He prayed aloud; the sound of his voice brought with it clarity of thought. ‘I have made mistakes, my Allah. I have made them knowingly, willingly, and in the cloak of darkness, but you know why I have done the things I have… The world does not need to witness the birth of another Akbar Khan. Do not let my sacrifice go to waste, my Lord,’ he said.

He brought the beads to his eyes before kissing them and putting them aside. He folded up the prayer mat and moved to the bed. His wife slept soundly, the kind of sleep that is brought on by warm milk, turmeric and blessed ignorance. Her children would be together tomorrow and the preparations for their arrival, the desire to fulfil their every whim, had exhausted her.

How many years had it been since all the children had been under this roof? Akbar Khan could not remember… Fifteen, perhaps? Sixteen? Sixteen years since his daughter Jia had made a necklace of arms around him and discussed her plans? She had called him her ‘Baba jaan’. But the ‘jaan’, the life, was leaving his old bones and he needed to make peace with his strongest-willed child. There were things to discuss and things to reveal. Time had taken too much; it could not be allowed to take any more. Tomorrow, he would start anew. Tomorrow, all his children would be together, all but one.

CHAPTER 2

In the end it wasn’t the drug cartels, the prostitution rings or the money laundering that made Jia Khan leave her father’s home. It wasn’t the various fraud cases, it wasn’t the police raids, and it wasn’t even the fact that her father was head of the city’s biggest organised crime ring, the Jirga. It was simply a matter of a broken heart.

The sound of the podcast helped numb her mind to the day she’d had. Defending guilty men left her devoid of feeling and in need of the kind of understanding that comes from family. But this wasn’t something she was ready to admit to herself, or to anyone else. She needed no one. This independence had been hard won and she bore the scars of battle.