eypresho

Yalina's name is kinda ruined because of her stay with Hamza with no chaperone, and she actually takes advantage of this to insist that she wants to take sometime so that people forget her association with Hamza. Jameel agrees and Yalina uses the opportunity to become somewhat of a PR manager/ representative for her dad. And because of Hamza's (unannounced) partnership with Jameel, they keep crossing paths. It's pretty clear to even Jameel that they haven't moved on, and for his own daughter's good, he tries to keep them from meeting, but Yalina tells her father that she doesn't want to have any crutches for her work. This unresolved tension floats around in their relationship/professional equation for a long time(this is again a fast moving timeline too, and this is 4-5 years of plot after they broke up).

Hamza still builds the house, and when Yalina comes with her dad over there the first time, she is gutted to realise that the man who asked her to get out of his house built his home exactly like how she had said she wanted her house to be(a là The Notebook). She confronts him about it, (up to you if he is completely sincere or he was legit like, when I have a house plan might as well use it,sounds sophisticated af--and then realising that he might have another chance with Yalina, seizes it and says he never moved on. I am going with option 1), they have a heart to heart with him confessing that he knew that his ambitions would put him in danger and he didn't want to drag her into that mess unprepared or at all, so he gave her the choice, and while it broke his heart to see her go, he was happy that she would be safe. Yalina asks if the question is still valid. He says yes. Yalina doesn't say much but the next time Jameel meets Hamza, he is mad, but offers him his daughter's hand in marriage. Hamza is stunned but accepts.

Then Pinda happens, and Yalina still finds out. Except this time she can walk out.(And she does). She rethinks his explanation, realises that her biggest gripe with her father's work had been that it never seemed to benefit the people who he begged votes from. And she realises that she agrees with Hamza. Years of seeing the government and army's actions by her father's side has made her realise that neither of the two institutions are actually doing anything to protect the people, that re-integration of criminals is very much the norm in the country and the government is perfectly fine with ISI turning the commoners as target practice. So she goes back, to warn him about SP. They have a talk about how their relationship began, Hamza's intentions and manipulation of the younger Yalina. Hamza is genuinely remorseful of preying on her younger self(regardless of the option you chose before for the house, this is true) and Yalina asks if it wouldn't have been easier to simply marry her instead of giving her an out then, and he replies that it would have, but he had fallen in love while trying to get her to fall for him and he could not in good conscience, do it anymore. She only asks him if he thinks he will return to his motherland,to which he replies that he is not sure, but he hopes to. That cements that they will never have a future as husband and wife, atleast to her. So she breaks the engagement again, giving a bs reason to her dad, and instead starts helping Hamza in his spy work in anyway she can. She is the one who discovers about Omar, because Hamza still goes to say goodbye to Yalina when he knows it's about to go down, and gives her the keys to his house,saying that he has willed it to her, even though they couldn't live there together, he hopes that she lives there one day, so that saath na sahi, both would have lived in the house she dreamed and he built.

A day after he leaves, Yalina decides to go to the house(still fully functional with its crew because no one knows that Hamza doesn't plan on coming back) and finds Omar snooping. She sees that he holds a half burnt passport and another picture also half burnt, of a family. She puts two and two together and attacks him, by chance, she gets the gun and shoots him point blank. He is dead. She takes both the evidence and flees. Ofcourse it's discovered and people try to point fingers at her, Jameel doesn't really ask anything and twists the story to make it seem like it was self defense. Hamza calls after the destruction because the official story will go that the PAF decided to kill the terrorists and the story that the higher ups get will be that the BUF betrayed Hamza and blew him up with the others inside the building. So he is dead to the world.(He is not discovered because Omar is dead and killing Iqbal, Mir and Cheema had basically been easy picking for him. He just shot the three after the money exchange and since they weren't prepared, they died(a la unknown gunman move lmao). So before he can continue, Yalina asks, that even though Hamza is dead, will Jaskirat find any space for her in his heart? And he is shook, and she tells him everything else that happened and he basically tells her that yes, Jaskirat loves her too, but Jaskirat died long before Hamza did and that now he is a nobody. So Yalina simply hums and wishes him well. Hamza is heartbroken, but leaves when Sanyal sends people to extract him.

All that climax part happens and he goes back to Sanyal, resigned to live as Sanyal wishes. Instead Sanyal sends him to Vancouver, with a new name, to live as a sleeper agent, except he is assigned a partner who will pose as his wife and they are supposed to integrate into the community as a family. Jassi tries to protest but Sanyal simple smiles and says that he is sure that once he meets his assigned partner, he will have no problem. He goes, discovers it's Yalina with a new name: Aleena Gill and she had had to leave Pakistan due to the murder accusations and had convinced her father to directly speak to Sanyal wishing for aide and help. She simply implies to Jassi that Jamali owes something to Sanyal. She doesn't reveal that she knows that her own father is a spy, something she had discovered a couple months ago and she had twisted his arm about giving her this. And so the story ends, with them getting their actual happily ever after.

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(Ikk thode plotholes hain, par sorry yaar my brain is not braining because the exam was today(it went well, dw))

With the sheer number of asks I have taken up but haven't written a fic for yet, I am convinced I will end up forgetting or taking too long, so I am giving you the plotline in your asks only, anon. If I do end up writing it, I will either elaborate on this one itself or explore the other possibility I had mentioned in the beginning. Anyway, I hope you liked this little drabble/word vomit I did. 😊

I hope you have a great day and see y'all soon(hopefully, cus I might have to start looking for a change of job because I don't like the changes happening in the management, so that's another thing)

Cheerios!

=====================xXx=====================

Yalina stared at the big purple suitcase half her size that she was somehow supposed to fit her entire life into. The tickets and passports sat right next to the open suitcase like a glaring reminder of everything that had transpired only a few hours ago, and every time her eyes drifted toward them, a strange heaviness settled deeper into her chest.

Hamza—

No.

Even in her own thoughts, it suddenly felt wrong to call him that now, as though the name itself had become another mask she had accidentally peeled away with trembling fingers and tearful accusations. Her husband, then. That was the one truth she was still certain of amidst the ruins of everything else, and so her husband he shall remain, no matter what names he had worn before her.

Her husband had sat her down the previous night, and for the first time in years, she had seen that harsh decisiveness return to him. The hesitant guilt and awkward apology that had clung to him ever since ... Aalam Chacha’s death had melted away, revealing the same man she had married, the man with burning eyes who had proclaimed that he would be the King of Karachi. His words had been firm, clipped, leaving very little room for argument, but his eyes had betrayed him entirely. Worry. Fear. Desperation. A kind of frantic hopefulness that almost frightened her more than panic would have.

Vancouver.

They would leave Pakistan. Start over. Build a new life from scratch, away from the lies, away from Lyari, away from the ghosts trailing behind them like bloodstained shadows. No more carefully maintained facades, no more pretending that their marriage had not been born from deceit and sharpened into something painfully real afterward.

But Yalina did not know how much of that promise was truly possible and how much of it was simply something her husband desperately wanted to believe.

How did people simply start over?

What happened to the years already lived? The memories already built? The walls of the house they had chosen together, the marks of Zayan’s height on the corridor wall, the gardens she had bullied Hamza into planting despite him insisting they would attract insects, the dinners, the birthdays, the fights, the reconciliations, the ordinary little moments that had slowly become the shape of her life? She did not understand how they could have a new beginning when they already carried so much history between them, so many wounds, so many lies, so much love twisted painfully around betrayal.

And what of her parents?

If she left Pakistan today, there was a very real possibility she would never see her Ammi or Abbu again. They fought often, yes, and her mother could carve wounds into her with words sharper than knives, but they were still her parents. She loved them despite everything. She had always prepared herself for the eventuality of outliving them because her Abbu had already been old when she was born, but she had never imagined a future where he still breathed somewhere under the same sky while she could never again touch his hand or sit beside him over tea.

Her thoughts wandered, as they often did these days, back to that night in Rehman Bhai’s complex.

The night her husband had given her an out.

At the time, blinded by love and anger and hurt pride, she had mistaken it for a challenge. She had not understood the enormity of what he had been offering her. In hindsight, she understood it now for what it truly was—the last sliver of protection the man beneath Hamza’s mask had tried to secure for her before all chances to back out vanished.

On some days she regretted her choice.

But that regret never lasted long.

Not even when she had been forced to learn how to move amongst the polished, prissy wives of politicians who simultaneously looked down upon her for being a gangster’s wife, feared her for the exact same reason, and tried to cozy up to her because of her husband’s influence. Not even when she had learned how to maintain composure while one of Hamza’s rivals tried to intimidate her during public gatherings, or when another had attempted to attack her in broad daylight simply to send a message.

Her husband had always reached her before real harm could be done.

And those men had always paid for it afterward.

Still, fear had lodged itself somewhere deep inside her after those incidents, becoming a permanent part of her life. But over time, that fear had transformed too. It stopped being merely a weakness and became something sharper, harder, almost weapon-like.

She had not regretted her choice even when her husband had begun insisting that she learn how to use a gun with the precision of a soldier. She had learned without complaint, learned how to hold it steady, how to aim, how to fire without flinching, and in the process had earned the quiet admiration of her husband’s men.

When the truth had finally come out, her regret had never truly been about the path he had walked. It had only ever been about the lies.

She had grown up watching her father and his associates treat ordinary Pakistani citizens with the same careless disregard her teachers once described when speaking of Marie Antoinette and the French monarchy. Her patriotism had never belonged to the wolves who sat in powerful offices wrapped in the flag of the nation while feeding on its people. It had only ever belonged to the land itself. To the ordinary people who suffered beneath those men.

If he had told her himself, if she had not discovered the truth in the worst possible way, her clothes stained with the blood of guests she had invited into her home while the SP’s threats rang in her ears and every single lie she had trusted came crashing down at once, she would not have begrudged him at all.

And she would never betray the man she had given space in her heart, especially not when his actions were ultimately meant to protect people from monsters wearing uniforms and titles. The same people who would call her a traitor if they ever learned the truth were people she had seen abandoned repeatedly by those claiming to protect them.

She knew the difference between patriotism and sadism.

The men hailed as the greatest patriots of her country often had eyes gleaming with cruelty. Their righteousness had always felt hungry. Violent. Hollow.

Her husband’s eyes had not looked like that when he had knelt before her begging forgiveness for deceiving her while simultaneously confessing that everything he had done had been for his motherland, there had been sincerity in him. Pain too. Shame. Love.

So she had accepted her lot in life. Accepted him too.

Her eyes drifted absently across the room as she tried to locate Zayan’s favorite shirts amongst the mess around her.

The reveal had changed many things, she mused. She had assumed that now that he no longer needed to maintain a facade with her, they would eventually become strangers behind closed doors. She had thought he would begin detaching himself from the life they had built together.

Instead, somehow, he had done the opposite.

After that brief awkward period where he seemed uncertain whether she would expose him, he had become even more involved in their lives. A better father. A more attentive husband. He spent increasing amounts of time with Zayan, reading him stories, helping prepare him for school, taking him out for picnics, teaching him little things with patient seriousness, playing with him whenever he found the time.

Sometimes it almost felt as though he was trying desperately to give their son enough memories to survive an entire lifetime.

And with her too, he remained unchanged in all the ways that mattered. He still insisted she did not need to mingle with the shark-like harpies that were the other politician's wives. He pushed her to finish her studies. Encouraged her to open her own businesses. Taught her how to manage finances herself. Quietly ensured that she had her own loyal guards among his men, men who answered to her first before anyone else.

It felt like preparation. Like he was preparing her for a future where he would no longer be there to protect her.

That realization hurt her in ways she could never fully explain. For some reason, even after the truth had come out, Yalina had never truly imagined a life without him.

A few months ago, after his relentless insistence that she memorize routes, names, accounts, safehouses, and his gang’s operational details finally snapped the last thread of her patience, she had dragged him into their room and screamed at him for behaving like a dead man walking.

He had only smiled at her then. A small, sad smile filled with such resignation that it had terrified her more than anger ever could have.

And afterward, with his head resting against her shoulder, he had finally told her fragments of the truth. Not his real name. Not where he came from. Nothing concrete enough to unravel the entire lie. But enough.

Enough for her to understand that he had once had two sisters, and that only one lived. And she had lived only because he had stained his hands in the blood of her abusers instead of waiting for justice. Enough for her to understand that he had paid for that choice with his own life long before he ever became Hamza. Enough to understand that the state which abandoned him, later returned demanding loyalty anyway, and he had given it despite everything.

That conversation had changed something fundamental in her perspective of him.

Because suddenly she no longer saw him as merely a deceiver who had manipulated her people and her country. Instead, he looked like a man who had been punished repeatedly for trying to do the right thing and still somehow choose goodness afterward. A brave man. A wounded man. A good man trapped inside impossible circumstances.

She had chosen the right man.

Perhaps at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, in the wrong life entirely, but still the right man.

For one brief moment that night, doubt had crept into her heart again. What if even this story was another lie? Another carefully crafted cover?

But the wetness soaking into her kurta while he refused to lift his face from her shoulder had answered that fear better than any words could.

And she knew.

She had never truly known Hamza or any of his masks. But she knew her husband. And that was enough for her.

That night, as they lay in their bed, both to keyed up to truly sleep, she had begged her husband to come back to her, to try to live for her even if his motherland had asked for his life. She had held his folded hands, looked into his glassy eyes that shone even in the dark, and had asked in her most brave voice, that she wanted to raise their son together, and that she wanted to cash in his promise that she had rights over him for all his life, that if Hamza Ali Mazari had to die for India, she would not complain, but she wanted her husband to return to her, safe and sound. He had merely nodded once and said nothing. But his preparations had taken on a different light, and he had kept his promise to try, with the proof of his sincerity sitting innocuously next to her suitcase.

As she stared at the things she had absentmindedly gathered while lost in thought, her eyes drifted toward the deep red suit folded carefully at the back of the cupboard.

The color had always been her favorite. But she had never worn that suit again after that day.

Slowly, she reached for it.

Women in her husband’s country wore sindoor, she remembered him once saying casually, in the many midnight talks they had taken to having, after that night where she had demanded he live. Something of a similar shade, red like devotion and passion, worn for the long life of one’s husband.

Before she fully understood what she was doing, she had already unfolded the suit and changed into it. She stood there silently afterward, fingers brushing over the familiar fabric. She did not know why she had done it.

Was this prayer too?

For a husband who had pushed passports into her trembling hands with promises that he would return to her, while holding her so tightly it had felt less like comfort and more like a man trying to memorize the shape of the person he loved before walking toward something terrible?

She did not know.

All she knew was that, that was what she was wearing when Laila hurried in, her eyes panicked, her breath heaving with urgency. It was Omar.

Omar, the fucking SP who had begun sniffing around Hamza after Aalam’s death.

Something cold and ugly twisted inside Yalina’s belly.

Laila kept speaking in frightened bursts, explaining how he had arrived at dusk with uniformed officers, how Hamza’s men had stepped away for dinner while only the ornamental security her father insisted upon remained near the gates, how Omar had forced the guards down at gunpoint and entered without warrant like some stray dog emboldened by an open door.

And then she uttered the words that undid whatever calmness Yalina had been pretending to have.

“He has Zayan baba.” Her vision tunneled.

Her son. Her little boy.

The shameless rogue was holding her son hostage. Anger licked at her mind, but if being the wife of a gangster with many enemies had taught her anything, it was to stay level headed in such situations. Omar must have thought that her husband's bloodthirsty men, who had hung up the officers of Lyari Task force when Rehman bhai had still been alive, and had made a joke out of SP Aslam, would go back home for dinner.

Omar had made one mistake already.

He thought Hamza’s men would truly leave the estate unguarded simply because dinner was being served. The fool did not understand how these men lived. This was not merely their boss’s house. It was their home too. They ate here. Slept here. Guarded the walls like family property. Even when scattered, they remained close enough to return at a moment’s notice.

And so Yalina called them.

Her fingers shook only slightly as she dialed Lassan first, then Taheer, her voice frighteningly calm as she informed them that Omar was inside the house and had her son. They were across the estate grounds and would need ten minutes at most.

Ten minutes. They felt too long.

Then Jahana rushed in next, this time openly crying.

“Memsahab…” she whispered shakily, “woh Zayan baba pe bandook taane baithe hain…keh rahe hain agar aap abhi neeche nahi aayi toh—”

On gunpoint? Her little Zayan? He dared to threaten her son in his own home? Demanded from her and threatened his life?

Worry and rage warred within her. She had tried to protect Zayan from his father's line of work as much as possible, he didn't even know that Hamza was a gangster, he thought his Abbu ran a business. His little mind had never known fear, he would not recognise the danger.

But her son was in danger! Her feet carried her even before she knew where she was going.

“Zayan!” she shouted while hurrying down the hallway, her voice echoing sharply through the corridors. “Zayan, beta!”

No answer came.

Her heart slammed painfully against her ribs as she moved faster, cursing the sheer length of the hallway between her room and the formal sitting area downstairs. But fear sharpened the senses in strange ways, and even amidst the panic she immediately noticed details Hamza himself would have noticed.

Every uniformed guard had been forced outside. They knelt near the porch while policemen stood over them with rifles drawn. Not one officer remained inside the house.

All of them are out, he left no one standing here, Yalina. You have a chance to not be the weak, unarmed side, her husband's voice whispered in her mind.

Her gaze darted immediately toward the drawer near the staircase. Gun.

Hamza kept one there.

She retrieved it silently and checked the safety with fingers that somehow still obeyed her. She had never understood Hamza’s strange habit of keeping mirrors angled near room entrances so someone outside could partially observe interiors without being seen. She had once mocked him for it.

Now she silently thanked God for his paranoia.

From the reflection she could see the sitting room clearly enough. Omar sat there with one thick hand gripping Zayan’s shoulder so tightly the child looked uncomfortable already. The gun barrel pressed carelessly near her son’s face.

She pushed Laila gently toward the doorway, hoping the maid understood what she wanted.

“Memsahab aa rahi hain, sir,” Laila said shakily from the entrance. “Woh keh rahi hain tab tak aap baithiye aur Zayan baba ko daraaiye mat…Baba, idhar aaiye…”

Through the reflection, Yalina watched her son attempt to move.

Then she watched him wince in pain as Omar’s thick fingers dug brutally into his tiny shoulder. The barrel of the gun pressed into her child’s cheek. Then shifted towards his neck.

“Tell Yalina,” Omar snarled, “that if she wants to see her son alive, she better hurry. Warna aaj woh apna shohar bhi khoyegi aur beta bhi.”

Yalina saw red.

He would murder a child?

Her child? Her baby?

The red haze that had briefly receded came roaring back so fast that it almost blinded her. Laila carefully stepped aside from the doorway but refused to flee entirely. Brave girl. Loyal girl.

The SP would die today.

If someone later asked Yalina exactly what happened after that moment, she would never fully know how to explain it. One second she was still in the hallway trying to keep her breathing controlled as she raised the gun properly, and the next she was already inside the room, her arm steady despite the hurricane inside her chest.

wo bullets struck Omar in the chest before anyone fully processed what had happened. The third entered his throat.

She fired that one deliberately.

The sound exploded through the room. Omar collapsed instantly, his grip loosening from both the gun and her son simultaneously as blood spread rapidly beneath him.

A scream of “Ammi!” through the haze, her arms extending towards her son by habit, and Zayan crashed into her arms so hard she nearly lost balance.

Yalina dropped the gun immediately and held him with terrifying desperation, pressing frantic kisses into his hair while checking his face, his neck, his shoulders, searching wildly for injury. She could feel his frightened little breaths against her throat and only then did the hysteria truly begin to recede enough for her knees to stop shaking.

Her son was alive. Her son was alive.

After checking him twice more, she pushed him gently toward Laila. “Isko upar le jao,” she ordered hoarsely. “Abhi.”

Zayan resisted instantly, frightened tears gathering in his eyes, but she hardened herself and sent him away. Only after he disappeared did she finally look back at Omar.

The dying man still watched the direction her son had gone with those hateful little eyes.

She wanted to gouge those eyes out herself. Rip his throat apart with her bare hands for daring to terrorize her son inside his own home.

She stepped closer until she could see tears gathering in his eyes from the agony of the bullets lodged inside him. His lips moved weakly.

Yalina crouched down to hear the aborted sounds beneath his wheezing breaths.

“Hamza…” he rasped wetly. “Spy…yes?”

And strangely enough, Yalina felt regret then. Not for shooting him. Never that.

But regret that perhaps Pakistan’s first honest police officer had died on the floor of her home and she had been the one to kill him.

If only he had not threatened her son.

“My…men…” he struggled. “Outside…you…not…escape…”

She felt bad for his naivete. He really was an honest man.

“I am the daughter of the Education Minister of Pakistan,” Yalina told him quietly. “The wife of the most feared gangster of Karachi. Main tumhe aur tumhare aadmiyon ko yahin marwa sakti hoon aur mujhe kuch nahi hoga.”

As if summoned by her words, sounds of violence erupted outside.

Gunshots. Screaming. Then Lassan’s profane mouth saying things she would have scolded him for, on a normal day. Taheer yelling murder.

“Sun rahe ho, SP?” she asked softly. “Those my husband’s men.”

Omar’s eyes remained fixed on her face. He was a persistent man.

“You know,” she continued, voice growing steadier, “my husband, who walks amongst people like Iqbal Ahmed, head of ISI’s Indian wing. Mir Iqbal. General Shamshad Hassan himself. But you are a dying man. You will not leave this room alive. Let me tell you the information you threatened to kill my son for". He had the gall to look offended.

"He is a child Omar! You threatened a child to get information, you are no better than the criminals you claim to protect our people from!" His eyes were back to looking beseechingly at her, and so she spoke again. "You were right. Hamza is a spy." His eyes gleamed in triumph and she felt the sudden urge to wipe it away. He did not deserve the feeling after his actions.

“But he was killing terrorists,” she continued. “Tell me honestly, SP sahib…did you take your oath to protect terrorists? Or innocent civilians?” The triumph in his expression faltered.

Good.

Because this pursuit had never truly been about justice. It had been about pride. Hamza had stopped gang wars, built factories, given work to desperate people, dragged Lyari toward something almost resembling stability, and still Omar had hunted him not because innocents were suffering, but because he could not tolerate being outplayed.

“My husband will succeed,” she said quietly. “And you have failed. Both in catching him and protecting the people you swore to serve.”

She stood slowly then and moved away from him, only now noticing the blood staining the red fabric pooled around her legs. Red. Like blood. She had never killed anyone before. She was a murderer now. Her hands began trembling.

Her gaze drifted toward the family portrait hanging nearby. Her husband stood there with one arm around her while Zayan sat laughing on his shoulders.

She stared at that photograph for a very long time.

It had to be worth it.

Her son was safe. Her husband would come home safe. She had to believe it.

It had to be enough.

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Later, when Jameel Jamali rushed into his daughter’s house, alerted by Nafeesa, the cook he had personally sent with Yalina after her marriage. There had been no call from his daughter herself.

The drive there had felt endless despite the short distance, every horrifying possibility clawing through his mind one after another. Nafeesa had been crying so hard on the phone that half her words had dissolved into incomprehensible sobs, but he had still understood enough. Gunshots. Police. Zayan. Blood.

His daughter.

Ya Allah, his daughter.

For all his political experience, all his years navigating dangerous men and dangerous situations, nothing had prepared him for the helpless terror of imagining his only child trapped somewhere frightened and alone. By the time he reached the estate, his own heartbeat was pounding loudly enough to make him feel sick.

What he found instead was silence.

Not true silence, because outside there were still murmurs, hurried footsteps, Hamza’s men dragging bodies and barking orders at each other, but inside the house itself there was a strange stillness, heavy and stunned, as though the walls themselves had not yet processed what had happened within them.

And there, in the middle of the sitting room, stock still like a frozen statue, sat his daughter staring at the family photograph mounted upon the wall like she had forgotten where she was. And a corpse beside her. The SP's corpse. A vague thought entered his mind that his daughter's family had a penchant for killing SPs.

Then she saw him.

“Abbu…”

The word broke apart halfway through as she stumbled toward him, and suddenly she was no longer Yalina Mazari, wife of the most feared man in Lyari, no longer the poised politician’s daughter who knew exactly how to speak and smile and manipulate a room to her liking. She was simply his little girl again, crying so hard against his shoulder that her breath kept catching painfully in her chest as she pointed weakly toward the corpse lying several feet away and tried desperately to explain herself between hiccups and gasping breaths.

His child.

His only child.

His pride. His baby.

She had not hugged him like this since she was nine years old and had burnt her hand trying to iron her own clothes because she had decided, after watching a maid work, that she too should “learn responsibility and be a big girl.” He still remembered how inconsolably she had cried that day, less because of the pain and more because she thought he would scold her for touching the iron and ruining the clothes like how he did with the help.

Now she clung to him with that same frightened desperation, her fingers knotted tightly into the fabric of his kurta as though he alone was holding the world together for her.

“He…he pointed the gun at Zayan, Abbu,” she cried brokenly. “Usne Zayan pe bandook taani thi…main darr gayi…maine bas…”

Her words dissolved into another sob.

“I shot him…aur..aur woh…”

Jameel closed his eyes briefly and tightened his hold around her.

Her tears soaked through his shoulder as she kept speaking in frantic bursts, telling him how Omar had threatened her son, how she had panicked, how she was terrified they would take her away now, how she would never see Hamza again, how she would never see Zayan again, how she was scared she would never see him again either.

Only the last confession sounded sincere.

And despite everything, despite the corpse cooling only feet away from them, despite the political disaster already forming in the back of his mind, Jameel almost smiled through the ache in his chest because his daughter had always been sly in moments of crisis. Yalina had inherited his instincts too well. Even as a child she had known how to weaponize tears with frightening precision when she wanted protection or forgiveness.

But she was still a good girl.

And more importantly, right now, she was terrified. Truly terrified. She needed her father and she needed Jameel, the politician too.

Jameel knew enough about Hamza’s operations to understand there had already been contingency plans in place for extraction a day later. Three people. Hamza. Yalina. Zayan. He had never asked too many questions because plausible deniability had kept him alive in this God-forsaken country, but he had not been blind either.

So he did what he had always done best whenever disaster struck.

He handled it.

He pulled his daughter closer and stroked her hair the same way he used to when she was little and frightened by darkness, murmuring softly, steadily, “Bas, bas, meri bachi…Abbu hai na. Main dekh lunga sab. Kuch nahi hoga tumhe. Kisi ki himmat nahi hai meri beti ko haath lagane ki.”

She cried harder at that.

He let her. Let her mourn, later, he would too. After whatever pretense of a call she made in goodbye. After he received a call about her convenient demise around the same time her husband perished. But for now, he would be strong. Strong for the daughter he will never see again, in three days' time.

Then, after pressing a kiss to the top of her head, he gently guided her upstairs toward her room, pretending not to notice the half-open suitcase lying upon the bed or the passports carelessly visible beneath scattered clothes. Pretending not to understand exactly what those things implied.

“Kapde badlo, beta” he told her quietly once they reached the room. “ These clothes must be sticky, change into something comfortable.”

The blood upon her dress had dried in places already.

Yalina looked down at herself almost blankly, as though only now realizing what she was wearing, then nodded weakly and disappeared into the washroom.

Jameel stood there for several long seconds after the door closed. He took a quick glance at the passports. Leena Thapar and Rayan Shergill. Sanyal sahab and his firm belief that Hamza was a lion in disguise. He shook his head.

Then he exhaled heavily and went back downstairs, where Zayan sat curled miserably upon the sofa looking far too small for the enormous room around him. The moment the child saw him, he climbed immediately into his grandfather’s lap without a word, still shaken enough that he did not even attempt his usual chatter.

Jameel held his grandson close with one arm while reaching for his phone with the other.

Outside, men were already cleaning blood from marble floors. Somewhere deeper in the estate, someone was shouting instructions. Another body was being dragged away.

Inside the sitting room, however, there was only the quiet sound of Zayan breathing against his chest while Jameel made call after call in a calm, measured voice, arranging protection for his family with the same efficiency other men reserved for business meetings.

Being a parent was a strange thing.

You would go to impossible lengths to protect your children. You would cross lines and limits you once swore you would never even approach. You would stain your hands, your reputation, perhaps even your soul itself, if it meant keeping your child safe.

He was a parent.

And tonight, he realized with a strange ache in his chest, so was his daughter.

======================xXx======================

Masterlist

A/N: Haan, haan, I know, I had promised you guys the next part of the Ulfat series, I am sorry, I was thinking of how this scene could have gone differently and I kept returning to the saying that a woman might be weak, but a mother never is. In one world, a scared Yalina capitulated to the SP. In another, her motherhood did not allow for such a slight to slide by her, and one mother's love for her son saved another mother's son from losing his family. I just had to post it. I will get to the asks, I swear, you guys. (this is also a scheduled post you guys, there are two more for next week and then I will be back.)