A Dynasty of Deceit

Chapter Three: The First Cut is the Deepest

The first time Zayn stepped into the towering glass edifice of Maduako Holdings, he felt nothing but only a hollow silence that stretched through his chest like the echo of something long buried and returning to life, because this wasn’t just a building to him, it was a monument to everything that had been stolen from him, his name, his bloodline, and his place at the table.

The reception smelled of imported jasmine and marble polish, and the air-conditioning hummed with indifference as men in tailored suits and women in pencil skirts marched past him. Everyone's eyes were glued to their phones, and their faces carved into stone by years of wealth and control.

None of them knew that the eighteen-year-old sitting across from the elevators in a grey suit too sharp for his age was a ghost in their machine, the bastard son of their god was here not to seek permission, but to plant his first flag.

The invitation had come from Kelechi Onwudiwe, whose venture group had agreed to incubate Zayn’s logistics startup under the illusion that he was a brilliant nobody with a rare eye for efficiency and AI integration, but Zayn knew it wasn’t luck, it was war strategy and within months, his startup, SwiftPath AI, had secured pilot contracts with logistics subsidiaries quietly owned by Maduako Holdings, and Zayn made sure every data report, every performance metric, and every upward curve bore his name in bold, like a warning sign to the dynasty that once erased him.

Kelechi brought him to headquarters for a quarterly performance review. Zayn was unwar that this wasn’t just a meeting. It was reconnaissance, the first step into enemy territory. And as they rode the elevator to the 22nd floor, Zayn kept his expression neutral, his hands were folded and his eyes devoured every detail, the security protocols, the office layouts, the framed photos of Alaric with presidents and oil kings, and the mission statement etched in gold above the entrance to the executive boardroom, “We Build What Time Cannot Destroy”, and Zayn almost laughed, because time could destroy everything, especially lies, and he was the proof.

In the meeting, he spoke with the confidence of a man twice his age. He pitched not just numbers but vision, strategy, expansion pathways, and the room of investors, most of them old enough to be his uncles, listened without interruption, their eyes narrowed not in disbelief but curiosity, because brilliance like his couldn’t be faked, and Zayn knew he had them hooked but his real target sat across the long mahogany table. Chika Maduako, Chief Operating Officer of Maduako Logistics and Alaric’s younger cousin, a man known for his skepticism and tight fists, the kind who could smell weakness or bluff from miles away, and when Zayn finished speaking and silence fell like a judge’s gavel, it was Chika who leaned forward, he steepled his fingers under his chin, and asked, “Who are you really?”, not aggressively, but with a curiosity that felt more dangerous than a threat, and Zayn was unfazed. He smiled and said, “Just someone who understands systems, sir,” letting the ambiguity simmer while Kelechi laughed and steered the conversation back to funding, but Zayn saw it, the flicker of suspicion in Chika’s eyes, the way his jaw tightened, the recognition that there was something familiar about the boy who spoke like a legacy yet carried the hunger of an outsider. After the meeting, while Kelechi chatted with board members, Zayn excused himself and wandered deliberately into the executive hallway, he came across past portraits of the family, until he stopped in front of the one he had been searching for. Chief Alaric Maduako, in his early fifties, stood beside a lion sculpture, he wore a black Agbada and the coldest smile Zayn had ever seen on a human face. He stared at the portrait for a long time, not with admiration, but with calculation, comparing it to the image burned into his mother’s nightmares.

The man who had once whispered promises into her ear only to discard her like broken glass, and then he whispered, so soft only he could hear it, “I’m coming,” and turned away before anyone saw him.

Over the next year, Zayn’s rise became impossible to ignore. SwiftPath AI expanded across the Southwest, it absorbed smaller competitors with ruthless efficiency, offering delivery times and data analytics no one else could match, and yet Zayn kept his face off the headlines, allowing Kelechi to be the public face while he remained the mystery behind the curtain, manipulating deals, leveraging whispers, courting allies in high places who owed him favors and didn't care about his surname but results.

He waited for the moment the Maduakos would look his way and that moment came one hot Thursday afternoon when he walked into a business summit and locked eyes with the woman who would turn everything inside him upside down, Adanna Ojukwu. She was speaking on a panel about cultural preservation in modern business, her voice was smooth and commanding, her Ankara blazer bold and royal, and Zayn, who had spent years mastering how not to feel, felt something in his chest shift. The sudden awareness that someone had entered the room who did not orbit anyone else. Adanna, daughter of Chief Ojukwu, chairman of a rival conglomerate with traditionalist roots, was known for her discipline, beauty, inaccessibility and rumored to be engaged to Tobe Maduako in a merger disguised as a marriage. But what struck Zayn wasn’t her reputation, it was the contradiction in her presence. Her eyes that held fire, a mouth that smiled only out of necessity, a posture that said she was tired of being a statue carved by other people’s expectations.

They met at the cocktail reception, where she was standing alone by the garden, and Zayn pretend to admire the landscaping, and when he introduced himself as “Zayn,” she arched one brow and said, “Just Zayn?” and he replied, “Names are a form of leverage and I don’t give mine out freely,” and she laughed, genuinely, and for a moment the war inside him paused. They talked for twenty minutes about literature, about silence, about what it means to carry your family’s future like a coffin and then she was called away by an aide in a black suit, but before she left, she said, “If you’re trying to disappear, you’re doing a terrible job at it,” and walked away, leaving him standing there with a drink he hadn’t touched and a heartbeat he didn’t recognize as his own. He told himself it was nothing but a distraction, a glitch in the algorithm of his vengeance, but her voice stayed with him, a thread tugging at the part of him Amara had tried to keep human, the part he thought he had buried beneath numbers and rage and when he later found out she was indeed engaged to Tobe, the legitimate son, the golden boy, the one who sat in the seat that should have been his, something snapped in him because now the battle wasn’t just about reclaiming his place, it was about protecting something, maybe even someone, from the very dynasty he had vowed to destroy.

And so he moved faster, acquired faster, cut deeper, his deals became more aggressive, his network thicker with influence, and the Maduakos finally took notice not just Chika, but Alaric himself, who summoned Kelechi for a private lunch and asked, “Who is this boy running your operations?” and Kelechi, unaware of the truth, replied, “Some genius from the slums. His name is Zayn. I don’t know much else, but he’s the future,” and Alaric nodded slowly, swirling his wine, unaware that the future he just acknowledged was the very past he thought he had buried and while the king was sipping wine, the bastard was sharpening his blade.