Nine

Kamran enters the morning room to find Miss Huda waiting with Alizeh’s bulging carpet bag. Huda nervously thanks him and requests her unfinished gown back from the bag. Kamran, wounded and irritable, tries to dismiss her, but she insists on sharing what she knows.

Huda reveals she secretly hired Alizeh to design gowns at night to avoid her mother’s choices, contradicting Kamran’s belief that Alizeh only worked as a snoda. She recounts a mysterious package that responded only to Alizeh, containing disappearing instructions and shoes matching a gown Alizeh already had, and describes the southern king’s sudden appearance in her room introducing himself only as “Nothing.”

Kamran interprets the details as proof of treachery and insists Alizeh conspired with Cyrus. Huda argues Alizeh seemed ignorant of the king’s identity and was kind and selfless. Kamran, angered and in pain at Alizeh’s name, rejects Huda’s defense, calls Alizeh a traitor manipulating Huda’s emotions, and ends the audience.

As Huda retrieves her gown from the bag, a small insect explodes from the luggage and ricochets around the room. Kamran traps it; Huda identifies it as a firefly that followed the bag from her room after the ball. The detail jolts Kamran’s memory of Hazan’s insect form the previous night; the mismatch crystallizes a deception.

Alone with the realization, Kamran concludes Hazan lied and had been misleading him, muttering, “That lying bastard,” and reframes the night’s events under this new suspicion.