th 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 so

ght, 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

r 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

danced around it like professionals trai

e 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 fee

d talk for hours about what it meant to feel invisible, about how legacy could feel like a prison dressed in gold, about how loneline

ives 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,

he 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 t

nd 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 sh

yn 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 d