Thread of Glass

Chapter 3

Raiyan straightened and adjusted his cuff, his face settling back into the calm, unreadable expression he wore around everyone else.

Geneva wasn't a stop he'd made for the Mansoor Corp case. He'd come for a closed meeting with two European investors and the regulatory team handling the company's expansion agreements, scheduled weeks before any of this started.

Now the case had followed him here anyway.

"Michael." He didn't slow his pace.

"Sir." Michael was already reaching for his tablet.

"Whatever Zoya Al Fayez has against Mansoor Corporation, I want all of it. Everything."

Michael's pen paused over the screen. It was the first hesitation he'd shown all morning. "Personal as well?"

His eyes never left the corridor ahead. "Everything."

Michael scrolled once, confirming the request. "Harrison filed our response yesterday afternoon."

"Good." Raiyan glanced at him.

"Litigation is reviewing every procedural avenue before the first hearing," Michael added, glancing up to gauge whether that landed.

"I want us ahead of opposing counsel at every stage." He didn't break stride to say it.

"Yes, sir." Michael's pen moved again, faster now.

"I don't intend to lose because we reacted late." Something in Raiyan's voice made Michael stop writing for half a second before he caught himself and kept going.

*Still Al Fayez. Not Malik. Not whatever name she might have taken since.*

He walked out. The door closed behind him.

Michael stood there a moment before Armaan appeared beside him, and neither of them said a word.

"Come on," Michael said finally, and they followed Raiyan out.

***

The car hadn't even cleared the gate before Michael's tablet lit up again.

"Sir, before the next round of calls." He turned the screen so Raiyan could see it. "The financial figures that leaked to the press. It's a raw internal export, not a summary. The timestamp is still intact." He glanced up. "Whoever leaked it had internal access."

Raiyan's gaze didn't leave the screen. "Source?"

"We're tracing it now." A pause, careful, like he was choosing which part to say first. "But it landed the same week the lawsuit did. That's not luck."

Raiyan's hand rested on the door, unmoving. "So this isn't just Zo— Ms Fayez."

"I don't think it ever was only her." Michael met his eyes. "I think the lawsuit is one piece of something bigger, and we're only seeing the piece that's supposed to be visible."

Silence stretched between them, long enough that Armaan glanced back once from the front seat before facing forward again.

"Find out who's applying the pressure," Raiyan said. "All of it. The leak, the investors, the complaints. I want to know if it's one hand or several."

Michael glanced up from his notes. "And the Al Fayez case?"

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

Michael nodded once and started typing.

***

That evening, the Geneva summit was already underway by the time Raiyan arrived. Michael fell into step beside him, tablet in hand. "The lawsuit has started moving. Two financial outlets picked it up in the last twenty minutes. It's on the summit press team's question list."

"Take it off. All of it. Nobody asks me about Zoya Al Fayez tonight. If the press wants a statement, they get Harrison's."

"I'll handle it."

Raiyan went onstage eleven minutes later and spoke for less than twenty minutes about corporate accountability and the gaps companies exploited when regulation moved slower than money. By the time he stepped offstage, Michael was waiting near the exit.

"Nothing on the official feed," he said. "The lawsuit isn't leading anywhere that matters."

Raiyan handed him the award he'd just been given. “Good. And the scholarship committee—don’t move the interviews because of this.”

“We weren’t planning to.” Michael caught Raiyan’s look and corrected himself. “They stay exactly where they are.”

"Nobody loses a place because my schedule became inconvenient."

The security detail opened a quieter corridor, and within seconds Raiyan had disappeared from public view.

***

She was running through a corridor that smelled of blood and metal. Every breath burned, and no matter how hard she tried to run faster, 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.

Raiyan was there.

In the dream, he always looked at her the same way. He never shouted. Somehow that was worse. He would just stand there, looking at her like he had already decided there was nothing she could say that would change his mind.

"Look what you did to us."

Zoya tried to answer, but nothing came out. He kept looking at her, and she knew he didn't believe her anyway.

Then small arms locked around her neck from behind.

"Mommy."

Zoya jerked awake with a broken cry. Both hands flew to her abdomen before she was fully awake and found nothing there.

She kept them there anyway.