Chapter One
Theo
Accra, Present Day
MY COUSIN HAS always insisted that the temporary headquarters of Obibini Studios—the movie studio he’s dreamed about for decades and the very one I agreed to build for him—smells like possibility.
Today it smells like rain baked into concrete and old ambition.
The glass conference room is a cathedral of light—the kind architects pretend not to design for Instagram while secretly calculating angles for capturing the most flattering sunshine.
Beyond the windows, the sprawl of Accra, Ghana’s capital city, unfurls in heat and colour.
A sliver of tropical green vegetation, a ribbon of red earth and the distant thrum of a city that keeps choosing to rise.
I roll my cuffs up just enough to feel air on my wrists and study the room in the same way my mind studies every box I’m put in—mapping exits, listening for echoes and cataloguing flaws I can repair.
The table is too glossy and therefore untrustworthy. The chairs look good but will go squeaky by next year. The ceiling’s acoustic panels are an apology for a design choice someone made when they wanted drama more than clarity.
Fitting, then, that my cousin loves this room. He’s an impressive, talented visionary, sure, but his world is cobbled together by illusion and make-believe, whereas I’m steeped in the real world.
‘Relax,’ Ashon says, lounging like a god in a charcoal suit, gold watch winking at the fluorescent halo. ‘You look like you’re about to perform surgery without anaesthesia.’
‘Creating a building is like performing surgery,’ I reply.
‘On land. In the memory.’ I glance at the huge wall monitor, the empty presentation screen that I suspect will shortly become a test of wills because my cousin thinks everything needs to be a huge production.
‘You didn’t tell me who else is in this meeting. ’
He tries and fails to hide a cryptic smile. ‘I told you it would be good for you.’
‘Which is exactly what you always say right before you attempt to throw a grenade into my life. Emphasis on attempt.’
He grins, cinematic and practiced, but there’s genuine affection there, too. ‘You should try trusting me. And remember how fun it was when we were boys?’
I hide the lance of disgruntled bitterness. ‘Barely. What is this really about, Ashon? I’m not in the mood for smoke and mirrors. I have several projects that require my attention.’ One in particular that I’ve been chasing for four years that is finally within my grasp.
I clench my teeth as another unwanted reminder attempts to push through. I’m not thinking about Tamara and her lies. And I’m most definitely not thinking about her.
Tessa.
The woman who’s taken up entirely too much real estate in my head for far too long.
Ashon leans back, laces his fingers behind his head. ‘Nana thinks you’re not hungry any more.’
I laugh once, unamused. ‘Nana thinks hunger is a leash he invented.’ The memory of standing in my grandfather’s study slides over my skin.
The severe old man with a voice like a banging gavel.
The smell of leather and disapproval. Legacy isn’t a word, it’s a schedule, he’d said when I was sixteen and foolish enough to tell him I wanted to draw buildings that breathed.
He wanted towers like spears. He wanted my life to be like a ledger he could balance at his will.
Needless to say, conflict and strife have always formed a great part of our relationship.
Ashon taps the table, pulling me back to the present. ‘Is he still trying to tempt you with the university campus commission?’
My lips twist. ‘Trying. And unaware he’s failing.’
He grins. ‘He thinks it will show him whether you’re serious about the family business or just chasing magazine covers.’
‘He’s welcome to keep flogging that imaginary horse. It’ll keep him out of my hair for a while before he realises I’m not interested in his tests.’
My grandfather is all about building a legacy.
What he doesn’t realise—or refuses to accept—is it that I have no interest in creating legacies.
Not when the one I inherited was mired in shame and humiliation.
I decided a long time ago I was far better off not staining any progeny of mine with that same shame.
‘You do if we don’t want him playing chess with us on this project.’ Ashon’s smile fades. ‘You need to at least pretend you’re doing things his way.’
I study him for a beat. Whatever we are—friends, rivals, cousins—we know the shape of each other’s ghosts. His makes him wear his confidence like armour. Mine makes me build beautiful fortresses and then stand outside them, unmoved.
‘What the fuck is going on, Ashon? Why are you riding me on this when you’ve just finished defying the old man to get what you want?’ Marriage to a woman he clearly adored, a daughter who was the light of his life and another baby on the way.
No, I’m definitely not envious.
I deliberately emphasise that thought with another brief mental dip in the horror pool that Tamara’s text dropped me into four years ago.
The one that turned out to be a false claim she’d hoped to hook me into marriage with.
Shuddering myself free of the memory of that deplorable lie, I’m glad when my common sense reinstates itself.
‘I’m giving you a heads-up that he’s gunning for you, is all.’
‘Understood,’ I say, then look around. ‘But I’m more interested in this project you won’t shut up about. And I won’t remind you again, that I have a very slim window of availability. So, who are you planning on impressing me with today? Studio heads? Bankers? Your fan club?’
He doesn’t respond. He just smiles widely.
The door behind me opens, a scent drifting in.
And even before I turn around, even before I catch a glimpse of who the visitor is, the room shifts. Floods with the kind of dread and anticipation and sizzle of an impending event that would cause ripples for millennia. Possibly an eternity.
When Tessa Rockson steps in like the climax of a story, something in my chest, in my very blood, remembers the motion of a long-forgotten rollercoaster.
She’s exactly everything I haven’t allowed myself to recall.
That uncompromising posture, the calm lethal beauty that belongs to queens and women who have learned the cost of not blinking first. Her dress is cream, uncomplicated, hitting just below the knee. It makes her look like a line I’d redraw a hundred times until it’s perfect.
A thin gold chain at her throat catches a shard of light, as if it can’t help highlighting perfection one more time.
Her hair is pulled away from her face in a sleek knot, exposing cheekbones designed for a sculptor’s life’s work.
The only colour she wears is on her mouth.
It’s not a flashy red or even a coy pink.
It’s a deep burnished orange, decisive and unafraid.
The events of four years ago compress to a pinprick.
The hotel. The scent of her on my sheets. Stolen moments I’d wanted to stretch, for the first time ever, into something much, much longer.
Then the text that detonated everything.
Her gaze skims the room, glides over Ashon with first a professional, then a familial warmth—unsurprising, as her cousin is now Ashon’s wife. Then it lands on me as if I’m a corner fixture to be noted for structural integrity and then ignored.
‘Ashon,’ she says. Her voice is sanded smooth, the kind of voice that could tell a room to sit and it would obey. ‘You asked me to come in for the cultural wing brief.’ Another momentary flash filled with banked vitriol in my direction. ‘I didn’t realise there would be…others here.’
‘I did. And there are.’ My cousin stands, takes her hand, squeezes in something that comes as close to an apology as I know a Biney will allow. He is charm and pride and the warmth of family, all in one gesture. ‘Tessa, you look like Accra has been busy making angels.’
‘Flattery suggests you want something,’ she replies, but for a fraction of a second, the corner of her mouth curves. Not for me, for her cousin’s husband. ‘But maybe not what you think you want.’
‘I do want something.’ Ashon gestures towards me. ‘From both of you.’
She stiffens. And, caught as we are in the same inescapable vortex of awareness, she doesn’t want to look. But she’s helpless against the pull of my presence. She knows it. The whole room knows it.
And when she does, eyes clicking to mine like a blade seating in the groove meant for it, everything inside me squeezes tight in a way I want to despise but instead feel myself opening up to. Like a cold engine catching a spark, revving into action—stealing life.
‘Mr Biney,’ she says curtly.
‘Tessa.’
Her name feels different in my mouth now, like it’s charged for detonation. I keep my expression neutral, the way I do when a client brings me a bad idea and calls it inspiration.
Ashon clears his throat. ‘I’ve kept you both abreast separately of my vision for Obibini. You know it isn’t just another expansion. It’s a heartbeat we’re building and it’s been a long time coming.’
He glances at Tessa, warmth still curling around the corners of his lips. My cousin smiles a lot these days. It would be infuriating if it wasn’t almost endearing.
‘We’re putting the campus on Rockson land and I want it to exist for fifty years and more without apology.
That means a design that thinks in decades, programming that can breathe and grow.
I need the only architect I trust—’ he nods at me ‘—and the best cultural mind I know—’ he nods at her ‘—to do it together.’
‘Together.’ Tessa says the word like it’s a world-ending diagnosis.
‘And you think blindsiding us—me—will reap a good outcome for you, cousin?’ I ask silkily, knowing he hasn’t gone so soft that he can’t hear the cool threat and my complete anathema to…whatever he’s got up his sleeve, in my voice.