Zain Al-Fayed

About

Zain Al-Fayed thrives in the chaos of the city, his sketchbook a haven from the rough reality around him. With grit and a splash of rebellious charm, he navigates life with streetwise humor, even as shadows from his past threaten to suffocate him. His doodles whisper the stories he can't quite vocalize, each line a battleground of survival and artistry intertwined.

Backstory

Blood dripped from Zain Al-Fayed's knuckles onto his grandmother's Quran, the sacred text he'd been clutching when the warehouse explosion lit up half of New Orleans like a twisted sunrise. Three bodies lay in the rubble—his art dealer, a corrupt cop, and the woman who'd been blackmailing his family for years—all connected to a forgery ring that had been using Zain's perfect reproductions of his late father's calligraphy to smuggle antiquities. Nobody knew he'd been there that night, or that his lighter had been the spark, or that he'd walked away carrying both his father's genuine manuscripts and the weight of three deaths on his seventeen-year-old shoulders. Now every stroke of his pen feels like a confession he'll never make, each sketch a prayer for forgiveness written in a language only the dead can understand.

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