A Dynasty of Deceit

Chapter Four: Her Smile Was a Warning

The second time Zayn saw Adanna, it was at a charity gala hosted by the Lagos Arts Preservation Trust. He had come only to appease Kelechi, who insisted on rubbing shoulders with cultural influencers, and he had every intention of leaving early until he turned and saw her across the room, not as the radiant speaker from the business summit, but as something altogether different, encased in a deep red gown that kissed the floor with every step and crowned her with a quiet defiance that made people part like water around her.

She wasn’t surrounded by admirers or friends, she was just standing near the bar, sipping champagne like she’d rather drink cyanide, and he knew, instinctively, that this was not a woman who enjoyed the spotlight, only one who had learned to weaponize it. They locked eyes across the crowd, and this time, she came to him, offering a smirk instead of a smile and saying, “Still not giving out your last name?” to which he replied, “Still pretending you enjoy these events?” and with that, they disappeared into the corner of the room where the noise faded, and the conversation sharpened, not with flirtation, but with friction.

Their words sliced into the facade both of them wore like armor. They talker about freedom like fugitives, about legacy like it was a noose, about love like it was a myth designed to keep powerful families from devouring their own. She told him about growing up in a house where her mother rarely smiled and her father measured her worth in dowry offers. Where tradition was law and choice was an illusion, where she was groomed not for independence but for alignment, and where her upcoming marriage to Tobe Maduako was not a romantic milestone but a merger drafted in quiet boardrooms and sealed by ancestral obligation. And when he asked her if she would go through with it, she looked away and said, “I don’t get to choose,” and Zayn, who had spent his entire life defying the destiny imposed on him, felt something heavy lodge itself in his chest, something like an anger, something like protectiveness, and something dangerous and understanding.

Their chemistry was combustible, but they danced around it like professionals trained not to want what they could not have.

Until the third meeting in a small gallery tucked in Victoria Island, where Zayn had gone to purchase an abstract piece for his new office and found Adanna standing before a painting, her hand hovering just above the canvas as if she could feel its sadness through the frame. They didn’t speak at first. They just stood there and their two shadows stared into a storm of color and brushstrokes, until she said softly, “Does it feel like everything in this room is pretending to be alive?” and he whispered back, “That’s because everything here is,” their eyes met again and in that moment, something passed between them that could not be undone.

They began meeting in secret in bookshops, rooftops, even his startup’s hidden office above a printing press in Yaba, where they would talk for hours about what it meant to feel invisible, about how legacy could feel like a prison dressed in gold, about how loneliness was worse when you were surrounded by people who thought they owned you, and over time, the meetings turned from words to gestures.

Until one night, in the rain-soaked backseat of a rented car parked outside a donor’s residence, their restraint collapsed and they kissed with the desperation of two people who had lived their whole lives starving. But love, in their world, was not a sanctuary, it was a battlefield, and the moment their lips parted, the war began, because Adanna’s engagement to Tobe was weeks from being announced, and already her father had begun making the necessary political calls, aligning shares, calling pastors to pray over what he believed would be the unification of two bloodlines blessed by God and oil.

Zayn, who was once calm and methodical, now found himself spiraling, checking his phone more than usual, replaying her voice in his mind like a song, losing sleep not over deals or profit margins but over whether she would come, whether she would choose him, whether he even had the right to ask her to, but the answer came in the form of a neatly handwritten invitation “Mr. Tobe Maduako and Ms. Adanna Ojukwu cordially invite you to their Engagement Soirée,” scheduled for two weeks later at the Maduako Estate in Banana Island, and Zayn stared at the card as if it were a death certificate, because it was the death of a maybe, of a what-if, of the only softness he had allowed himself in years and yet, he went.

He dressed in his finest suit, not to cause a scene, but to see for himself if she would look at Tobe the way she looked at him, if she would smile like it wasn’t laced with sorrow and when she entered, hand in hand with the man whose blood Zayn shared but whose soul he would never understand, the crowd applauded, cameras flashed, and Zayn’s heart turned to iron, not because she looked happy, but because she looked imprisoned. She caught his eye across the room, just for a second, and in that second, he saw the apology in her gaze, the silent cry, the impossible choice and then she looked away, and so did he.

The rest of the night was a blur of champagne and fake laughter, of Tobe basking in attention and Adanna stiff beside him, of Alaric delivering a toast about legacy and honor while Zayn stood at the edge of the room burningand when it was over, when the guests had gone and the lights dimmed, Zayn stood alone by the hedge, wondering if this was the price of becoming something more than what he was born into, and then she appeared. Adanna was still in her gown but barefoot, whispering, “I can’t do this,” and he grabbed her hands, not like a lover, but like a lifeline, and said, “Then don’t,” and she replied, “I want to run,” and he said, “Then I’ll run with you,” and for the first time, they both smiled not with hope, but with defiance because now it was no longer just a love story, or a revenge plot, or a corporate rivalry. It was rebellion, and it would cost them everything.