Chapter 7: Ties That Choke
442 Words
By noon, Zariah was gone.
She left before the city fully woke, wrapped in Malik’s hoodie, slipping quietly into a black SUV sent by her father’s staff. No goodbye. No trace.
Just a note on his pillow.
“This was real. I’m sorry.”
Malik stared at the words, the ache blooming slow and sharp in his chest.
He had known it. Known it would end. Still, hope was a cruel thing.
Downtown, Zariah faced the empire she was born into.
Her father, Sebastian Cole, paced behind a long glass desk, seething. “Do you have any idea what the media would do with pictures of you sneaking into a garage in Southpoint?”
She sat still, silent.
“You were seen,” he said. “And now, I have to clean it up.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No, but you never had to. That’s what power does—it protects even the ones who rebel.”
Zariah’s jaw clenched. “Maybe I don’t want protection.”
Sebastian turned slowly. “And maybe I don’t want a daughter who throws away everything we built for a thrill in a tool shed.”
“It wasn’t a thrill.”
“Oh?” he sneered. “Then what was it?”
She looked him dead in the eyes. “It was the first time I didn’t feel like a prisoner.”
Later, her fiancé, Donovan Arlen, found her on the balcony.
He was everything the Cole legacy demanded—political, poised, charming. But hollow.
“I heard about your little detour,” he said, sipping from a crystal tumbler.
Zariah said nothing.
“You know, you and I… we’re two sides of the same coin. We do what’s expected, we smile for cameras, and we keep the blood off the brand.”
“I’m not like you.”
Donovan chuckled. “You are. You just haven’t accepted it yet.”
She looked out at the skyline. “He made me feel like I had a choice.”
“Well, you don’t.”
His voice was calm, almost pitying. “You’ll marry me. You’ll inherit your father’s chair. And you’ll forget whatever fantasy that mechanic made you believe in.”
“And if I don’t?”
Donovan’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Then the empire falls. And you’ll be blamed.”
Back at the garage, Malik tried to throw himself into work.
But every engine felt like her voice. Every silence echoed with her laugh.
She’d said it was real. But she was gone.
And he had no right to want her back.
Still… he did.
He always would.
- Writer
