Amira didn't blink.
—Are you saying that...
—I'm saying the plane was tampered with.
He took a step towards her.
—And that I did not survive by miracle.
He paused.
—I survived because I shouldn't have been on that plane.
Amira stayed still.
—That?
—The seat was mine, yes. But the passenger who ended up there... wasn't me.
She looked at him as if she had just heard something impossible.
—That doesn't make sense.
—It makes too much sense.
His voice was low, controlled, but beneath it was something alive. Something old. Something that had burned for years.
—The night before the flight, my mother received a call. I was upset. I wanted to cancel the trip. He said he had discovered “a betrayal between partners”. He never said names. Just a sentence.
Amira swallowed.
—What phrase?
Zafir held her with that impenetrable darkness.
—“They're going to keep everything when Hassan falls.”
Amira's heart gave a sharp blow.
—My father...
—I don't know if your father ordered anything —he cut—. And I don't speak without evidence. But I know that someone in that circle wanted to eliminate those who were in the way.
Amira took a step back.
—So who died in your place?
For the first time, Zafir was slow to respond.
And when he did, his voice was no longer that of a man of steel.
It was that of a wound.
—My cousin Samir. He was sixteen. He put on my jacket because it was cold. He got on the plane before I arrived. They never corrected it. The fire did the rest.
Amira felt a brutal chill.
God.
God.
—Then... —whispered— why does everyone think you were disfigured?
Zafir watched her for another second.
Then he brought a hand to the pashmina.
—Because someone needed me to disappear without being officially dead.
And before Amira could prepare...
He took off his mask.
Time stopped.
Amira was speechless.
Because there was no monster.
There was no deformity.
There was nothing that poisonous city had repeated for a decade.
What was beneath was a devastating face.
Severe. Male. Magnetic in a dangerous way.
Yes, there was a scar.
Only one.
Thin, pale, descending from the right temple until it touches the cheek, like an old silver line under the brown skin. It doesn't make it ugly.
It made it more real.
Harder.
More impossible to ignore.
Amira looked at him as if the ground had moved.
—You...
Could not finish.
Zafir held his gaze without pride, without vanity, almost tiredly.
—The mask was not to hide ugliness.
Pause.
—It was to hide that he was still alive.
The shock of understanding was so strong that Amira had to lean on the desk.
—Who knew?
—My mother, before she died. A trusted old doctor. My grandfather. And your father.
Amira raised her head suddenly.
—Did my father know?
