Chapter 1 - 6pm Sharp!
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Nikkinuu~~~~
CHAPTER ONE -
Imani Ali
6PM Sharp!
Imani Ali had learned very young that rich men believed beautiful buildings belonged to them.
Architects merely drew them.
She had spent the better part of her career correcting that misconception.
“No.”
Silence settled across the conference room.
Eleven people sat around a polished black table on the forty-second floor of Al-Nasir international headquarters in London.
Nobody spoke.
Imani leaned forward and turned the rendering around.
It was beautiful.
She would give them that.
A sweeping complex of glass and pale stone rose from the desert in elegant tiers, crowned by an enormous curved structure that appeared almost suspended above the central atrium. Beneath it sprawled a casino, luxury shopping galleries, restaurants, private members’ clubs, two hotels and a performance venue.
Billions.
That was what sat on the table in front of her.
Billions of pounds and three years of someone’s ego.
“It’s beautiful,” one of the executives finally said.
“It is. Very.”
Imani flipped through the designs on the screen.
The man appeared relieved.
Momentarily.
Her words did not match her expression, which was thoroughly unimpressed.
“It also doesn’t work.”
Relief vanished in a hurry.
Imani picked up her laptop pen and twirled it once before she began annotating.
“The load distribution here is ridiculous.”
She drew a circle.
“Your central atrium is carrying far more than it should because whoever designed this was committed to the illusion of suspension.”
Another circle.
“Your eastern support system interferes with the retail sightlines.”
A line.
“And this—”
A dry laugh escaped her.
She tapped the enormous glass canopy.
“—is going to turn your central promenade into an oven.”
“The environmental consultants approved—”
“They approved calculations based on external temperatures that don’t adequately account for solar gain across this amount of glazing.”
The man opposite her stiffened.
Imani looked at him.
The look cut straight through him.
“Did you hire me to tell you it’s pretty? I’ll happily be paid my wage to tell you a disastrous design is pretty.”
“No, ma’am.”
He glanced around the room.
Everyone suddenly seemed fascinated by something other than him.
“Good. We all agree.”
She pressed send on the annotated presentation.
Pings sounded throughout the room as everyone received it.
Imani stood.
“Start again.”
She knocked the desk lightly with her knuckles.
“It was very pretty, though.”
She passed the man in charge of the design team.
Nobody looked particularly pleased.
Imani smiled as she walked out.
A chorus of tense whispers started before the door had even closed behind her.
Imani didn’t come there to be liked.
She didn’t come to flatter.
And she certainly didn’t come to fail.
Three weeks ago, she’d received the call she’d spent fifteen years becoming good enough to receive.
Al-Nasir International wanted Imani Ali.
Not her firm.
Not one of the senior partners.
Her.
The Al-Nasir development would be one of the largest luxury developments undertaken in the region in years.
A destination in itself.
Casino.
Shopping centre.
Entertainment complex.
Hotel district.
All designed to attract the sort of clientele for whom a five-thousand-pound handbag was an impulse purchase.
It was easily the biggest contract of her career.
Not by as much as people assumed.
She had already put her name to a luxury hotel in Singapore, a cultural centre in Ghana, a private medical complex in Switzerland and a waterfront development in Dubai that had landed her on the cover of three architectural magazines.
But this?
This could change her name from one architects recognised to one everybody did.
Which was precisely why she wasn’t putting her name on something she thought was shit.
She had just reached her desk after another meeting and was eating the last of her lunch when a knock sounded at her door.
Her secretary peered around it somewhat sheepishly.
“The project director is here to see you.”
“Ms Ali.”
He was already walking in.
His second mistake of the day.
Imani glanced towards him.
“Yes?”
“The original concept came from Sheikh Al-Nasir himself.”
Imani’s pencil stopped.
Ah.
There it was.
She looked down at the rendering again.
Apparently the ego had a name.
“Then somebody should have told Sheikh Al-Nasir before spending three years developing it.”
Nobody answered.
Imani smiled pleasantly.
“Anything else?”
“No, ma’am.”
Her favourite sentence.
Her mother still kept the newspaper clipping.
Imani had offered to frame one of the magazine covers instead.
Her mother preferred the newspaper.
LOCAL GIRL WINS PRESTIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE SCHOLARSHIP.
Imani had been seventeen.
Her hair had been terrible.
Her eyebrows had been worse.
And her mother had bought twelve copies.
They had not been wealthy.
Not remotely.
Her father had driven buses before eventually buying a small minicab business with his brother. Her mother had worked as a teaching assistant and somehow stretched every pound until it screamed.
The Ali household had been small, loud and Muslim.
Qur’an recitations on weekends.
Eid clothes purchased too early because her mother refused to pay last-minute prices.
Her father’s voice reminding everyone to pray.
A mother who could identify that someone had entered her kitchen from two rooms away.
Imani loved them.
She simply hadn’t carried all of their faith into adulthood with her.
She still called herself Muslim when someone asked.
Still fasted some days during Ramadan, usually under sustained maternal pressure.
Still whispered Bismillah occasionally without realising she’d done it.
But religion no longer governed her life.
Her parents knew some of that.
They did not know all of it.
They certainly did not know about the locked wardrobe in her apartment.
That particular revelation might actually kill her father.
Imani had never slept with a man.
At thirty, this caused considerably more fascination amongst other people than it did her.
She wasn’t waiting for marriage.
She wasn’t preserving herself.
She simply had never wanted one close enough.
There had been a man once, when she was younger, who had touched her when she hadn’t wanted him to.
Years had passed.
She rarely thought about his face anymore.
What remained was something far stranger.
Control.
Imani liked control.
She liked deciding when men looked.
When they spoke.
When they stopped.
She discovered, eventually, that there were men who liked surrendering precisely what she needed to possess.
And the internet had provided the perfect distance.
No touching.
No names.
No face.
No possibility of somebody taking more than she had offered.
Behind a mask, dressed in things her mother would have required immediate medical assistance upon seeing, Imani could become someone else entirely.
Men paid to hear her voice.
Paid to obey.
Paid to be dismissed.
Paid to be humiliated.
Paid to be under her control.
Some returned week after week.
One had once transferred an amount of money so absurd that she’d stared at the notification for several minutes before sending half of it to a women’s shelter out of sheer guilt.
She didn’t need their money.
Architecture paid extremely well these days.
She enjoyed the power.
The high.
That was the secret.
That was her secret.
At work, however, nobody would ever have guessed.
At 5:58 p.m., Imani sat behind her desk wearing an olive-toned blouse and matching jacket, tailored green high-waisted trousers and small gold earrings, reviewing revisions for a paediatric hospital.
That project would make her precisely zero pounds.
She had volunteered for it eighteen months ago.
The charity had acquired a narrow, awkward plot and couldn’t afford the architect they wanted.
Imani had read their email at two in the morning.
By eight, she’d accepted.
Tomorrow at nine she was meeting their director to discuss the new family accommodation wing.
Her assistant had already blocked two hours.
Imani circled a problem with the accessible garden entrance.
A knock sounded against her open office door.
She didn’t look up.
“Yes?”
She had sent her secretary home ten minutes early.
Male.
Unfamiliar.
“Ms Ali?”
“Mm?”
“I’m from Sheikh Al-Nasir’s office.”
Her pencil continued moving.
“Mhm.”
There was a pause.
Imani almost smiled.
“The Sheikh would like to see you.”
Now she looked up.
The man standing inside her office was impeccably dressed and had the particular expression of someone accustomed to delivering statements rather than requests.
Imani looked at the clock.
5:59 p.m.
She returned to her drawing.
“What about?”
“The development.”
“Which part?”
“I wasn’t given specifics.”
“Then he’ll need to arrange a meeting.”
Another pause.
“He would like to see you now.”
Imani drew another line.
“I gathered that—from the fact you’re standing in my office.”
The man’s expression tightened almost imperceptibly.
“Ms Ali, Sheikh Al-Nasir is waiting.”
Her computer clock changed.
6:00 p.m.
Imani capped her pen.
Closed the file.
Slid it into her briefcase.
The man watched as she stood, shrugged into her lightweight black coat and lifted the leather case from beside her desk.
“I’m afraid Sheikh Al-Nasir has been waiting for the wrong woman.”
“Excuse me?”
“My working day has finished.”
For perhaps the first time in his professional life, the man appeared genuinely unsure what to do.
Imani walked around her desk.
“He specifically requested you.”
“And tomorrow, he can specifically have me.”
She switched off her desk lamp.
“I have a nine o’clock, so that’s unavailable. Ten until one is blocked for design review.”
She considered her schedule.
“Tell him two.”
“Ms Ali—”
“Actually, don’t.”
She picked up her phone.
“Call my assistant in the morning. She’ll schedule it properly.”
“He is expecting you upstairs.”
Imani stopped beside him.
She was not rude by nature.
Contrary to what several former clients maintained.
She simply had boundaries and an unfortunate lack of interest in pretending otherwise.
“My contract gives Al-Nasir International an exceptional amount of my professional time,” she said evenly. “It does not give Sheikh Al-Nasir ownership of it.”
The man’s eyebrows rose.
“Two o’clock tomorrow.”
She walked towards the lift.
“Good evening.”
The doors opened.
Imani stepped inside.
Just before they closed, she caught sight of the man reaching urgently for his phone.
She thought nothing of it.
She had a takeaway to collect.
A shower to take.
And at eight-thirty, a man named SubbyHu88y had paid an obscene amount of money for an hour of her undivided attention.
Imani checked her watch.
Unlike Sheikh Al-Nasir—
she didn’t like keeping people waiting unnecessarily.
Well written and an Intersting protagonist. Imani strikes me as completely believable with strengths and flaws. I will be reading more. 👍
Thankyou ❤️ ❤️ I love your messages along the chapter! 🥰🥰