The court was silent.
Not the kind of silence that brought peace but the kind that gripped the walls like a noose, that waited for something or someone to snap.
Zina Dalhatu stood at the center of Courtroom 7 like a shadow carved from steel. Her back was straight, her black robe hung perfectly, but her fingers trembled slightly as she clutched the file in her hands. No one saw it. No one ever did.
Because Zina Dalhatu didn't break.
She was her father's daughter.
And they had already broken enough of him.
"Objection sustained," the judge barked, irritated. The old man was tired. The case had dragged on for weeks the media frenzy outside, the whispers of cover-ups, and now a young woman with a famous name daring to walk through fire barefoot.
Zina blinked, slowly turning her gaze to the man behind the defense table Senator Umar Gambo.
A living relic of Nigeria's old elite. Her father's closest political ally. The man who had dined at their table, toasted to justice… and stood beside her father's closed casket less than two weeks after he'd been found dead in his car.
Heart attack, they said.
But Zina had seen his body.
Bruised. Cold. Silent.
Like justice in this country.
"Do you have any further questions, Counselor Dalhatu?" the judge repeated, louder.
Zina drew in a quiet breath. "No, My Lord. The prosecution rests."
As she stepped away, her heels echoing against the marble floor, she caught a flicker of a smirk from Senator Gambo. Just a twitch at the corner of his lip but she saw it. He wanted her to know this was a game. That he'd already won.
But he hadn't met her endgame yet.
Outside, the courtroom steps had become a battlefield. Microphones lunged toward her face like bayonets. Reporters screamed questions over one another.
"Zina, are you accusing Senator Gambo of murder?"
"Was your father investigating a political scandal?"
"Do you have evidence or is this personal vendetta?"
Zina didn't flinch.
Didn't blink.
Her late father used to say: Never let a journalist write your weakness before you write your truth.
She walked through them like a ghost in daylight, vanishing into the back of her black SUV.
Her apartment was dim, clean, and cold a fortress wrapped in shadows and memory. She tossed her case file onto the dining table and poured herself a glass of warm water. That's all her stomach could take these days. The truth was heavy, and it didn't leave space for food.
On the far wall, her father stared back at her from a framed photograph. Minister of Justice Ibrahim Dalhatu. A man who had refused bribes, rewritten ethics policies, and famously declared: "No man stands above the law not even the man who wrote it."
That man now lay in the ground, nameless in the headlines.
She sat down slowly, opening the folder with shaky fingers. It wasn't the court file. It was his file. His last case. Smuggled out of his office by his assistant before the government sealed the room.
Whispers of electoral rigging. Embezzlement. Offshore accounts. Shell companies. And buried in the notes a set of initials: A.R.
She stared at them for a long time.
The kknockon the door came soft at first.
Then again. Firmer.
Zina frowned. She wasn't expecting anyone. She grabbed the taser in her drawer a habit now and moved cautiously.
She opened the door just enough to see a figure standing tall, suited, calm like he belonged in a different world. A rich one. His skin was lighter than hers, almost golden, and his eyes… they were too calm. Dangerous.
"I'm sorry for the intrusion, Miss Dalhatu," he said smoothly, his voice laced with something familiarity or danger, she couldn't tell.
She didn't move. "Who are you?"
He smiled softly, lowering his voice like a secret. "Let's just say I'm someone whose life is about to become… dangerously entangled with yours."
Zina stiffened.
"And I know what A.R. stands for."
Her heart skipped.
He slipped a folded document into her hand a thick envelope, heavy and before she could speak, he was already walking away into the corridor.
Zina shut the door, chest rising fast.
She opened the envelope. Inside was a photograph old, slightly blurred. Two men shaking hands at a private airstrip. One was her father.
The other?
Her eyes widened.
It was Senator Gambo.
And standing between them, barely grown, shaking her father's hand like he was meeting a god, was the man who just knocked on her door.