LThe shopping mall's roof at dusk was a flat, anonymous place a slab of concrete that smelled faintly of hot metal and perfume, with a low parapet that looked out over the city's soft glass sprawl. Evening traffic droned like a distant tide. Neon signs bled color into the sky. Raza stood with his hands on the concrete lip, looking down as if the distance would answer a question he could not put into words. His shoulders were tight; his breath came shallow and quick, the rhythm of someone who had rehearsed the step and found no courage in the script.
He had come up alone, saying he needed air, but the roof had always been a place that made decisions feel possible simple, finite. Tonight the edge seemed like an end that would finally quiet the confusion inside him: the shame he had collected, the humiliation he felt, the echo of Tuhfa's rejection like a stone dropped into a still pool.
The sound of footsteps arrived before the figure did quick, certain. Rehaan appeared in the doorway like a man who had followed a scent. He did not look surprised to find Raza there; his face showed calculation rather than concern. He moved with the patient ease of someone who had practiced timing.
"Raza," Rehaan said, voice low enough not to carry but sharp enough that the word cut. "What are you doing up here?"
Raza made no answer at first. He turned slightly, the rooftop light catching his jaw like a fault line. "I can't live like a joke," he said at last, the words rough with something like shame and pleading. "They mocked me there today and before they made me small. I told her. I told her I liked her, Rehaan. I told her I wanted her to marry me. She laughed at me. She said she'd tell her father. She said go away. I can't..."
He leaned his forehead against the stone, as if the contact could hold him steady. Rehaan came up close, put a hand on Raza's shoulder. The gesture was simple, practiced the way brothers steady each other when a body wants to go where a mind thinks it should.
"You're not going to do anything stupid," Rehaan said, not because he wanted to be kind but because, in his own view, he could not afford spectacle. "You're worth more than this. Step back."
Raza let out a sound that could have been a laugh or the last shudder of a sob. He stepped away from the lip, as if moving a foot or two inward could rearrange the argument he had been having with himself. They stood shoulder to shoulder and for a moment there was a strange kind of silence, the city's distant noise filling the space like a bandage.
"Why did she say that?" Raza muttered, voice small. "I told her how I feel. She said she'd tell her father. I thought I thought she understood. I thought maybe..."
"You made a mistake telling her like that," Rehaan said, bland as a verdict. "You put something private into public. People will talk. We'll fix this."
Raza looked up at him, searching. "Fix how?"
Rehaan's eyes narrowed. For a second the brief flicker of something like contempt crossed his face. "We'll make sure your name is straight. We'll show them you were driven and we'll make sure she knows what her words cost." His voice was quiet, but underneath it sat a dangerous kind of certainty. "She'll be dealt with."
Raza, still fragile from the edge, swallowed. He wanted comfort and absolution. He wanted the story to have him as the wounded hero whose scars would be acknowledged. He wanted, most of all, someone to steady him.
Rehaan's hand remained on his shoulder, but there was no tenderness in it. There was a plan. In that plan Raza would be both victim and instrument: a man who had been pushed to the brink and then rescued, whose story could be used to justify a reckoning.
The memory of the rejection came back to Raza then like a small, precise hurt: Tuhfa's sharp voice, the unbending line of her chin, the way she had turned away. It had happened weeks before, in a corridor that smelled of chalk and washing powder, where Tuhfa had been brisk and exhausted from responsibilities. He had found her in a patch of quiet and spoken without the ceremony of patience.
"Tuhfa," he had said, voice rushing, "I like you. I...I want you to marry me."
She had looked at him as if at a child who'd misread a game. Tuhfa's eyes, honest and cool, had held him steady for a moment and then cut like a clean thing. "If you ever talk such nonsense again I will tell my father," she had answered. "Now go away."
She meant it as a warning a line drawn to protect herself. She did not know the weight those words could be made to carry when people chose to retell a scene as evidence rather than fact. She did not know that her flat refusal would be turned into a thread someone could pull to unravel her life.
Back on the roof Raza squeezed his eyes shut as if that memory were a physical blow. "She said that," he murmured. "She said she'd tell her father."
Rehaan's jaw set. The plan in his head found a shape. He had always preferred clarity: controls, levers, a story that could be written so that a man could step into the role he wanted. If people could be persuaded to see Raza as the one who had been driven, then they could be persuaded to see Tuhfa as the cause and causes beget punishments in a house that loves tidy narratives.
"Listen," Rehaan said. "We'll make a few calls. We'll send flowers from anonymous hands. We'll ring from numbers she won't trace. We'll push until someone's patience breaks or until they apologise publicly. And if anyone asks, we'll tell them the truth from our side. You were in danger. We pulled you back. She refused you. It isn't right."
It sounded tidy enough to Raza in his rawness. He wanted to believe someone would take up his cause and make the world right. Rehaan's voice sounded like the map he needed: someone competent to arrange the evidence and the presentation. He would be the man rescued and then celebrated. He could feel the comfort of that story like a bandage.
They left the roof with the night folding around them; the air felt colder down the stairwell. For Raza the immediate danger had passed, but a new operation had begun: a small campaign that would bend facts, push at edges, and trade in the currency of rumor. Rehaan's plan was not born of mercy. It was born of a desire to script a story that put Raza as sympathetic and Tuhfa as dangerous a story that would justify whatever came next.
In the days that followed the first gestures arrived like quiet, poisonous gifts. Flowers appeared at Tuhfa's gate in the night, their stems cut short and anonymous cards tucked into the petals. Calls came from numbers that changed each week, voices that folded into static as soon as she answered. Messages landed with edited fragments of phrases stitched and altered so that meaning shifted and blame could be argued. Each small assault was meant to unsettle: to make her look strange, to make her father think there was something to answer for, to make the private public.
Tuhfa did not know, in those first moments, that the roof had been the origin of the plot. She only felt the slow tightening of fear, the sense of being watched and maneuvered. The world that had seemed ordinary became a sequence of doors, each one slightly less secure than the last.
And somewhere in the tidy coordination of it in the late-night planning and the sending of flowers from hands that never showed themselves Rehaan smiled with the kind of quiet cruelty that had nothing to do with rescue and everything to do with the exercise of power. Raza, still raw, accepted the role of the wounded man. Together they had started a game that would not remain private; it would grow teeth and, before long, it would be the story an entire family told itself to explain what had happened.