---
the
The gun remained pressed against him for several long, merciless seconds.
Khaled did not move.
Did not breathe properly.
Did not trust his own voice.
Whoever this man was, he spoke with the terrifying confidence of someone who considered extreme violence a perfectly reasonable form of family communication. The car moved in smooth, expensive silence while hookah smoke thickened the air, absurdly at odds with the cold metal still aimed at the most vulnerable part of Khaled's body.
His hands were bound behind his back.
The blindfold was tight.
His pulse was doing its best to tear itself free.
Then, without warning, the blindfold was ripped away.
Light crashed back in.
Khaled blinked hard—
And nearly choked.
An RPG launcher was pointed directly at him.
Not a pistol.
Not a knife.
Not even some dramatic little threat designed to intimidate him.
An actual rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Inside the car.
Aimed at him.
Khaled stared at the black mouth of it in complete disbelief. For one pure second, fear itself gave way to offended confusion.
"What the hell is that?!"
His voice came out somewhere between outrage and panic.
Across from him sat an old man.
He was not frail in any sense. Age had not softened him; it had refined him into something harder. He wore expensive traditional clothing with the careless authority of someone too powerful to need display. One hand rested near the long stem of the hookah he had apparently been smoking throughout this entire abduction. His face was lined, but his eyes were alive—sharp, dangerous, and utterly unbothered by the fact that an anti-tank weapon was now part of what appeared to be a domestic disagreement.
The moment Khaled spoke, the old man burst into laughter.
Not restrained laughter.
Not polite amusement.
He laughed with his whole chest, loud and wild, as though Khaled's expression were the best entertainment he had encountered in weeks.
Khaled stared at him in horror.
One thought rose above all the others.
This man is insane.
The second thought was worse.
How had any family member of his ever survived childhood?
The old man laughed until he coughed once, then pointed at Khaled as if presenting him to an invisible audience. "Look at his face! Look at him!"
The men around them did not laugh.
That somehow made it more disturbing.
Khaled sat very still, his gaze moving from the RPG to the old man to the silent guards, trying to determine which part of this was real and which part belonged in a fever dream.
By the time the car stopped, he had reached only one conclusion:
His life had apparently become the private hobby of lunatics.
He was dragged out again—not beaten, but handled with enough force to make resistance pointless. He lifted his head, expecting to be marched into some heavily guarded private estate, an underground facility, or a criminal warehouse built for regrettable endings.
Instead, he froze.
He knew this building.
His eyes widened.
"This is my company."
The words slipped out before he could stop them.
The old man stepped out behind him with infuriating dignity, a faint trail of hookah smoke still clinging to his clothes. He looked at Khaled with pure offended pride.
"Your company?"
Khaled turned toward him, stunned.
The old man lifted his chin. "Who do you think I am?"
Silence.
Then, with the majestic irritation of a king correcting a fool, he said, "I am the owner of this company."
Khaled blinked.
The old man's expression changed instantly. "And who gave you permission to resign?"
There it was.
The answer.
Humiliating. Impossible. Ridiculous.
Not a gang.
Not enemies from the missing years.
Not some criminal syndicate comes to collect an old debt.
His father-in-law.
Or rather, the terrifying patriarch attached to the life he had apparently tried to dismantle through one divorce request and one resignation letter.
Khaled opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again. "You kidnapped me… because I resigned?"
"Because," the old man thundered, "you are behaving like an idiot in every department of your life."
Before Khaled could form a defense against that deeply offensive and perhaps not entirely inaccurate statement, the old man flicked two fingers toward his men.
"Take him," he ordered.
Then, with dreadful calm: "To Room Zero. Top floor."
Every instinct in Khaled recoiled.
Room Zero?
What kind of building had a Room Zero?
And why did it sound like the sort of place people entered only once, usually while regretting all prior decisions?
Before he could ask, the guards had already started moving him again.
Elsewhere, at nearly the same hour, Sarah stood outside Khaled's house with unease tightening steadily in her chest.
She had called him multiple times.
No answer.
Sent messages.
Nothing.
By the time she arrived, the front door was not fully locked. It stood slightly ajar, enough to sharpen concern into suspicion.
Sarah pushed it open and stepped inside.
"Khaled?"
No answer.
The house was too quiet. Not peaceful—wrong. It carried the abandoned stillness homes acquired when something had gone wrong within them.
She moved farther in, scanning the living room, the hallway, the stairs.
Nothing.
No movement. No footsteps. No sign of him.
Her brow furrowed. "Where is he?"
She took out her phone again and called.
Still nothing.
Her pulse rose.
What if he had remembered something?
What if Osama had told him something?
What if he had gone to Maryam?
What if—
The sound of the door opening behind her made her turn sharply.
Maryam stood there.
For one brief beat, both women froze.
Maryam had not expected to find anyone in the house—least of all Sarah standing inside it as though she belonged there. Shock crossed her face, then hardened almost instantly into something colder.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
Her tone was sharp enough to cut.
Sarah straightened.
The two women looked at each other in charged silence, each carrying her own injury, her own pride, her own claim to a man who was currently absent and becoming more dangerous by the hour.
Sarah recovered first.
She lifted her chin with composure polished into cruelty. "I heard he wants to divorce you," she said smoothly. "So I came to see how things were going."
Maryam stared at her.
If disgust could take weight, it would have crushed the room.
Sarah did not even bother pretending sympathy. She stood in another woman's house—if it could still be called that—and spoke as though the collapse of a marriage were simply news she had come to verify.
Maryam's fingers tightened around her bag.
There were many things she could have said.
None of them would have been kind.
But before the confrontation could deepen—before humiliation and fury could sharpen into something worse—the scene shifted again, far above them, to the top floor of the company Khaled had once led and had now been dragged back into like a criminal returned to the scene of his own incompetence.
Room Zero existed.
That alone felt offensive.
It was not exactly an office. Nor was it a normal conference room. It looked more like a private surgical suite disguised inside corporate architecture. Sterile lighting. Metal surfaces. Machines fitted discreetly into the area walls. The sealed cabin was set. A smell so clean it felt threatening.
At the center of it all stood an operating table.
Khaled was tied to it.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
His wrists secured.
His ankles are fixed.
His body was pinned with humiliating precision while he twisted against the restraints in escalating disbelief.
"What is this?" he snapped, straining hard enough to make the table rattle. "Are all of you insane?"
The old man stood nearby, perfectly calm.
Then the door opened.
A doctor entered.
Not a general physician.
Not some random man in a white coat meant to create fear through appearance alone.
No.
This was a specialist.
Professional. Middle-aged. Wearing glasses. Calm in the way only a man long accustomed to human madness could afford to be. And judging by the insignia on his coat and the instruments being set out beside him, he specialized in male reproductive surgery.
Khaled went very still.
Then slowly turned his head toward the old man.
"No."
The old man stepped closer.
"No," Khaled repeated, this time with real alarm breaking through everything. "Absolutely not."
The old man remained grave.
"We are going to cut it off," he said coldly.
Khaled stared at him.
The doctor adjusted his gloves.
The old man added, with appalling reassurance, "But don't worry. You won't die."
That was the moment Khaled lost the last of his dignity.
"What is wrong with all of you?!" he shouted, jerking violently against the restraints now, the table shaking beneath him. "Are you insane? I don't know anyone! I lost my memory!"
His voice rose into outright panic.
"I don't remember anything! I don't know what I did, who I married, who I offended, or why everyone in this city seems determined to ruin my life!"
The doctor paused.
The old man narrowed his eyes.
Khaled's breathing came fast and ragged now as terror finally tore through him without restraint. "I'm serious! I have amnesia! I woke up and five years were gone! I don't know what's happening!"
The room stilled.
The old man studied him.
Long.
Hard.
As if trying to determine whether this was cowardice, manipulation, or the miserable truth.
Khaled swallowed.
He was tied to an operating table beneath white surgical lights while a reproductive specialist stood ready nearby and his father-in-law considered whether to castrate him.
If humiliation had an ultimate form, surely this was it.
"I swear it," he said, and this time his voice cracked under the strain of terror too raw to hide. "I lost five years. I don't even know why I'm here."
The old man did not answer immediately.
He only kept looking at him with the kind of silence that made Khaled wonder whether being believed would somehow still end in mutilation.
And tied there beneath the lights, with the surgeon waiting and the threat hanging cold in the room, Khaled realized something horrible:
In every possible version of this day—
He might still be doomed.
---