Leila smiled – not the curated, camera-ready smile she’d been paid for, but a crooked, uncertain, real one. “Then we owe the agency a penalty for breach of contract. It’s triple what they paid us. We’d have nothing.”

The agency’s director, watching through a drone feed, screamed into his headset. “ABORT! ABORT! This is a riyal hit , not a romance novel!”

But somewhere between the scripted sunset and the real one, the act began to bleed into truth.