Ayat Wajdani felt Isaa sigh next to her for the umpteenth time in the last twenty minutes. For a fact, she was losing her patience too but Isaa's impatience and bouncing of legs tested her limits. Ayat hadn't known of so many things but she could bet on everything that was alive that Fayd was there inside her uncle's office not for the sake of just visiting him like the receptionist told them. He would be the last remaining person on the earth to willingly visit anyone other than her. She might claim to not know him but she did and that was a mistake on her part. It bugged- it ate her by cells and skin. It was so palpable that the feeling was slowly crawling out of her to grumbly Isaa.
"How does your wife shut your mouth? God."
"In ways you don't want to imagine, little kid." He snickered, throwing her off the edges. Ayat fake gagged and scrunched her nose in absolute disgust. Isaa laughed his ass off at her reaction as he watched her scoot away from his seat.
Ayat had been on edge since the minute Fayd opened up to her after Asher came back. She knew Fayd wasn't doubtful of his feelings, in fact, his feelings were the only truest thing amidst many pretensions and deceptions, however, she didn't know what to think of all of it. He told everything- from those two days in the garage to the day they met again in the cafeteria but he didn't let her get an inkling of his color blindness. What did he think? That she would walk away? Even so, how could he have a thought like that when he claimed to know and love her? Was that how weak his love was?
She was in a dilemma given the fact that Fayd was going out of his way for her and that he was going against the ones that stood with him since childhood. It wasn't good. It was betrayal and she knew how that felt. How having someone they knew and trusted go behind and backstab them felt like. She knew how leaving someone behind felt like and it was the last thing Ayat wanted him to do for her. Fayd and Ayat- they didn't know what awaited in the future or what was written in their fate. They didn't know if they were meant to be together, so she didn't want to get back at someone for her sake- for someone who might not be written in his destiny. Because that would leave him with nothing but bleeding wounds and she wouldn't be there to hold him in her embrace and pull him up.
"How are you wearing his pendant?" Isaa inquired at the sight of Fayd's resin pendant peeking through her unbuttoned blazer. Ayat looked down at her chest before standing up and buttoning her blazer.
"It is as simple as it is, he gave it to me." He didn't give it to her, he made her wear it. He made sure it sat perfectly on her neck- plunging near her collarbone and hoisted stiffly near her chest. He made sure it fit her more than it ever did on him. That day at the car when they were returning from meeting Salaar in his new place, he gave it to her and asked to treasure it the way he had been treasuring it for twenty four years.
This, however, unsettled Isaa as he drove a knife into his mind, thinking of many other hints that Fayd had been dropping for a few days. It was suspicious at first. His words had always been suspicious so Isaa didn't take his words to mind but now that he thought about it- he wanted to jump off the cliff and fall on knees and ask forgiveness from his brother for leaving him alone with the birdbrain named Fayd Yazdan Malik.
"What else did he give you?"
"Not that you should know but a few things he took that belonged to me." Ayat didn't put much information in her words. Whatever happened between them was a private affair and nobody else needed to know it.
"Such as?"
"Isaa." She swallowed his name warningly, indirectly telling him to not cross the line. Ayat leaned against the backrest as she tried to put his thoughts together even though she wasn't entirely sure that she was reading them correctly.
"I think he is having twisted thoughts, Ayat. Make it very clear." The creases on her forehead deepened as he stared at Isaa. A line forming on the center of her forehead.
"Pendant, a bracelet when he was in Pakistan and nothing else. He opened up to me if that counts. He gave me my secrets tho."
Abashed, Isaa looked at her as though she was a crazed woman who hadn't learnt the art of love. What was she thinking? What was Isaa thinking? And what if he was indeed true with his thoughts?
"He is returning your memories goddammit," Her woven brows loosened and she gazed at him questioningly.
"He is not," A wave of nausea almost hitting her, "Yazdan promised to fight for us, he would never do that, Isaa." Ayat gulped the lump in her throat as she stared at Isaa while she waited for him to continue. Was he really giving up, if yes then what about the time when he said he would fight for them?
"I am not trusting your man anymore. Wait." He said and brought his phone out of his pocket and did something on it, leaving Ayat alone after putting her in a torturous position. All that she felt was an unrelenting ache. He could not leave her just when she had started to love again- just when she had started to live again. It would be too unfair and unjust even for someone like her- for a woman who had only seen love in a raving shape.
"What are you doing?"
"Just let me do my work, you'll see what it is." He said as he tried to connect to something. Her heart thumped in her rincage, almost breaking them with intense fear. Was it what awaited her?
"I planted a tapping device in your chacha's office with the help of Abbas."
You all were tapping him and Abbas helped you to tape chacha jaan, why?
Ayat stared at him in distress as he continued telling her about how he gaslighted Abbas into helping him plant a tapping device a few days before his arrest and how they couldn't do anything to help him because he was framed for embezzlement. And that was how they were told to go back with the statement of not knowing the rules of America. They shut their mouths but his impulsiveness bore fruit.
Her chest felt heavier with every second that ticked away. She was growing restless at the thought of him doing something when things had just been set straight. The assurance and the warmth that he gave her was slowly being ripped off from her as she sat there aloof even though someone was sitting and talking to her. A strange fear crept and crawled over skin- making its way into the rincage and then into the heart.
"Why is this so important?" His voice from Isaa's phone stripped her away from the land of her thoughts. Roused, Ayat sat attentively to listen to their conversation closely before jumping into any conclusion just because Isaa Zaman was putting thoughts into her head.
"You wouldn't be here if it wasn't, would you?" Ismael Wajdani had the audacity to give a derisive laugh to the man she loved.
"That still doesn't say anything about my presence here. I'm here for Ayat and you totally know that." He spoke through his clenched jaw so much that she could animatedly hear his teeth being crushed. How foolish was Ismael Wajdani to bargain with him. How foolish was he to think Fayd would cower to his wishes. Just how foolish he was.
"That's the thing, Fayd. I have to think from my twin's place too," His voice stopped when the flipping of papers overpowered, "For her, it's either you or the family and the company. She cannot have both."
It was when the world around her stopped existing. The man that she called family was suggesting the man she loved to leave her so she could continue to run the company. The world darkened at the cruelty Ismael Wajdani suddenly started to shower them with. What was so wrong about their togetherness? Why couldn't the world just let them be?
But then the universe came crashing down her shoulders when her chacha jaan began to talk about it. How could her grandfather- a grandfather she knew nothing of- could write her life the way he desired? How was she responsible for what her father did? Ayat was surely a baby born of love but she had nothing to do with her mother's mental illness and her father's helplessness. The one that sat behind the screen was not Khalid sahb but her own grandfather. That time when she visited America at the age of seven was the only opportunity her father had to beg his father to help his wife. It wasn't her fault that her parents asked her grandfather for money to start a company. It wasn't her fault that her father asked his father to suggest a place to treat his wife. How was anything her fault when she barely understood it? Apart from knowing that her mother was going insane, she knew nothing. Her parents told her nothing. Not about the papers, not about the deal with her grandfather and not about her mother's illness.
"Considering the skilled investigator that you are, I don't doubt the fact that you know of Ibrahim and Khalid and Nazeem's friendship." Fayd's slow breath was audible to her like the device was planted on something over the desk instead of placing it under.
"My father had to hire them to look after his granddaughter. To see if she is worth taking over the empire her father built in his name in Pakistan." Fayd scoffed at the information that was being thrown at him as though they were something new.
It didn't take much time to add it up and see the full picture. She remembered him telling her that Abbas was hired by Khalid sahb to send threats. She remembered him hinting at so many things as if he knew nothing much about it. He even told her about the picture of her father with Khalid and Nazeem Shah and Zohaib Alamgir. He told her almost everything yet kept most of it to himself. She wanted to break down and cry. She wanted to run away from the world and hide in his arms. How hard it must have been for him to look at her while carrying her darkest secrets?
She was appalled. Ayat Wajdani was abashed at how the family she rejoiced of having was slowly stabbing her in the back. She trusted Huzaifa so much. She trusted him because she saw him going through the same as her but she didn't foresee him to be backstabbing her, although unintentionally and although for the sake of his family. The weight that she felt reducing was now growing. She couldn't think of what Ismael Wajdani was going to put before Fayd.
"So you're going to ask me to leave her life?"
"I don't dare. I honestly don't. I just wish you to sign this and be a shadow in her life. I ask for nothing more," Fayd slammed the binder on the desk and the wheels rolled back, telling her that he stood up from his seat, "I don't dare ask my niece's lover to betray her. I'm not cruel but my hands are tied. I cannot just give the company to her."
"It's already hers."
"It is, but I have the right to take it from her and give it to one of my sons or just sell it. My father has legally given me that right. Love can be replaced but do you think what she put in for the company to grow and thrive through the odds can?"
Fayd was silenced and his breath shallow. This was where she realized that he was indeed considering doing it. Was it why he always told her that their togetherness wasn't possible? Of all people, how could he betray her?
"Say something," Ayat bounced her leg when a surge of impatience flooded through her body. She wanted him to say something- anything if that mattered. His silence, as always, had the ability to rot her from the inside.
"So if I were to leave Ayat, would you not bother her with anything and she can go back to her old life in Pakistan peacefully?"
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❝Aankhon se dur shaqs
Dil ke bhot kareeb hota hai.❞