i am so fucking done

By the time Hamza climbed the stairs to his apartment, the sweetness of the evening had begun to settle unpleasantly at the back of his throat.

Yalina had made a production of his birthday in the careful, earnest way she approached most things involving him. Dinner somewhere discreet but expensive, a small cake she had bullied the staff into bringing out despite his protests, and a gift wrapped so neatly that he had felt guilty tearing the paper. She had looked beautiful across the table, smiling as though spending the evening with him was something she had been anticipating for weeks rather than another step in a courtship built, at least on his end, from calculation.

That did not mean he disliked her. Quite the opposite.

Yalina was warm and clever, sweeter than the people surrounding her had any right to allow her to remain, and Hamza found that he enjoyed making her laugh. There were worse duties than taking a beautiful woman to dinner, listening to her talk, and allowing her to imagine a future with him. There were certainly worse ways to move closer to her father and everything her family represented.

He knew what each gesture was worth. Every dinner, every hand held beneath a table, every promise left carefully unfinished. He knew where it placed him and which doors it might eventually open.

Still, as he reached his landing and took his keys from his pocket, an absurd flicker of guilt moved through him.

It was not guilt toward Yalina. That would have made sense.

Instead, he found himself thinking about Uzair.

As though there were vows between them to break. As though whatever existed in dark rooms and stolen hours had ever been named as anything beyond convenience, appetite, and the understanding that neither of them would speak of it once the sun came up.

Uzair had a wife, after all.

Zoya bhabi, he called her. She was quiet and distant, and spent more of the year at her maternal home in Peshawar than she did beside her husband in Karachi. Hamza had met her only a handful of times. She spoke softly, kept her eyes lowered in rooms full of men, and seemed to move through Uzair’s life like someone careful not to disturb anything.

Uzair had explained the marriage only once.

They had been drinking, not enough to make either of them careless but enough to loosen something in him. Afterwards, Uzair had lain beside Hamza with his eyes half closed and a cigarette balanced between two fingers, smoke curling lazily toward the ceiling. At nineteen, he had said, Rehman bhai had walked in on something he was never supposed to see. A marriage had followed quickly after that, arranged to smother the question before anyone else thought to ask it.

He had said it lightly. Almost mockingly.

Hamza had known better than to mistake that for ease.

He slid the key into the lock.

Uzair had told him earlier that he would come by once Hamza had finished whatever he was doing with Yalina. The words had been delivered with studied indifference, but Hamza knew him well enough by now to recognize the edge beneath them.

Their arrangement had begun as another instrument of the mission.

Uzair’s loyalty mattered. His trust mattered more. Keeping him close had helped Hamza rise through the organization, placing him nearer to Rehman bhai and higher within the gang’s confidence than patience alone ever could have managed. Uzair spoke freely in bed. He softened after pleasure, after drink, after the rare moments when he permitted himself to believe he was safe. Hamza had learned names, schedules, grievances and fears while Uzair’s guard lay scattered with their clothes across the floor.

It was useful.

That was what Hamza told himself whenever the usefulness became difficult to separate from everything else.

Because he liked Uzair. He liked his dry humour and his competence, the way he remembered every appointment Rehman bhai forgot and could untangle a week’s worth of crooked accounts without appearing to concentrate. He liked sitting beside him during long drives and listening to him complain. He liked the weight of his attention, the rare flash of approval in his eyes, and the fact that Uzair seemed to understand Hamza without demanding that he explain himself.

He was attracted to him too. There was no point lying about that in the privacy of his own mind.

What Hamza refused to do was examine what that attraction said about him.

This belonged to the night. To locked doors, lowered voices, and the certainty that neither of them would ever drag it into daylight. Whatever felt natural between them could remain unnamed so long as it remained hidden. Hamza had no intention of making a life out of it, or allowing it to alter the life he had been sent here to destroy.

Nothing he felt for these people would interfere with the mission.

Not Rehman bhai’s trust. Not Yalina’s sweetness. Not Uzair.

Hamza opened the door.

The light beside the bed was on, casting the rest of the apartment in a muted amber haze. Uzair sat against the wall at the head of the mattress, one knee raised, an accounts ledger spread open across his lap.

His kurta was gone.

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read the rest on ao3!