by Holly Rayner
Noticing she was awake, he looked over at her. “Do you need anything?”
“What time is it?” Alyssa asked.
“Early evening. Almost sunset.”
Almost time for Ali to arrive home and find her gone. Or did he already know Alyssa had been kidnapped? Had Malouf sent him an email? Released a ransom note for the whole country to read?
“You’ve just been sitting there, huh?” Alyssa said drily. “Watching me sleep.”
Alyssa didn’t know why she’d tried to make a joke, and it didn’t matter. Malouf’s lips didn’t so much as twitch.
She rubbed at a knot in the side of her neck, caused from sleeping in an awkward position on the couch. She might as well keep talking. Try to get Malouf to trust her so that when he tripped up and left her alone for a minute, she could take her chance and flee. Maybe he would be too smart to fall for that age-old tactic, but she had to try.
“When you talk about Ali,” she said, “I can…understand it. Kind of. But, really, that’s not the person I know.”
Malouf didn’t answer.
“We met randomly on the street, you know,” Alyssa went on. “Well, I guess it wasn’t exactly random. I picked him out of a crowd. I didn’t want to go to my high school reunion on my own, and so I went outside and grabbed the first cute guy I saw. I was pretty surprised when he agreed to pretend to be my date.”
Malouf blinked, his eyes shifting toward Alyssa.
“I didn’t know he was a sheikh until a while after that,” Alyssa continued. “And I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. I was just a normal girl from New York. I felt so…boring. I worked as a paralegal. Always hung out at home…probably complained way too much. But he saw something in me he liked.”
Malouf’s chair creaked as he shifted his weight. “I thought no one spent time at home in New York.”
Alyssa stared at him. Was that a joke?
“Yeah.” She smiled slightly. “There’s almost too much to do there. I’m kind of a homebody, though.”
Malouf looked down at the floor, but his head was cocked in Alyssa’s direction, like he was paying attention. Good enough for her.
“I never thought I’d leave New York,” she said. “I mean, I thought about other places. All the time. But I grew up there. My parents are there.”
At the thought of her parents, emotion welled in Alyssa’s chest. She forced the sentimentality aside; If she started crying, she might not be able to stop.
“Where did you grow up?” Alyssa asked quietly.
Malouf lifted his face the slightest bit. “Here. In Baqar.” He paused. “Although, in a neighborhood very different from the one you live in. It was more like the area we are sitting in now.”
Alyssa’s heart banged in her chest. He was talking! This had to be a good sign.
“Is this your house?” Alyssa asked.
“No.”
Predictably, he didn’t add anything else. He probably wanted to make sure he didn’t give Alyssa too many clues.
“And how did you meet Ali?” Alyssa asked, taking a leap and going with a question she knew she probably wouldn’t get an answer to.
Except, he did respond.
“School. When we were children not older than ten.” Malouf lifted his face, but he gazed at the wall thoughtfully. “My parents did not have very much. They were laborers. But education was very important to them, and they sacrificed in order to send me to private school. It was there that I met Ali. We became friends and progressed through the rest of our years together. After graduation, we went our separate ways. I studied medicine, and he studied business.”
“Did you stay in touch?” Alyssa asked.
Malouf made a face like he recalled something unpleasant. “No.”
“But then you met again, right?” Alyssa laughed drily. “You didn’t start a business in middle school.”
“We met again about five years ago. At a party. Ali did not live here then. He had left long ago and was merely in town for a business trip. We spoke for much of the night, though, and I thought we…reconnected.”
Malouf’s eyebrows bunched in anger, and Alyssa knew he was thinking that “connection” must have been a lie.
“I had many ideas, but even though I was a practicing physician, I had not enough funds to make any of those ideas reality. My plans were all quite big. Ali, however, had the money. Or rather, his family did.”
Alyssa breathed shallowly, afraid she would miss a word.
“We went into business together.” Malouf lifted his brown eyes to Alyssa. “We launched a chain of plastic surgery clinics across the region. They were an immediate success. Ali and his parents provided the capital, and I provided my talents by selecting and running a world-class team of physicians.”
“How long did this last for?” Alyssa asked.
Malouf’s lips drew into a thin line. “Not as long as it should have. Everything was going wonderfully, and then a rival practice began competing for our business. Ali felt I was not doing enough to better the services we provided. It did not matter that I gave everything to the business. Many nights, I slept at the main office in order to not miss a minute when I could be working. Doing more.
“There was stress. At first, everyone handled it well. Except for Ali. He became increasingly aggravated. He expected me to become superhuman and save the business from a free economy. Essentially, he acted like the spoiled royal he is, expecting to get his way.”
Alyssa stayed silent; it really wouldn’t be a good idea for her to comment on that.
“Things became worse when I began a romance with a woman Ali had dated the year before. For him, she had been nothing more than a fling. He did not even live in Baqar. He only visited a fraction of the time. She wanted marriage, though. As did I.”
“Was Ali upset about that?” Alyssa asked.
“He should not have been. He had not wanted her for his own.”
“Except that he was, huh?”
Malouf leaned his head back, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.
“I kept it secret for as long as I could. Though I myself believed he had no true reason to be angry, I knew that he very well could be. Ali did not like to mix business and his personal life. When he finally found out we were in a relationship, he became angry.”
“What?” Alyssa asked in surprise. “But why? He didn’t want to marry her…right?”
“No, he did not. When he confronted me in our main office, he said that I was bringing personal affairs too close to our work. That a woman could stir up drama between us. That she already had.”
Alyssa blinked and absorbed that. Knowing Ali, he probably had been upset about his friend dating his ex-girlfriend. Forget the fact that he hadn’t wanted marriage, then. Ali liked to put on a tough exterior, but deep down, he was soft. People did hurt him. He just didn’t like to admit it when it happened.
“And was that it?” Alyssa asked. “Everything ended there?”
“Ali withdrew the funding. All of it. He said he could not trust a partner who would keep a secret from him. It did not matter that I was careful to not let my personal life affect my professional endeavors. Ali was furious.”
“Wait.” Alyssa shook her head. “He just took the money away? But I thought you said the business was doing well at this point. Why would you need any more funding?”
“There was the rival practice, you see. They were taking so many of our potential clients. I could not keep up with the competition. Not with…” He looked away. “Everything else.”
“You mean Ali. And your girlfriend? What happened with her?”
He shook his head tightly.
“With the funding pulled, I had nothing to offer her. I could not support a wife—I couldn’t even support myself. The business sank into debt. It was easy for Ali to pay off his portion of everything, but I had nothing. I sold my home and everything I owned in order to pay those debts. I lived in my car for months. All while Ali enjoyed life as a playboy in New
York and came back to stay in the palace anytime he pleased.”
Alyssa felt numb after listening to the story. She didn’t want to believe any of it was true, that Ali would be so careless, but she knew he’d had a fiery temper before she’d met him. And this whole story fit the persona the man on the yacht had presented her with.
“I was ruined,” Malouf said quietly. “My family shamed. My parents worked so hard to give me a better life, and with one decision, all of that went away. I have lived in poverty all these years, still working to pay off debts. Meanwhile, Ali has become more and more successful. All I want, you understand, is for Ali to make things right. To pay back the money he took from my family.”
Alyssa drew her bottom lip between her teeth. The story had gotten to her, and she would have told Malouf she was sorry for him—except he still held her captive in a ramshackle house. Kind of hard to have too much empathy for a person when they did that.
There was one thing she could be genuine about, though.
“Thank you for telling me that,” she said. “It helps me…understand all of this better.”
Malouf didn’t answer. It seemed he’d withdrawn again.
Sighing, Alyssa turned around and settled sideways onto the couch, her arms wrapped protectively around her belly. There was nothing to do but wait.
She stayed that way for a long time, watching the last of the sunlight coming through the bottom of the window disappear. There was the occasional noise behind her, and at some point, Malouf turned the light off. The cot creaked as he lay down on it.
Alyssa breathed shallowly as she stared around the gray room. Her eyes had adjusted to it, and she could make out all of the lines composing the doors and windows.
Slowly, she sat up and looked behind her. Malouf lay on his back on the cot, his shallow breathing filling the room. Alyssa’s mouth was dry with fear over what she was about to do. Licking her lips, she eased herself off the couch.
One foot. Then another. She took lethargic steps for the door to the hallway, holding her breath with each move, afraid the floorboards would creak and give her away.
At the door to the hall, Alyssa’s heart pounded so loudly that she worried she wouldn’t hear Malouf even if he were to stand up from the cot. With a sweaty palm, she turned the doorknob, her eyes on Malouf’s sleeping figure the whole time.
The door groaned softly as it approached its half open point, and Alyssa stopped right there. With her protruding belly, she had to shuffle sideways to make it through the doorway, but she managed.
She stood in the hallway, elation mixing with fear. She had done it!
Almost. There was still the door at the end of the hall, and she didn’t know where it led, but if she was lucky, there would be windows in there that hadn’t been nailed shut.
She tried not to get her hopes up, but her heart still sank when she tried the door at the end of the hall and found it locked. And then, in a flash, she remembered: she’d pinned her braid back that morning. Some of the braid had come undone during the day, and thick strands of hair fell around her shoulders, but there had to be a pin or two still in there somewhere.
Digging through her hair, Alyssa found a bobby pin. Keeping one ear tilted in the direction of the main room, she proceeded to pick the lock.
It was slow going, and Alyssa wasn’t even sure if the attempt would work. She remembered seeing a hack online once that claimed picking locks with pins was possible, though.
The end of the pin met a new resistance, and Alyssa wiggled it to the side. The pin slipped into a deeper spot in the lock, and then…click.
Alyssa almost shouted from jubilation. She pressed her lips together, though, and opened the door as quietly as she could.
Instead of a yard, she found herself in an enclosed porch. The long, tall windows were glass, and there was a door to the right. Moving swiftly to it, she tried the knob. Locked.
She slipped the pin into the lock, and heavy footsteps sounded behind her. Spinning around, Alyssa found Malouf, dark and looming, in the doorway to the porch.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
Alyssa swallowed her sob of despair. She didn’t answer. She’d been so close.
“Come back inside,” Malouf said.
Alyssa curled her fingers around the pin.
“What did you do that with?” he asked.
“It was unlocked,” she lied.
A long moment passed. Alyssa kept the pin hidden. Not that it mattered. Now that Malouf knew she was savvy enough to escape, he probably wouldn’t take his eyes off of her for a minute.
“Come inside.” His voice was harsher this time.
Alyssa had no choice but to listen.
Chapter 12
Ali
“Here it is.” Dalir Khara, the head detective employed by the bin Talid family, paused the security camera footage.
Ali leaned closer, his hands white-knuckling into fists on the edges of his home office desk.
Khara pointed at the car on the black-and-white footage. “That’s the plate number.”
“Run it,” Ali demanded.
“We did. It’s fake.”
Ali’s heart seized, and he swiftly closed his eyes. How could this happen? Who had Alyssa gotten into a car with?
Upon getting the call from Dr. Latifi’s office, Ali had come home early and gone through the entire house, searching for Alyssa. What the doctor had told him made no sense. She had arrived for Alyssa’s checkup at the scheduled time, but Alyssa had not been there. Instead, the day guard, Malek, said that Alyssa had left with the “other doctor.”
But what other doctor? Latifi had sent no one else in her place.
The guard had not asked for the man’s identification. He had merely allowed him access to the home.
Ali’s first impulse had been to fire Malek, but he knew it was not the man’s fault. A doctor had shown up, albeit a bit early, for a scheduled visit that no one outside of the OB-GYN’s office should have known about. Why, from Alyssa’s or the guard’s point of view, should it have looked suspicious?
Ali pushed his fingers through his hair and stared at the frozen image on the screen. No more running over what had happened. He had to do everything he could to get Alyssa back.
“What next?” he asked.
Khara stood. “First, know that we are doing everything possible to keep this out of the press.”
Ali stared at the detective. He had nothing against the man, but the statement made fury flare in his chest. Ali didn’t care about keeping Alyssa’s disappearance from the press. He wasn’t like certain family members, who cared about appearances and minimizing scandals more than anything else.
“We should release a statement,” Ali said. “Report her missing so that everyone knows to look out for her.”
Khara nodded. “I leave that up to your judgment, Sheikh.”
“We’re doing it.”
Spinning on his heel, Ali went down the hallway. His pulse screamed in his ears, and with every step, he hated himself more.
He should have taken his parents’ advice and gotten Alyssa a personal bodyguard. If he had, they would not be in this situation right now.
Where was Alyssa? What was she going through?
The questions laced Ali’s chest with white-hot pain. His mind wanted to jump to the worst-case scenarios, but he would not let it. Wherever Alyssa was, she was alive. This had not been a random kidnapping. It had been well-planned, and whoever did it had good reason to take the risk involved.
But what was that good reason?
In the main living area, several members of Khara’s team chatted among themselves. Noura sat on the sofa, and Fakhir, hands laced behind his back, paced nearby.
Ali’s mother looked up at him, her eyes watery. “What did he say?”
Getting the words out was like chewing nails. “Khara ran the car’s plate. It’s fake.”
“Oh!” Noura pressed her fingers to her lips, and her chin trembled. “Who wo
uld do this?”
Fakhir’s brow furrowed, and he spoke to Ali. “Is there anyone who wishes to take revenge on you?”
Ali bit the inside of his cheek. He did not think he had done anyone wrong—not in unforgivable terms, that was. But were there people out there who felt so slighted by Ali that they would attempt to hurt him by taking his wife?
He recalled the tense conversations he and Alyssa had had about his business practices. Ali knew he had likely hurt others. Could Alyssa’s kidnapping have something to do with one of those cases?
“If that is what has happened,” Ali said, “I cannot…narrow it down.” His nostrils flared and his whole body burned. “I do not know exactly who could hate me so much.”
“Poor Alyssa.” Noura wiped at her eyes. “Poor Rashid. He was looking around for her.”
Ali’s throat tightened, and he blinked back tears. Crying was wasted time. Time that could be put to use finding his wife.
“Where is Rashid?” Ali asked.
“Kinsley put him to bed a while ago,” Noura said.
“And what of the DNA collection?” Ali looked to his father.
“They swabbed the doorknobs.” Fakhir paused. “But so many people touch the doors in the course of one day, and it can take a long time for the results to be processed. We must be prepared for that course not panning out.”
Ali gritted his teeth. “We cannot stand around here and wait. We must—”
A phone ringing interrupted him, and the three of them looked at Alyssa’s cell. It sat on the coffee table, where it had been since Ali came home to an empty house.
“It’s her mother,” Noura quietly announced.
Ali stiffened.
“I will answer it,” Fakhir said. “We must explain.”
Ali nodded, and Fakhir answered the phone and walked to the back of the house.
“I’m going to release a statement,” Ali said, pulling his phone out and bringing up his publicist’s number.
“Saying what?” Noura asked, eyes wide.
“The truth. If anyone knows anything—or has seen Alyssa or the car—we must know of it.”