When you had first travelled to Cairo, you hadn’t heard of any planned protests in the area but here you were now: stranded in a five-star hotel with the scent of fire seeping through windows and archways. The crowds outside were only growing larger as their protests grew louder and security failed to calm them down.

Of course, a hotel wasn’t exactly the typical subject for such protests but it was more so directed at the family who owned it: Hamid. They were an invisible super-power in Cairo, in Egypt even. Everyone knew of them but very few knew them. After all, in the outside world their influence didn’t extend much further than slightly panicked intelligence organisations.

Jonathan Pine had walked through the crowded streets to get inside, purposefully starting his shift early with the thought that they might need his help. He wasn’t wrong. Almost instantly he’d been directed to help calm down the guests, including one lady who’d called front desk from her room and another who kept demanding they fixed it… as if a protest could just be ‘fixed’ by a simple hotel manager.

Then, he saw you. Simply standing there and looking out at the protesting crowd with furrowed brows. He’d signed you in when you’d first arrived and helped to get your bags up to your room so he remembered you relatively well.

Excusing himself from his current conversation with a complaining guest, Jonathan made his way over to you. “Believe me, [title], this hotel is the safest place right now,” he said, a line he’d been repeating to almost everyone in the past ten minutes. It was an attempt to soothe the chaos, even if just a little bit.