind the glass, his friends arrived, panting, their eyes wide open. Classmates. Four boys. They weren't crying—but they looked exhausted, as if something had cracked in their sense of security.
"Is he going to die?" someone whispered.
No one answered.
They kept looking at the red on the floor. At the blood that had followed him inside, thick patches that the doorman couldn't keep up with. The blood of their friend.
From Siraj—the quiet boy who used to smile with the corner of his mouth, who liked to sit by the window and draw landscapes instead of faces.
The boy who had finally started laughing in the past few months.
Now he was inside that room, motionless, a white sheet pulled to the middle of his chest, wires and monitors screaming.
Then Daniel arrived.
Not in a suit this time. No cold sunglasses. No hem.
Just anger.
And fear.
He pushed his way past the guards and nurses and questions. His face was a storm carved in stone—jaw sharp and clenched, fists trembling at his sides, eyes scanning the corridor as if ready to kill anyone who breathed incorrectly.
He saw blood first.
His steps stopped.
For a moment—just a heartbeat—Daniel froze.
Because it wasn't just blood.
It was Seraj's blood.
It was everywhere on the white floor. It was everywhere on the sleeves of his school shirt that the paramedics had cut. It was everywhere along the corridor like a chain.
His chest rose.
It fell.
It rose again.
But inside—it was burning.
They touched my son.
They didn't just threaten me, they touched him. They cut him. They drained his blood.
To destroy me.
Hours later
He slowly turned to the surgeon as he emerged from the operating room. The man's gloves were stained red up to his wrists.
"Is he alive?"
The doctor swallowed hard. "We're doing our best. He's lost a lot of blood. The knife wound was deep—very close to his liver. We've stopped the internal bleeding, but his vitals are unstable. If he doesn't wake up in the next 12 hours..."
He didn't finish.
He didn't need to.
Daniel looked behind him. Through the glass window of the operating room.
And he saw him.
Siraj.
His skin was almost translucent. His cheeks were sunken. A tube was in his mouth. An oxygen mask was on his nose. His chest was rising very slowly.
Daniel's fists were clenched.
The last time he saw him, that morning... Siraj was laughing at something over breakfast. Orange juice. A lame joke. Music playing on his phone.
That memory shattered like glass in Daniel's mind.
This is war.
Do they want to destroy me?
They just let me burn them all. I'll burn them for my son.
The waiting room outside the intensive care unit was too quiet for boys their age.
No one was kicking chairs.
No one was laughing.
No one was playing on their phones.
Four teenage boys sat in silence—backs straight, knees moving, eyes darting down the corridor whenever a doctor passed by.
They were Siraj's friends. His real friends.
Not the loud, fake kind who come to get attention.
The real ones—the ones who see through his silence.
Yasser sat closest to the door, his jacket hooded, his arms tightly crossed. He hadn't spoken a word in half an hour. His eyes were red—not from crying, but from bottling up his emotions. Siraj had saved him from a bullying incident last year. He had taken a beating for him. Now he lay on the other side of the wall, and Yasser was helpless.
Tim paced the room, eager to sit down. His sneakers squeaked on the tiled floor every few seconds. "He'll be okay," he kept muttering over and over. "He's strong. Right? He's strong. He'll be okay."
Ramy covered his face with his palms.
Then there was Adam.
The four of them quieted down. He sat with Siraj's sketchbook in his lap, slowly turning the pages. Landscapes. Shadows. A half-finished drawing of their school's rooftop. The last drawing was a face... not quite finished, but it looked like Daniel's—drawn with precise, clear lines.
"I can't believe this happened," Adam said quietly. "He was literally complaining about gym class this morning."
None of them replied. They all stared at the wall, listening to the beeps of the machines behind the ICU door, reminding them that he was still alive. Barely.
Time passed differently in hospitals.
Minutes dragged on like hours.
Hourly hours faded away like smoke. They refused to leave. Even when the nurses offered them food. Even when Daniel, who was pacing outside the operating room, told them they didn't need to stay.
They stayed.
Because he would stay for them.
Because this was Siraj, who never asked for help, but was always the first to notice when others needed it.
Who sat with Tim when his older brother was in prison.
Who gave Adam his favorite pen when he forgot the end of it.
Who taught Yasser how to throw a punch without getting caught.
The one who didn't say anything when Rami cried in the locker room—just handed him tissues, sat beside him, and waited until he stopped.
That boy was now on the brink of death.
And none of them could ease his pain.
So they waited.
Heavy eyes. Heavier hearts.
Tim finally broke the silence. "If he doesn't wake up... I swear I'll find whoever did this and—"
Yasser stopped him. His voice was low. "Do you think Daniel wouldn't?"
The room went cold.
They all remembered Daniel's look when he arrived—how the air seemed to wrap around him. How the nurse at the front desk shuddered when he spoke. How even the doctor recoiled when Daniel stepped forward.
It was something else.
And who had stabbed Siraj?
He had just declared war on a man they didn't know who.
- Writer
