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The heavy cedar-wood doors of the inner chamber clicked shut, sealing away the murmurs of the palace courtyard. Inside, the air hung thick with the scent of burning frankincense and the lingering tension of unspoken dread. Momma remained frozen by the edge of her embroidered velvet bed, her knuckles pressed white against the mattress as Laure stood near the doorway, breathing heavily.
"What do you mean she is not there?" Momma’s voice came out in a ragged whisper, stripped of its usual haughty cadence. "Habiba placed her in the crib. You confirmed the room was vacant."
"I am telling you the truth, Your Highness," Laure stammered, casting a frantic glance over her shoulder into the dark hallway. "I went straight to the nursery the moment Habiba left for the kitchen. The blankets were tossed back, but the child was gone. There was no sound, no struggle, nothing!"
Panic, sharp and suffocating, clawed at Momma’s throat. Eighteen years of calculated scheming, of enduring the subtle slights of Uwah and the stifling politics of the royal household, suddenly felt like a house of cards built on shifting sand. If the child had vanished—if someone had intercepted their plot or, worse, witnessed it—their entire existence hung by a thread.
"Could Habiba have taken her?" Momma demanded, her eyes darting wildly around the room as if searching for an invisible enemy.
"She couldn't have," Laure replied, wringing her hands together. "Habiba was walking toward the grand kitchen when I crossed the courtyard. Unless the girl has a double, she had no time to return and spirit the infant away."
Before Momma could process the terrifying implications, her phone buzzed violently against the silk duvet. The screen illuminated the dim room with the name Madina. With trembling fingers, Momma snatched up the device and accepted the call.
"Adda! Tell me it's done," Madina’s voice rushed through the speaker, tight with nervous anticipation. "Tell me the obstacle has been cleared before Abdulaziz returns and starts asking uncomfortable questions."
"She’s gone, Madina," Momma choked out, tears of sheer frustration spilling over her lashes. "The child is gone. Not dead—gone. Someone has taken her right from under our noses."
A sharp intake of breath echoed from the other end of the line. "Taken her? By whom? Are you telling me we’ve been betrayed?"
"I don't know!" Momma hissed, pacing the length of the room with frantic steps. "Laure searched the entire wing. There is no trace of her. If this leaks out, if anyone connects us to this disappearance, we are finished. The Emir will not spare us, and the court will tear us apart."
"Calm down," Madina commanded, though her own voice trembled. "Panicking will only dig our graves faster. Find out who has access to that wing at this hour. Check the guards, check the maids. Someone had to see something."
Momma cut the call without another word, her chest heaving as she stared at Laure. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the distant ticking of a grandfather clock in the grand hallway—each second counting down toward an inevitable reckoning that neither woman was prepared to face.
Eighteen years later, the heavy atmosphere of apprehension had transformed into a different kind of quiet suffocation.
Across the city in the newer residential quarters of Kano, the afternoon sun cast long, amber shadows through the intricate ironwork of the estate gates. Fadwa sat quietly in the back seat of the sedan, her gaze fixed absently on the passing storefronts. Beside her, Khadijah stared into her phone screen, her expression a mask of petulant boredom.
The contrast between the two young women had only sharpened with age. While Khadijah wore her status like heavy armor—demanding deference, draped in imported fabrics, and fueled by a sense of unearned entitlement—Fadwa moved through the world with a quiet, observant grace. Yet, beneath Fadwa’s gentle exterior lay a persistent, unanswerable ache. She never knew the warmth of a mother’s embrace; her entire world was defined by the distant corridors of the palace, the stern protection of Uwah, and the profound, grounding affection she found whenever she sat in the presence of Mai Martaba.
The car turned through the grand stone gates of the palace, crunching softly over the gravel driveway before coming to a halt near the main entrance. Khadijah pushed her door open immediately, stepping out without a word to her sister. She tossed her car keys to an approaching attendant and strode toward the inner halls, eager to escape the heavy atmosphere of the royal compound.
Fadwa lingered behind, stepping out into the warm afternoon air. She looked up at the towering parapets of the ancient palace, her mind drifting back to the conversation she had shared with Uwah earlier that day. There was a secret resting just beneath the surface of this household—she could feel it in the way the older women whispered when she entered a room, in the way Momma’s eyes avoided hers whenever their paths crossed in the grand corridors, and in the lingering shadows of a past that no one dared speak aloud.
She took a slow breath, adjusting her shawl over her shoulders, and began the long walk toward her quarters. She did not know what the future held, nor did she know the bloody, desperate conspiracy that had been woven around her crib eighteen years ago on a stormy night. But as the evening wind swept through the palace courtyards, carrying the distant call to prayer, one thing was certain: the truth could only stay buried in the dark for so long before it demanded to be seen.
