"You'll get her back if you really love her."

The words fissured through his frenzied head. No, this wasn't true. This couldn't be true. Azlan Shehryar didn't know how to love. Love was a weakness and Azlan Shehryar didn't have any. Sameena was just going paranoid. He tried assuaging himself as he lit another cigarette in the shrouded darkness of his master bedroom, only a dim hue shimmering through the wall sized window serving as light. He leaned back into his recliner as he caged the toxins between his lips. It was almost ironic how that burning poison pacified the one inside him. Killing him slowly. But, tonight, even this wasn't helping. Not even in the slightest.

Heaving a deep sigh, he closed his eyes.

"You fraud!"

Her venomous words, filled with nothing but loathe and sheer disdain, reverberated in his ears and he squeezed his eyes with taut expressions scraped in his face.

"You are disgusting."

He convulsed his head, his hands clenched with full intensity. He was disgusted. Disgusted of himself. He had hurt her...so bad. And in the process he had hurt himself. Maybe even more than her.

"No doubt you are his cousin."

It was the way she had spat "his" which slit through his flesh. She hated him, and this fact wasn't sitting well with him. He just wanted to die, right away, right there. But even death wasn't too kind to come to someone like him.

With heavy breaths, he shot his eyes open - the scarlet streaks of agony not hidden in them. It was the cumulonimbus cloud of pain in his eyes that was a pure testament to how much he regretted all this. But did it even matter now? Now that he had lost everything?

Striking the cigarette on the ashtray, he extinguished it and rose up from the chair, as he ruffled his long and svelte fingers through his already unkempt hair. Even in that unruly condition, he looked nothing short of majestic with his tall stature and perfect angular face.

Suddenly, a sharp pang of pain whooshed through his head as he felt like his head being chopped into tiny fragments so painful, he felt world slipping away from his feet. For a few minutes, he stayed there with his head buried in his hands before retrieving two tablets of Panadol from the drawer and dragging them down his throat.

With small and calculated strides, he moved towards his crown sized bed. Each minute passed with sheer anguish but the night did end and the sun did rise. As always. But the sleep? Oh, even sleep was too hostile to come to him.

After offering the morning-prayer, he finally slipped under the duvet and after endless tossing and turnings, the sleep finally surrendered its guards and took the restless nomad under its protective veil.

For one hour, he stayed in the land of utopia - where everything was perfect, where he had met her and nothing had gone wrong - only to be awakened by the harsh buzzing of his cellphone placed on the side table.

With a groan, he answered the phone.

"Yes?" His voice was hoarse.

"Have you seen Safa?"

At first he could neither get the hang of Arham's words nor his surroundings as they spiraled around his eyes, his head pinning vigorously.

On not getting any response, Arham repeated. "Hello, dude, have you seen Safa?"

Finally registering the gravity of the question being asked, he sprung right on the bed with a jolt, his back ramrod straight.

"What?" He asked, his heart skipping a beat. It was as if he had seen a ghost.

"Have you seen Safa?" Arham repeated for the third time, irritatingly. "Is she with you?" He spat in one breath, causing Azlan to hop right off his bed.

"No. What's going on?" He interrogated as he ran a hand through his hair, all the while pacing through the lengths of the room in worry. He could feel his heart coming up to his mouth.

"We can't find her." The words were an alarm to his ears, to the chaos he himself had ensued. Everything he did in the name of revenge was coming back to bite him. To haunt him.

"What do you mean you can't find her? Did you check her room?"

"Oh, no, we are making assumptions without checking her room and every corner of the annex, school and houses of the people she knew in the village." His tone was galore with sarcasm, not lacking any bit of annoyance he felt towards his best friend at the moment who seemed to have completely lost it.

He staggered back and if it wasn't for the wall behind him to support him, he would have landed straight on the marble floor. Ya Allah, what had he done! She was gone...because of him.

"...llo. You still there, man?" Arham's voice wafted to his ears from somewhere far away as the melancholic cloud of their last interaction flashed across his welled up eyes.

"Azlan. You there?" It wasn't until the seventh time Arham had repeated himself, much to his annoyance, did Azlan finally gain his conscious back.

"Yes, yes, I'm here. I'm coming." He cried as he cut the call without waiting for the reply.

As at the moment, he didn't care about anything else but her.

******

The black Land Cruiser rushed through the highway as he kept squirming in his perfectly comfortable seat which felt nothing short of a bed of thorns, at the moment. Why did the village have to be so far? In all his years of going back and forth between Islamabad and the village, the distance never felt so long. Rather it'd had always served as a relaxing trip for him.

But now, it felt like an eternity with so much at stake.

With his whole life at stake.

His whole world.

Since the moment he had disconnected the call with Arham, he kept trying to contact Safa but it kept going straight to voicemail. Not that she would answer his call, anyway, but the fact that he couldn't even reach her phone was enough of a reason to form all kinds of disastrous scenarios in his head.

Ya Khuda, please let her be safe!

He knew praying for her safety was like praying for a lion's safety as that woman was all in all a lioness herself. The strongest woman he had ever known. The woman of steel.

But it was the part of him that cared oh, so desperately for her that wasn't letting him settle and have a clear mind. He needed to see her right now. He needed to know she was safe and sound.

It was when the red light sparkled in the road did the colorful set of curses finally shot out of his mouth as he hit his hand on the sleek steering wheel.

"Move, Goddamit!" He roared at the flow of traffic like a wounded wolf in need of medication.

For the umpteenth time he dialed her number but in vain. No answer. No ringing. Just a lost hope.

Finally, after hours and hours of ride, he reached the village, and killing the engine, dashed inside the annex where Asmara and Arham were situated on the couch, their faces completely ashen and bodies restless. As soon as they saw him, they shot right up from their seats in an instant.

"Any news?" He inquired, desperately.

Arham moved towards him in a jiffy as he put a hand on his shoulder, his face dreadful. "What the hell happened to your face?" The wounds from last night were still afresh on his face, bandaged nonetheless.

"Nothing." He shrugged his hand off. There was no time for chit chat.

"You need to sit down. You look so exhausted." He added as he scanned his dilapidated form.

"Do I look like I came here to sit down?" He hollered, visibly pissed, making Arham take a step back and throw his hands up in surrender.

"Arlight, alright!" He knew better than to wage a war with his boss, especially when he was in this much anger and...pain.

"So? Any news?" He asked for the second time, this time his tone laced with finality.

"No. Nothing" Arham bored into the hollow of his eyes sunken deep in the sockets as the latter's intense gaze was impatiently fixated on him for answers.

"When did you find out she was gone?" Without passing another glance at Arham - not wanting to waste a single second - he accosted Asmara with exigency.

"Well, she came home late last night, and wasn't really in a good condition. I could detect she had spent those last hours crying."

The wave of uneasiness that washed over him wasn't difficult to detect under the scrutinizing glare of Arham. He could feel his gaze piercing through his body. But that was least of his concerns as of now. What left him unsettling was that she was crying. Well, could he complain after the bomb he had dropped on her?

"And?" Questionably, he raised an eyebrow, ignoring the coarse gaze of his secretary/best friend.

"And when I asked her, she didn't say much. Just that she was exhausted. I didn't probe further because I didn't want to suffocate her. And today, when I woke up, she wasn't in the room." Her already dense eyes brimmed with overabundance of tears as she gulped hardly. "I searched everywhere, God knows I searched everywhere!"

She exclaimed as she cowered and put a hand on her stomach, the eyes refusing to hold the tears back, anymore, as they marred their way down her face in full torrents.

Without wasting a second, Arham rounded her arm around her shoulders. "It's okay. We all know you did everything you could." He chirped, softly. "Come, sit here." He said as he chaperoned her towards the couch, gently lowering her body down on it from her shoulders.

"Thank you!" She sniffed as she took the glass of water from his hand.

"Did she leave anything behind? A note maybe?" Azlan interrogated, still rooted to his spot. The intensity of the situation at hand had numbed him, leaving every muscle in his body sore.

Asmara shook her head in negative.

"What if she's kidnapped?" The realization dawned upon Arham as his eyes widened in horror. Azlan followed the gaze and, in that moment, he forgot to breath. His heart stopped as if it would never function again.

"No, can't be." Asmara convulsed her head with surety. "We sleep in the same room. If she was kidnapped, I'd have woken up due to the noise. Also, all her things are gone along with her bag. So..."

"So she left deliberately." Azlan completed the statement for her. Asmara nodded.

"Good thing we can track her location down through..."

"Her phone?" Arham arched a perfect eyebrow as he cocked his head towards Azlan. "Don't you think we've already gone that way?" He was surprised at the idiocy of his best friend - a shrewd businessman with no room for idiocy and people possessing it.

"So, what happened?"

"She left the phone at home." Asmara piqued in as she extended phone towards Azlan from where she was still sprawled on the couch.

Of course, she did that. The woman in question was Safa Hayat. And Safa Hayat, very well, knew how to cover her tracks.

Even for someone like Azlan, it took him eons to locate her. The woman was good at playing hide and seek.

"Do you think we should call the police?" It was Asmara again, her distressed face leaned forward for an affirmative reply. But received a shake of head instead.

"No. If this is what she wants, we shouldn't create hindrance for her by getting police involved." He said as his sore eyes bored into the far corner of the premises. "We can search her ourselves, but getting police involved means adding more to her problems."

"What problems?" The duo asked in unison as their expressions scrunched in bafflement.

What was going on?

On the epiphany of what he had just said, he panicked - if the sudden shimmer in his lifeless eyes was any indication. Biting the insides of his mouths, he swiveled his eyes under their glares.

"Uh...nothing...I just meant, there's got to be a reason behind her leaving like this."

Yes, you! - The internal voice in him hissed, the guilt in his stance prominent.

"Azlan..." Arham tilted his head to the side as his eyes minimized to mere slits. "Did something happen between you two?"

The question caught him off guards, making his head jut in his direction. His lips pursed into a thin line, halting him from wailing.

"What? No!" He feigned to be shocked but, for the very first time, Azlan Shehryar's lie wasn't bought - if Arham and Asmara exchanging glances was any indication.

There was something fishy going on. Azlan's reaction had confirmed that. But what? They didn't dare to question.

"Alright, then. I'm gonna go search the village." He said, cutting the heavy silence that had ensued, galore with questions and doubts.

"We've already done that." It was Asmara who spoke this time as she stood up.

"Well, I don't trust anyone when it comes to her."

That she hadn't expected.

When it comes to her?

Didn't her boss hate her?

Then why all of a sudden he was going bonkers over her?

Wasn't she just a nuisance in his life whom he'd never miss a chance to mock?

Shouldn't he be happy that the nuisance wasn't there anymore?

The answers to all her questions came to her without much struggle when she looked deep in his eyes.

The eyes.

The damned eyes.

That give so much away.

They never let the curtains draw over them.

The eyes. They always mess the game.

"Should I come with you?" Arham asked without putting up a fight.

"No. Put our people to work and tell them to search every nook of this country." He ordered before exiting the premises and Arham turned towards Asmara.

"He doesn't even know he's in love with her yet. Imagine the intensity if he did. He'd shoot the hell break lose."

Asmara let out a heavy sigh as she gave a slight shrug before falling down on the couch.

******

The moonlight broke into the hush darkness that had engulfed the village in its soft embrace. Everyone was in their home, peacefully enjoying the glory of the calm night.

Except for one soul.

One soul that after spending his entire day wandering from one house to another, was trudging forward in the pervaded darkness with his hands caged in the pockets of his slacks, head lolled downwards. No information, whatsoever.

He was on the brink of collapsing - the shooting pains from the fight last night; getting sleep for hardly an hour; spending today, roaming from one house to another - Azlan Shehryar was thoroughly exhausted as his entire body ached. The man needed rest.

But rest before finding her wasn't something that could even cross his mind. The woman in question was Safa Hayat, and for her, he didn't even care if he was dying. He just needed to find her and make sure she was safe and unharmed.

As he moved forward towards his current destination, the shack finally came into view. His stomach gave a sharp lurch as he tried pulling himself together and headed towards it. It was hard. There was no need for him to go there, but something in him probed him to. What it was, he didn't know.

As the wooden doors of the room flew open, he stepped inside with heavy strides. His feet pained terribly. They were heavy to move as if mountains. He didn't have it in him to move forward...in the place where he had lost her.

He couldn't.

He just wanted to run away from there and never turn back.

But Azlan Shehryar was many things, and coward wasn't one of them. And so heaving a deep breath, he put the foot down on the floor, crossing the threshold - the smell of blood and revelations welcoming him as they sliced into his exterior.

The smell of his blood.

The intensity of her gaze.

The catastrophic memory of their destruction.

It was getting too much for him to handle. It singed every nerve in his body through and through, different hues of emotions morphing into his face. He was no coward, but he couldn't put up with all this pain either. And so he had just spun around to exit the incinerating memory when his eyes caught the sight of a piece of cloth draped lifelessly there on the bed.

It was her cashmere from the other night when she had taken it off her shoulders to assist to his wounds with ease.

Her cashmere.

Black.

Just like their souls.

Just like their pasts.

Tainted and horrifying.

A forlorn memento of their end before the beginning could even happen.

He didn't know what it was that took over him, but without thinking for even once, he picked it up in his almost quavering hands and buried his face in it as a strangled cry escaped his trembling and dry lips. He inhaled deeply into the fabric to have a feeling, just a mere feeling of her being there with him. A feeling that she was never gone.

The scent of it was a balm to the burning aches soaring through his body. It was childish he knew. But it made him feel her presence. And for her, he didn't care if he was being childish or a straightaway nutcase. It was only her that mattered to him. Only her. He had come here to find something that'd lead him to her but instead he had found a part of hers. Something that'd assure him she was there. That he'd find her. That he'd never stop unless he had found her. That he'd keep looking for her till his last breath.

******

A/N

So, hey, AsSalamuAlaikum, y'all! I hope you haven't forgotten me. I know I said I'd start updating once I'm done with the book. But hey, I'm down with almost five chaps so I'm good for five weeks, ig. I couldn't resist myself.

Please, let me know what you guys think about this development. Eager to hear your feedback. Also, don't forget to pray that my exams go well. Xoxo.