❝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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☾ ☽
THE BUILDING TALIB EL-MASRI was living in was, like the house they had visited yesterday, simple and unassuming. It was the third tallest of the buildings on the block and the corridors inside were decorated with art and floral arrangements, which made it feel much more inviting than the hotel had. Still, as Mara followed Ardeth through the corridor and Jonathan followed her, she felt her nerves pick up the closer they got to the flat where her brother lived.
He was seventeen when last she saw him. Now he would be twenty-two, and he wouldn't be the same boy she remembered. He'll have changed, just as she had, and that was something she had worried about since setting out on this venture. The fears she had expressed on the train had returned to her now that she was so close. He hadn't wanted her to ever know about the letter he wrote, so how would he act when he saw her at his door?
"This is it?" questioned Jonathan, and neither he nor Ardeth noticed when Mara stopped in her tracks at the end of the hall, while they had continued and stopped in front of a door with the flat number written on it.
"This is the address Jamil gave me," Ardeth confirmed with a nod.
Jonathan looked to his left, where Mara should have been standing, and when he saw she wasn't there he turned around and found her where she had stopped walking a few feet away. Her eyes weren't on them and she seemed to be staring at nothing. "Mara," he started, and she looked at him. "Are you all right?"
Was she all right? The day had begun with being held at gunpoint and being interrogated about her brother. That in itself would not make her all right. She swallowed nervously as he walked down the hall to her, and she admitted, "I'm scared. I don't know why."
"That's understandable. You haven't seen him in five years."
"What if he doesn't want to see me?"
"You'll never know unless you try," Jonathan pointed out. Mara nodded silently, but glanced down the hall apprehensively. Ardeth was waiting patiently outside Talib's door as he watched them. "Do you want to turn around?"
Mara looked at him again. If she said yes, what would that make her? Maybe it would make her smart considering what happened in that hotel room this morning. Or would it make her a coward because she was standing just a few feet from his flat? She glanced back at Ardeth, and asked, "It's that door there?" Ardeth nodded. She took a deep breath. "My brother is the other side of that door. I've come this far."
Her decision had been made, and she couldn't back out of it now. With a certainty to her steps that hadn't been there before, Mara stepped forward to the door, and after gesturing for both Ardeth and Jonathan to step back, she raised her hand to knock. She did so twice, and on the third knock, the door swung open and Mara narrowly managed to avoid being hit by a spanner wrench by mere centimeters.
