Chapter 7: Decoding the Queen

Chapter 7: Decoding the Queen

The drive back to her apartment was a study in taut silence. Layla sat perfectly still in the passenger seat of Zayd Al-Jamil’s Aston Martin, the scent of expensive leather and his subtle, clean cologne a jarring contrast to the earthy spices of her aunt’s workshop. The worn leather journals felt heavy on her lap, a tangible link to a past she was just beginning to understand. They were a secret history, a potential weapon, and she was acutely aware of the man sitting beside her, a rival who had inexplicably appointed himself her guardian.

“He’s a brute,” Zayd said, his voice cutting through the low hum of the engine as he navigated the city’s glittering arteries of light. He didn’t need to specify whom he meant. Basil’s possessive threat still hung in the air between them.

“He is my father’s choice,” Layla replied, her tone noncommittal. Giving him information felt like ceding ground.

“Your father’s choices seem… questionable lately,” Zayd countered, glancing at her. “That medication order was more than questionable. It was deliberate. And now this merger, this… suitor. It feels like the desperate moves of a man playing a losing hand.”

His perception was as sharp as his scalpel. He saw the cracks in the Al-Fahim facade that her own brother had only just confessed to her. “My family’s business is not your concern.”

“Perhaps not,” he conceded, pulling up smoothly in front of her high-rise building. “But a puzzle is. And your father has become a fascinating one.” He cut the engine, the sudden silence amplifying the tension. He turned to her, his expression unreadable in the dim glow of the dashboard lights. “Be careful, Doctor. The men our fathers’ generation called lions are often just old predators, most dangerous when they feel cornered.”

He didn't ask what was in the journals. He didn't press for details. He simply stated his observation and left it hanging in the air. For the first time, Layla felt that his interest wasn't just professional rivalry or arrogance; it was the clinical curiosity of a master diagnostician who senses a deep, systemic disease and cannot resist investigating its source.

“Thank you for the ride, Dr. Al-Jamil,” she said, her voice formal as she opened the door.

“Zayd,” he corrected her quietly. “Good luck with your research.”

His use of her first name was a subtle shift in their dynamic, an offer of a different kind of relationship she was not yet ready to analyze. She gave a curt nod and escaped into the sterile safety of her building’s lobby, the weight of the journals both a burden and a promise.

Her apartment was her fortress of solitude. Cool white walls, minimalist furniture, everything in its precise place. It was a space of order and control, a direct rebellion against the opulent, suffocating chaos of her father’s house. She laid the journals on her glass dining table, the ancient leather looking alien against the modern surface.

For hours, she worked. Fueled by black coffee and a simmering, desperate urgency, she hunched over the books. The pages were filled with elegant, spidery script that was utterly incomprehensible. It wasn’t Arabic, not exactly. Words and symbols she had never seen were interspersed with strings of numbers and strange, angular characters. Frustration began to gnaw at her. It felt like a cruel joke—the key to her freedom, locked in a language she couldn't speak.

She remembered Aunt Samira’s words: A mix of the old tribal dialect… and a corporate shorthand she invented herself.

The tribal dialect. Her father had forbidden it, called it the language of goat-herders and old women, unfit for his modern family. But she remembered fragments, whispers from her mother and her aunt in the years before her father’s control had become absolute. Words for the desert wind, for a particular shade of dusk, for the matriarch of a herd. She forced her mind back, digging through the sediment of memory.

Around 3 a.m., she found it. A recurring symbol next to a list of properties. It looked like a stylized flower. She almost dismissed it, until a ghost of her mother’s voice whispered a name in her memory. Arfaj. A tough, yellow desert flower that bloomed in the harshest conditions. It was a word from the old dialect, a word for resilience. A woman’s word.

Suddenly, the code fractured. It wasn’t one language; it was two, woven together. The tribal words were the signifiers, the emotional keys that unlocked the cold, hard data of the corporate shorthand. Her surgeon’s mind, trained to see patterns in the chaos of the human body, took over. She began to dissect the text, line by line, symbol by symbol. The angular characters were a rudimentary form of accounting. The numbers were coordinates, stock codes, bank routing numbers from an era before digital transfers.

As dawn began to bleed grey light into the sky, the full picture emerged, and it took Layla’s breath away.

Her grandmother, the quiet, smiling Amara, had been a financial queen.

Under the holding name “Arfaj Investments”—a name her father would have dismissed as sentimental nonsense—Amara had built a shadow empire. She had used her own dowry and early profits to buy swathes of coastal land decades before the developers saw their potential. She had secured patents for drilling technologies that the Al-Fahim company later used, but the royalties, Layla now saw, were being funneled into a Swiss account under a different name entirely. There were offshore accounts, a portfolio of international stocks, deeds to properties in London, Geneva, and Tokyo—all legally sound, all meticulously documented, and all completely separate from Khalid Al-Fahim’s control.

Her grandmother hadn’t just been the visionary; she had created a firewall. She had built an escape route, a hidden fortune so vast it dwarfed what was left of the crumbling Al-Fahim company. And the final page of the last journal made her heart stop. It was a simple, notarized statement, written in plain Arabic.

“All assets, holdings, and properties held by Arfaj Investments are the sole and exclusive inheritance of the firstborn female of my direct lineage, upon her thirtieth birthday or upon a time of great personal duress, whichever comes first.”

Layla stared at the words, her exhaustion forgotten, replaced by a surge of electrifying power. She was not a pauper to be disinherited. She was an heiress to an empire her father knew nothing about. She had the power not only to walk away from his threats but to save his company or let it burn.

But the journals were only the map. They were a history, a letter of intent. They were not the treasure itself. The last entry listed the location of the physical documents—the deeds, the original stock certificates, the bearer bonds, the keys to the accounts. The proof.

They were in a fireproof safe.

Behind a false panel.

In her father’s private study.

The blood drained from her face. The study. The heart of his power, the one room in the entire Al-Fahim estate that was his alone. After her mother died, he had locked it, and it had remained his forbidden sanctuary. As a child, she had imagined it was a place of dark magic, the source of his booming authority. Even as an adult, she had never crossed its threshold. It was more than a room; it was the symbolic seat of his control, the lion’s den where he kept the trophies of his conquests.

The morality clause in his will was a gun to her head. But these journals, and the documents they pointed to, were a sword. To wield it, she had to walk into the one place she feared most. She had to invade his sanctum, violate his power, and steal back the legacy of the queen he had tried to erase.

The choice was clear. She was no longer defending. She was attacking.

Layla stood up, her body aching from the sleepless night but her mind clear and sharp as a scalpel. She walked to her window and looked out at the rising sun, the city sprawling beneath her. She was done being a pawn in her father’s desperate game. It was time to start playing her own.

I’m coming for it, she thought, a silent vow directed at the fortress-like mansion across the city. I’m coming for all of it.