❝death is only the beginning.❞
Mara El-Masri's fascination with the long-ago world of ancient Egypt started with the stories her stepfather would tell her when she was a child. Her brother Talib El-Masri is missing, left after their mother's funera...
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RUN. DON'T LOOK BACK. JUST RUN.
The moon hung above him and the stars watched as he bolted through the streets of Riyadh. The buildings around him were blurring as he ran. The bag on his shoulder, securely fastened shut, was hitting him with each step, and the heavy object inside was likely leaving bruises on his side. But bruises were the least of his concern. He could hear the shouts of the men he was fleeing, yelling that he was a thief. They were trying to get someone to stop him, but he was fast. He'd been running since he was fourteen years old, and he was in better shape now than he was then.
The alleys of the city were as familiar to him as the ones in London, if not more. He knew where he was going. He knew exactly which short-cuts to take to evade his pursuers and stop himself from getting murdered. He weaved through the narrow alleys and ducked through his short-cuts, running until he couldn't hear the shouts of 'thief!' anymore.
With the silence enveloping him, he waited in the darkness. Was it safe for him to return to his flat now, without anyone following him to the only place he had to go in this city? He heard no shouts, no footsteps, and so he decided that it was safe enough to spin back and head the direction of his flat. He'd run about twenty minutes out of his way trying to escape, and it only seemed a minor inconvenience considering his main goal was to keep breathing long enough to figure what the hell he was supposed to do now.
There were three locks on his door, the consequences of being a cautious thief, and he locked all three when he was safely inside the flat. The space wasn't big, but it wasn't small either. There were some knickknacks around the place he'd taken with him when he left London, and were the only ties he had left besides his memories. Two bedrooms, though only one of them had an actual bed in it, and the other was used as storage and hardly anything else. A small kitchen in the same room as the main living area, and in the middle of the main living area was a rectangular wooden table with a ruby-colored table runner laid across it.
The table runner became crooked as he threw off his bag and set it on the table. Even though it seemed safe here, he still hesitated to switch on a lamp, and he didn't. The only light he had was that of the moonlight through the windows as he stared at the closed bag in front of him. His foot tapped anxiously on the floor. He'd already taken it back to his flat. He'd come this far already.
He reached forward and opened the bag, and he dragged out the crown inside. He couldn't believe it when he'd seen it in the safe he had broken into. It was like a painting come to life, and he couldn't stop himself from taking it. It wasn't that he wanted to sell it. It was that he'd seen this crown before, in something his father painted and his sister hung in her room.
The crown looked ancient, like it was thousands of years old. Allah knows what color it was originally, but now it was aged and rusted, to the point where when he had seen it, he thought that if he had touched it, it might have fallen apart. His thoughts had been wrong clearly, because it had survived being stuffed into a bag and the running. It had seven points, dull and chipped.
