Chapter 37 AVERY
AVERY
The second-floor stairwell door slams behind us with a metallic clang.
The sound reverberates off the walls, and my whole body registers the finality of it. Is this really happening? Disbelief and terror claw at me as I glance up the steps in front of me. What is Nadiyah planning? The possibilities are all too horrifying to imagine.
Ahead of me the steps to the higher floors loom under the sickly green, fluorescent lights. My footsteps halt momentarily, and she jabs the nose of the pistol into my back. "Go."
This woman was making my veil. She sat across from me at numerous fittings over the past several months. She smiled that reserved smile and stitched lovely seed pearls into delicate lace while I talked about honeymoons and forever.
And the whole time, she was planning this.
The betrayal sits in my chest, cold and heavy. All those times I tried to draw her out of her shell, to make her feel appreciated and included—to make her like me, even a little bit. What an idiot I've been. How could I have been so blind to her animosity toward me, toward Nick?
The pressure of the gun barrel against my spine pushes my feet into motion. I draw a shaky breath. "Please don't do this, Nadiyah."
Silence.
She doesn't acknowledge that I've spoken at all. The gun doesn't waver. Her footsteps continue their steady rhythm behind mine, unhurried, patient. She already knows how—and where—she intends to end this.
This tormented woman is past the point where words can reach her.
Whatever she's been building toward, she made her peace with it long before this morning.
Probably made her peace with it months ago, in the quiet hours after her son fell asleep, while she sat alone with her grief and her photographs and the memory of a man who chose death over defeat.
That man she loved—the man who belonged to another woman, another family—chose death over everyone else. Including Nadiyah and their son. It's a truth she must realize, deep down, even if her grief and rage won't allow her to admit it.
Every step I’m forced to take drags heavier than the last, my legs fighting the climb. We pass the third floor, marked by a painted number on the landing wall. Nadiyah pushes me onward, her weapon coercing me to climb the next flight, and the next.
Each floor passed feels like something closing. Options narrowing. The building's exit getting farther away with every step I climb, while my phone sits useless in my purse because I barely managed to send half a text before she came back from the kitchen with that gun in her hands.
But Nick knows something is wrong. By now, he has to know. But does he know where I am? Even if he figures it out, I can't hope he'll reach me before Nadiyah does whatever she intends with me.
Part of me already knows the answer. My fingers have gone numb around the strap of my purse, and my vision sharpens with dreadful clarity as the metal access door comes into view at the top of the sixth-floor landing.
She's taking me to the roof.
Like the one in Dubai. Like the one Omar al-Hassan threw himself from in front of Nick.
My legs keep climbing. Each step a betrayal of every instinct screaming at me to stop.
My breath races in and out of my lungs as panic rises inside me. Nervously, I glance over my shoulder at Nadiyah, praying I'll see some wavering of her resolve. A small degree of sympathy. Anything to give me even the slightest hope that my life—and my baby's—isn't about to end.
"Nadiyah, please—"
"Step aside slowly."
I do what she says, my attention flicking from the pistol still trained on me to the emotionless look in her eyes. Leaving me no space to navigate or even consider making a move, she puts her back against the roof access door and pushes it open behind her, the gun leveled at my midsection.
My hand wants to drift to my stomach, to protect the secret growing there. The tiny, precious life that Nadiyah doesn't know exists. But I force myself to resist. I can't risk any movement or give anything away. I can't let her see that there's more at stake here than she realizes.
Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm facing.
The push bar clanks as Nadiyah shoves the door open. For one breath, my whole body refuses the threshold. Then cold air swirls in around us, sharper than I expected, carrying the bite of a season turning toward winter. Gray light spills through the opening, flat and colorless.
"This way," Nadiyah says, holding the door open with her body and gesturing with the pistol for me to step out onto the rooftop ahead of her.
The space opens vast around me. Isolated.
Tar and gravel underfoot, HVAC units humming somewhere nearby, and the sounds of city traffic so far below they might belong to another world entirely.
Against the gray sky, low parapet walls ring the roof on all sides, knee-height, maybe less.
Nothing but air between those edges and the street six stories down.
Nadiyah gestures with the gun, directing me toward the center of the roof. Not the edge, but the most exposed position. The place where every low wall is visible, where running in any direction ends at a ledge too short to protect me.
I stop where she indicates. Wind pushes at my back.
Then Nadiyah circles around to face me, and for the first time since she pulled that gun in her apartment, we're looking at each other directly. Her eyes meet mine, and I make myself hold that resigned gaze. Desperately, I search it for something I can hold on to, or something I can use.
In the flat outdoor light, her face looks different than it did in the apartment.
Stripped down. The grief is still present, but it's gone rigid beneath something harder.
Resolution. A terrible stillness, like water that's stopped moving because it's frozen solid.
The face of a woman who has already made her choice and is simply waiting for the world to catch up.
The wind gusts, pushing my hair across my face. I don't brush it away.
"I knew something was wrong, Nadiyah." The words come before I've consciously chosen them, rising from some instinct that urges me to find connection with her.
Find the thread that I can gently pull and hopefully make her see me as a person, not an object of her hatred.
"At the fittings. The way you looked at me. The distance you kept."
I shake my head slightly, remembering those moments.
Her gaze sliding away from mine so frequently, her smile that never quite warmed, the careful reserve I'd attributed to professionalism or cultural difference or simple introversion.
"I thought I'd done something to offend you.
Said something wrong, or... I couldn't figure out what it was. What I'd done to make you pull away."
Nadiyah's expression doesn't change. But something in her stillness shifts, moving toward an attention that wasn't there before. She's listening. Registering that I saw her, even when I didn't understand what I was seeing.
But she says nothing.
The silence stretches between us, and I wait for it to break, for her to offer something I can work with. But the seconds pass and her face remains that mask of terrible calm, and the small flame of hope that flickered when I saw her attention sharpen begins to gutter.
She heard me. But hearing isn't the same as being reached.
Her fine, dark brows furrow slightly. "I don't hate you, Avery." She sighs, resigned. "This was never about you."
Good. I tell myself this is something, a small start. If she doesn't hate me, maybe there's room for something other than violence, space for words to matter, a crack in the wall where reason might slip through.
But even as the relief rises inside me, dread follows right behind it.
If this isn't personal, bringing me up here like this, then it's purposeful.
Nadiyah isn't acting from fury or impulse—not the kind of white-hot fury that burns itself out, that might crack under the right pressure or crumble when faced with consequence.
She has a plan. And I'm not the target of her hatred.
I'm the instrument of something else entirely.
"Dominic Baine took something from me." Nadiyah's gaze holds mine, steady and unblinking. "Something that can never be replaced."
She says his name with precision, not spitting it, not raging. Just stating it. A fact entered into evidence. A name on a ledger she's been keeping in her heart for eighteen months.
"He destroyed the only man I ever loved. Then he went on with his life as if nothing had happened." The muscles in her jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. "As if Omar meant nothing. As if what he did to him—ruining a good man for his own gain—carried no weight at all."
The words settle into me, and I have to fight the urge to defend Nick.
To explain that he carries that awful day with him too—the horror of watching a ruined man step off a roof, the weight of being present for something he couldn't predict or prevent.
But that's not what this moment needs. That's not what Nadiyah wants to hear.
"Dominic Baine wronged my Omar." Her voice carries the weight of something long-held. Long-rehearsed in the dark hours when sleep wouldn't come and grief was the only company she had. "And wrongs demand an answer."
I swallow hard, understanding this isn't simply grief anymore.
It's mourning that has hardened into something else.
Something that has come untethered from reality, with edges sharp enough to draw blood.
Nadiyah isn't spiraling into the kind of emotional collapse that might create an opening for connection or reason.
She's calm because she decided long ago how this would end.
She's been living with that decision for months.
Working beside me at House of Delaire, stitching pearls into my wedding veil with those steady, careful hands.
All while carrying this certainty inside her like a stone.