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book, continued not out of habit but because it was correct, the identity-not-habit distinction he had been thinking about on Sunday. He handed the package to Lior.

"Go home, Elias."

"I am home."

Lior looked at him.

"Yes," Elias said.

Lior turned and walked to the door, out into the street. Elias watched him move along the pavement with the slow, specific walk of a man who was seventy-three, walking slowly, not pretending otherwise, walking in the way of someone who had somewhere to go and was going

there, for whom the speed of the going was not the point. He watched him all the way to the corner. Lior did not look back.

Elias went back to the counter. He sat down, picked up the book he was reading, found his page, and read.

* * *

A customer came in at 15:30.

She was looking for something for her son, who was eleven and who had been reading everything he could find about maps. Elias thought about the shelf in the back left where the navigational texts were.

The navigational texts were for the people who came in knowing what they were looking for. The boy was eleven and he was looking for maps, and he did not yet know what he was looking for, which was not maps.

"I have something." He took her to the back left, took down the book that was the book for an eleven-year-old reading everything he could find about maps, and said, "This one. The first three chapters are about maps. The rest is about what maps are for."

She read the back cover.

"He will like this," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She paid and left with the book and the second book she had seen on the way out, the one she had picked up and said, "This one too," which was the correct additional book.

He watched her go, went back to the counter, and read.

* * *

The afternoon light moved across the floor as it did in a room with an east-facing window in late October, slowly, the quality of light in the season when the days were shortening, making itself more present by being less available.

He noted this.

He had been noting things since Tuesday.

He had been doing a different accounting. For thirty years the accounting had been the operational accounting, which was: what do I have, what do I know, what does the situation require, what is the intersection of those three things. The operational accounting was the

accounting of someone who was in the middle of a situation and who was managing the middle. It was not the wrong accounting. It was the accounting for the middle.

He was not in the middle anymore.

The accounting he was doing was the other kind, which was: the water in the morning. The cheese from the market stall. The quality of the October light at 16:00 in a room with an east-facing window. The character in the book who was about to make the wrong decision and did not know it.

He was noting a great deal.

He had been in the middle for thirty years, and a great deal accumulated in the world while he was there, things that did not require managin

g but that rewarded noting.

The shop was empty and quiet, the light moving across the floor as it did in late afternoon, and he was still there, still reading. The phone on the counter did not ring. He noted this. It did not ring.

* * *

It did not ring in the evening.

He closed the shop at 18:30.

He turned off the lights. He locked the door.

He stood on the pavement outside the shop for a moment. The street was doing what it did at 18:30 on a Thursday in October, the end of the day's work, people going home, a bicycle, a woman with a bag from the market. He had been watching this street since Tuesday and was still finding it interesting, the specific quality of a street you have chosen to be in rather than one you have ended up in.

He walked along the water.

He had been looking at water for a long time. The apartment in the unnamed city during the eleven hours. The Nicosia station window. The Lisbon terrace. The Mediterr

anean from the Argonautis deck.



He

had looked at it o

n Farideh's behalf. S

he had been inside the cabin with the blanket and he had looked at the water from the helm.

W

ate

r does not ask anything of you.

I have been looking at it from windows that required things of me. He thought: I am now looking at it from a street that does not.

He went home.

He ate something he had bought from the market two streets from the shop. He had been going to the market on Tuesdays and Fridays. The woman at the cheese stall had learned his preference on the second Friday and had put the correct thing aside for him on the third Friday without be

ing asked. He had thought,

t

his is what continuity looks like.

He read for an hour.

He put the book down at 22:00 with the page marked.

He thought about the page and the character he had been reading, in the middle of a decision at the end of the chapter. The decision was going to go the wrong way. The character did not know this. He was going to read to find out what happens when the decision goes wrong and how the character becomes the person who made that decision and lives in the world after it. This was what the book was for.

He went to bed.

He slept the whole night through.

* * *

In the morning he got up.

He made coffee.

He walked to the shop along the water.

The water in the morning was the water in the morning in October at this latitude, which was: the light coming off the surface at the angle that early morning produced at this time of year, which was the low angle of a sun that had not yet climbed and that was illuminating the surface rather than the depth. He had been watching this since Tuesday. He thought he would watch it until spring and see what it did.

He opened the shop.

He arranged the new books that had come in the previous afternoon while he had been reading.

He made coffee and stood at the counter.

The phone did not ring that day either.

He read. A customer came in. He helped her.

She left with the book.

He read.

* * *

He read.

EPILOGUE

An Ordinary Tuesday.

2029.

YOUSEF. TEHRAN. AGE 22.

The agricultural subsidies bill passed by four votes on a Wednesday afternoon in October.

Yousef sat in the chamber afterward when everyone else had gone. The lights were still on. The building smelled of new paint and old argument, the specific combination of a space that had been built quickly and was already accumulating history. He had been in this chamber for eight months. He had voted on forty-one pieces of legislation. He had sponsored three bills, of which one had passed, one had been referred to committee, and one had been quietly killed by a procedural maneuver he was still learning to recognize before it happened.

He sat with his hands on the tab

le in front of him and thought,

this is what it is for.

Not the rooftop in March 2026. Not the basement in Tehran with a retired operative who had done more terrible things than either of them had named out loud. Not the fourteen minutes in the parliamentary corridor when he had recognized two faces that should not have been there and had to decide what to do with that knowledge before the session began.

Four votes on a bill about farmers.

He turned off the lights when he left. He walked home. It took twenty-two minutes and he passed the building on Mirdamad Boulevard where his family had lived, where he had stood on the roof in the dark and watched missiles arc over the city toward countries he had never visited. The building looked the same as it always had. His family did not live there anymore. His mother had moved to a smaller apartment near his sister's house in Karaj after his father died, which had been before the war and was therefore not the war's fault, though the war had made it harder to grieve properly because there was too much else requiring attention.

He stopped outside the building for a moment. He looked at it. Then he went home.

He slept without dreaming for the third night in a row, which was not yet a pattern but was becoming one, and which he was careful not to acknowledge too directly in case acknowledging it made it stop.

* * *

FARIDEH. SHIRAZ. AGE 28.

She had two students whose papers she genuinely looked forward to reading.

This surprised her every time she thought about it. She had expected to be a decent teacher. She had not expected to be the kind of teacher who found herself thinking about a student's argument at seven in the morning while making coffee, turning it over, finding the seam in it, wanting to be in the classroom again to push on the seam and see what the student did. She had not expected that.

She taught political theory on Tuesdays and Thursdays and ran a seminar on post-revolutionary governance on Friday mornings. The cafeteria knew her coffee order without asking. One colleague was also a friend, which was not the same as a colleague who was merely friendly, and the distinction mattered now in a way it had not before she understood how rare the first kind was.

Her brother's room door remained slightly open. She had not moved anything. Passing it ten times a day, she looked every time and had stopped pretending to herself that she did not.

On a Tuesday in November she was walking between buildings on the university campus when a student she did not know stopped her. "Are you the one who stopped the thing in the Gulf of Oman," he said. She looked at him for a moment. He was nineteen, with the specific directness of someone who had looked something up and wanted to confirm it.

"Where did you read that?

" she said.

"It is in three places if you know where to look," he said.

"The official record says it was a coordinated naval response," she said.

"I know what the official record says," he said.

She looked at him for another moment. "Come to my office hours on Thursday. Bring the three places."

He came and brought them. She read them carefully. Two were wrong in their details and one was wrong in its conclusions but correct in its instinct, the most dangerous kind of wrong because it was the kind that eventually became right.

"W

hat do you want to do with this?

" she said.

"Understand it," he said.

"Then sit down. This is going to take longer than office hours."

He sat down. She closed the door. Outside, the campus went about its Tuesday.

* * *

LYLA

. A CITY SHE DOES NOT NAME. AGE 36.

She filed the last report on a Monday at midnight.

She sat in the dark for a while after she sent it. The room she was sitting in did not have a name any more than the organization she worked for had a public name, but it had a window, and through the window she could see a street where the early-morning delivery trucks were beginning to move. She watched one of them for a while. A man in overalls was unloading crates of produce outside a restaurant that would not open for another four hours. He worked steadily and without urgency, which is the pace of someone who has a fixed amount of work to do and has correctly estimated how long it will take.

She opened the laptop again. She had closed it twice already and opened it again twice already. She recognized this as a pattern she had when she was not ready to stop, and she sat with it for a moment, and then she accepted it, and she opened the document she had never shown anyone.

She read the one line sh

e had written earlier

.

We were right and it cost us everything and we would do it again.

She read it twice. Then she added one line beneath it.

The second line said:

It was worth it. I know this now. I did not know it then.

She closed the laptop. She sat in the dark for a while longer. The delivery man outside had finished with the crates and was back in his truck, idling, checking something on his phone before he moved to the next stop. She watched the truck pull away. She watched the street after it was gone.

Then she went to bed. She set her alarm for seven. She slept.

In the morning she got up and she went back to work.

This was also what it looked like from the inside. Not a resolution. A continuation. The same person, slightly changed, at the same desk, in the same dark, doing the same work. Staying because someone had to stay and she was the one who knew how.

* * *

ELIAS. A COASTAL CITY. AGE 60.

He opened the shop at eight.

The light through the east-facing window on a Tuesday in November was the same light that had come through the east-facing window in Lisbon in October, approximately, if you adjusted for latitude and season and the specific quality of the sky over this coast, different from the Tagus coast but not so different that you could not feel the connection. He had not expected to feel the connection. He felt it anyway.

He made coffee. He arranged three books that had arrived the previous afternoon, placing them on the shelf in the position that made the most sense to him, which was not alphabetical and not by subject but by the order in which he imagined a person might need them, moving from one to the next with the logic of a mind following a question. This was how he had always arranged shelves. He had spent six years trying to understand whether it was a gift or a compulsion and had arrived at the conclusion that the distinction did not matter.

A customer came in at nine-fifteen. A woman he did not know, carrying a canvas bag and looking at the shelves with the specific attention of someone who reads seriously. He let her look. After ten minutes she brought two books to the counter. He wrapped them the way he always wrapped books, in brown paper, folded at the corners.

"Do you recommend either of these," she said.

"The one on the left. The other one is good, but the one on the left will stay with you," he said.

"How long?

" she said.

"I read it four years ago and I still think about it on Tuesdays," he said.

She smiled and paid and left. He watched her go. Then he went back to his counter and sat down and picked up his own book and found his page.

The phone on the counter did not ring that morning.

It did not ring in the afternoon.

At six he closed the shop and walked home along the water.

The evening was cold and clear,

and the sea was doing what the sea does in November, which is to make itself known without being asked. He walked the long way, which added twelve minutes and took him past a bakery that was closing for the night, the owner pulling the metal shutter down with the practiced motion of someone who has done it ten thousand times.

He went home. He ate. He read for two hours. He went to bed.

In the morning he got up and he went back to the shop and he opened it.

The phone did not ring that day either.

* * *

In Tehran, the parliament was in session.

In Shiraz, a classroom was filling with students who had grown up under a government that no longer existed and were learning, for the first time, what to do with that.

In Ankara, a tea house that had been operating since 1886 was open for business. The same man who had been making tea there for twenty-two years made the tea. He opened the shutters. He waited for the first customer.

On Mottahari Street in Tehran, a pharmacist unlocked her shutters at seven in the morning. She went inside. She turned on the lights. She began taking inventory. She had done this every morning for nineteen years, including the mornings when it was dangerous to open and the mornings when there was nothing on the shelves worth inventorying and the mornings after the nights when the sky over the city had been lit by things that were not stars.

She took inventory. She waited for the first customer. The first customer arrived at seven-twenty and needed something for a cough that had been going on for a week. She told him what to take and how often and sent him on his way.

The city continued. The world continued. It was not the same world it had been in January 2020 when a drone fired over Baghdad and a chain of consequence ran through six years of escalation, war, and loss to this specific Tuesday morning in 2029, when four people who had carried the weight of it were putting it down quietly, without ceremony, in four different cities, in the way people put things down when they had finally been allowed to.

Not all at once. Not with a feeling of completion. Simply, the weight, present for so long it had become part of the body, was slightly less today than it had been yesterday, and would be slightly less tomorrow. This was not healing. It was something more ordinary and more durable than healing.

It was Tuesday.

The Soleimani Effect began with a drone strike on January 3, 2020.

It ended on a Tuesday in 2029 when four people went to work and the phone did not ring.

Everything in between was the cost of the world that survived.

END

THE SOLEIMANI EFFECT

THE SHAHEEN

Book One: The War America Started. The Fire No One Can Stop.

Book Two: They Killed the General. Now the World Pays.

Book Three: The Iran War

.

Operation Epic Fury

.

Khamenei Files and The Soleimani Effect

.

REVIEW REQUEST

Dear Reader,

You finished the book. That means more to me than you know.

THE SOLEIMANI EFFECT was not an easy story to write. It is not an easy story to read. It is the war the world is living right now, told through the people history forgets to name

,

the analyst whose report was buried, the young woman used as a weapon without knowing it, the retired operative who could not stop being who he was trained to be.

If this story stayed with you

,

if you found yourself thinking about Elias, or Farideh, or Yousef, or

Lyla

in the hours after you put it down

,

I am asking you for one thing.

Leave a review.

Please consider leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Whether one sentence or several paragraphs, your review helps other readers discover the story

Not a long one. Not a perfect one. Just your honest words about what this book meant to you. A single sentence is enough. A paragraph is a gift.

Reviews are how readers who have never heard of this book find it. Every review is another person who gets to ask the questions this story asks. Every review keeps this story alive.

You can leave your review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you purchased the book. It takes two minutes. It matters more than you know.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for staying until the last page. Thank you for being the kind of reader this book was written for.

With gratitude,

Jaden Akin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel required understanding real events that are still unfolding, operations that are still classified, and the interior lives of people who will never speak publicly about what they did. Where the record was available, I used it. Where it was not, I used the knowledge of how these institutions work, how the people who serve them think, and what the specific moral texture of this kind of work produces in the people who do it.

Every analyst who filed a report that was buried. Every officer who made a decision without authorization because the authorization chain was too slow. Every asset who was left behind. Every pharmacist who opened the door at 7 AM. This is for the work you did that will not be in the files.

The Shaheen

series

would not exist with

out the foundational work of YPN

Intern

ational and Media LLC

, whose editorial standards and commitment to authentic human voice made this series possible.

The events in this novel are drawn from public record. The intelligence assessments, the operational decisions, the geopolitical

model,

these are as accurate as an unclassified account can be. The mistakes are mine.

The files will be unsealed in 2076. I look forward to being wrong about the things I got wrong.



Jaden Akin

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaden Akin is an international bestselling author whose work explores the choices, ambitions, and moral dilemmas that shape the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. His stories dive deep into family, community, and the often-unseen pressures that define who we become, capturing the tension between personal dreams and responsibilities to those we love.

Akin’s storytelling is rooted in authenticity, drawing from the

real-life

experiences

, challenges, and triumphs of life

across the world

. He examines how ambition, loyalty, and greed can collide, how love and sacrifice are weighed against opportunity, and how small decisions ripple into transformative consequences. What sets his work apart is the way it intertwines heart, realism, and suspense, creating narratives that feel intensely familiar yet impossible to put down.

He writes from different parts of the world, observing the patterns, choices, and social dynamics that influence daily life. Through his work, readers are invited to reflect on their own decisions, the boundaries of loyalty, and the courage required to pursue a future without abandoning the people who depend on them.