CHAPTER THREE #2
Zina stopped typing. She stared at the flashing cursor on the screen. She thought of her father, standing bleeding but unbroken in the grand hall, facing his murderers with the dignity of a king. She could not abandon him. She would not.
"Emir," Zina said softly. "We take his name as our surname. It is common enough in the east, and it keeps him with us."
Roxana closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her mouth. She nodded once.
"I am Zina Emir," Zina continued, her voice hardening with resolve as she began typing the encrypted requests into the dark web forums she had navigated for years. "Maman, you are Ana Emir. Maman-bozorg, you will be Mary Emir."
"And Reza?" Meryam asked.
Zina looked across the hall to where her twelve-year-old brother was sleeping on a pile of blankets, his face pale and exhausted. He was still just a baby. She couldn't strip him of everything he was. "He stays Reza. Reza Emir."
Over the next few hours, working purely through digital backchannels and encrypted networks, Zina forged their new existence.
She created birth records, mundane employment histories, and immigration documents.
By sunrise, Sherezine Kazan was officially a ghost, and Zina Emir had been born into the digital world.
***
The next three weeks were a grueling, physical blur, consumed by the logistics of survival.
They did not have a single moment to stop and breathe.
Ana and Mary threw themselves into the physical labor of restoring the café downstairs.
They scrubbed years of grease from the floors, repaired the old tables, and began experimenting with the local ingredients Enzo provided, blending their traditional Persian and Romanian spices with Italian staples to create something unique.
The work was backbreaking, leaving their hands raw and blistered, but they welcomed the pain.
It gave them something to focus on other than the agonizing void left by the men they had lost.
Reza was the center of their universe, an anchor they refused to let out of their sight. There was a small public school just three blocks away, but the very thought of letting Reza walk out the front door alone made Zina physically sick. The perimeter was not secure. The world was hostile.
Instead, the women converted the small wooden table in the upstairs kitchen into a classroom. While Ana kneaded dough and Zina kept a relentless, paranoid watch on the street below, Meryam sat with Reza.
"Focus, jaan-e man," she would urge gently, tapping a pencil against a borrowed notebook. "Mathematics is the language of the universe. If you understand the numbers, you understand the world. What is twelve times fourteen?"
Reza would stare at the paper, his bright eyes occasionally drifting toward the window. "One hundred and sixty-eight."
They were diligent in using their new names.
Every time they spoke to each other, they reinforced the lie until it became muscle memory.
But beneath the routine, the tension was suffocating.
Zina slept in agonizingly brief shifts, her suppressed pistol—the only thing she had brought from the estate—hidden beneath her pillow.
Every time a delivery truck idled too long outside, every time a stranger looked up at their windows, Zina’s hand was on the grip of the weapon.
She was a coiled spring, waiting for the assassins to step out of the shadows.
But as the days bled into weeks, the assassins did not come. They had successfully vanished. They had food. They had a roof. They had identities. They were surviving.
Almost two months after they had arrived on the coast, the dam finally broke.
It was late evening. The café downstairs was locked, the shutters drawn tight against the cool coastal wind. Outside, a light rain was falling, slicking the cobblestones, and washing away the noise of the tourists.
In the kitchen, Meryam was standing over the stove.
The air was thick with the rich, intoxicating scent of crushed garlic, olive oil, and simmering tomatoes.
It was a simple pasta dish, utilizing the cheap ingredients they had, but she was preparing it with the exact, meticulous care she had used in the grand kitchens of the estate.
Reza had gone to bed early, exhausted from his lessons. The door to the bedroom was cracked open, his soft, rhythmic breathing audible in the quiet apartment.
Zina and her mother sat at the small wooden table. Neither of them was speaking.
Meryam brought the steaming pot to the table, ladling the pasta into three chipped ceramic bowls. She sat down, wiping her hands on a stained apron.
"Eat," Meryam whispered. "We must keep our strength."
Zina stared down at the bowl. The smell of the garlic and the specific cut of the tomatoes hit her senses with the force of a physical blow.
It was Emir’s favorite dish. Her father would request it on the rare evenings he managed to step away from the empire, sitting at the head of the grand table, laughing loudly as Farzin and Rostam argued over something trivial.
Zina’s hand hovered over her fork. She tried to pick it up, but her fingers were trembling so violently she couldn't grasp the metal.
Across the table, Roxana was staring blankly at the wall. She hadn't moved. She hadn't even looked at the food.
Meryam took a small bite of the pasta. She chewed slowly, her eyes unfocused. Then, she stopped.
The silver fork slipped from Mary’s trembling fingers. It hit the ceramic bowl with a sharp, echoing clink, before clattering onto the wooden table.
That small, metallic sound shattered the silence of the room, and with it, the iron-clad walls they had built around their hearts for the last two months.
Mary let out a sound—a high, thin, keening noise that seemed to originate from the deepest, most primal part of her soul.
She covered her face with her aged, scarred hands, and her shoulders began to heave.
It was the sound of a mother who had outlived her child, a pain so unnatural and agonizing it defied language.
"My boy," Meryam wept, her voice breaking into ragged, tearing sobs. "Oh, God... my boy."
Roxana’s composure, the stoic mask that had kept them moving forward, dissolved instantly.
She slid out of her chair, dropping to her knees on the hard wooden floor.
She wrapped her arms around her own stomach as if trying to hold her organs inside, bowing her head until her forehead rested against the worn planks.
"Emir," she gasped, tears pouring down her face, soaking into the wood. "Farzin. Rostam. They took them. They took my heart. How am I supposed to breathe? How am I supposed to breathe without them?"
Zina looked at her mother and grandmother on the floor, and the overpowering pressure in her chest exploded. The assassin, the protector, the cold and calculating woman who had saved their lives, vanished, leaving only a twenty-seven-year-old who wanted her father.
Zina slid off her chair and collapsed onto the floor beside them. She pulled her mother into her arms, pressing her face against her mother’s shoulder, and Meryam scrambled down to join them, wrapping her frail arms around both of them.
They huddled together in a tight, desperate knot on the floor of the tiny kitchen, surrounded by the smell of Emir’s favorite food, and they gave in to the apocalypse.
Zina screamed, a raw throat-tearing sound of agony that she buried in her mother’s shoulder so it wouldn't wake Reza.
She cried as though her ribcage was physically breaking apart, sobbing until she couldn't draw oxygen, until the edges of her vision went dark.
The grief was a living, monstrous thing, tearing through them, ripping away the adrenaline and the survival instincts, leaving them exposed.
They had lost the people who defined the concept of home. They had lost the men who anchored their universe. The untouchable Kazan dynasty was gone, reduced to three weeping women huddled on the floor of a foreign town, clutching each other in the dark.
They cried for Emir’s steady, unyielding love. They cried for Farzin’s quiet brilliance. They cried for Rostam’s fierce, protective laughter. They cried for the aunts, uncles, and cousins whose blood had painted the marble of their home.
They sobbed until there were no tears left, until their bodies were exhausted and hollowed out.
And even then, they did not let go of each other.
They remained on the floor as the rain beat against the windows, holding tightly to the only pieces of their world that still remained, shattered, yet inextricably bound together by blood and survival.