Chapter 50 :

4:30 p.m.

Anvaya's POV

"I thought you were ignoring us," Nitya said, her tone caught between accusation and something softer. She slid my Starbucks across the table toward me, her nails tapping once against the plastic lid before she let go.

I tried to lighten the moment with a small chuckle. "Why would I ignore you? We’ve been texting pretty often."

She gave me a look, one of those don’t start with me looks, before rolling her eyes. "Texting and calling can’t replace meeting face-to-face. You’ve been gone more than a month now, Ani. A whole month without seeing you."

Her voice wavered, and I could hear it—this wasn’t anger. This was disappointment layered over longing. She wasn’t mad that I hadn’t made time for them. She was hurt. Hurt that the threads that bound us together had loosened since I’d moved out.

She wasn’t wrong.

Since leaving, I hadn’t met up with them even once. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was that my life had shifted so violently off its axis that I barely knew how to navigate it anymore.

And that shift had one name.

Him.

He had stepped into my world, rearranged it without asking, and somehow made me forget so many things that used to matter. And the strangest part was… I didn’t hate him for it.

When this began, my heart had held only one wish—for him to disappear, or better yet, to die. But now… things weren’t that simple.

I lowered my gaze to the table. "I’m sorry. I was… busy taking care of his health—"

"Do you feel for him?"

The words landed like a blade in the center of my chest.

My eyes flew to Mimi. She didn’t even blink. Her gaze was steady, assessing, almost clinical in its sharpness. She wasn’t guessing—she was confirming.

Maybe she’d already seen the truth in my silences. My best friends knew me too well.

My throat felt tight, as if my own body refused to let me speak.

Denying it would have been easier if it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. Accepting it… that would make it real, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.

"Tell me, Anvaya. Do you feel for him?"

The sound of my real name left no room for evasion.

My lips parted, but nothing came out. I looked away, knowing full well that my silence had already given me away.

The air thickened between us until Mimi sighed and leaned forward.

"I don’t care who you like or love, Ani. If he’s good to you, if he treats you well, if he loves you—that’s all I care about. But he’s married. And you know what happens when a single woman falls for a married man." Her voice dipped, the last words cutting into me. "She’s branded. Homewrecker. Second choice. And… a whore."

I flinched, not because the words were cruel, but because I had already whispered them to myself countless times. It was different hearing them from her lips—real, undeniable, stripped of the protective layer of denial I’d wrapped around them.

"I can tolerate anything for you," Mimi continued, "except your downfall. I can’t watch you break again. After Leon… I prayed you’d never see nights like those again."

Her eyes glistened with the memory.

Those nights—those cursed nights—still lived under my skin. They were invisible, but they moved. They crawled. They waited for moments of weakness to sink their claws into me.

A shiver slid down my spine.

"Please, Ani," Nitya said softly, placing her hand over both of ours. "We just don’t want history to repeat itself."

I looked at her.

It wasn’t only my suffering they feared. It was the ending. The part where I’d almost let my own demons win. The part where they had to pull me back into life.

My chest tightened, heavy and aching, as though someone had bound stones to my ribs.

"We’ll always support you," Nitya added, "but if it comes to protecting you, we might stand against your decision. For your own good."

I nodded, the motion small. "I know."

"But how? How did you fall for that man?"

The question hit me like cold water.

I didn’t know.

Love never knocks. It doesn’t ask. It just appears, slow and quiet at first, until you realize you’re drowning in it and you can’t remember how to swim.

He was cold, but never distant. Not a gentleman, yet he never looked at me as if I were disposable. There was obsession in his gaze, yes—but layered beneath it was something I didn’t dare name.

He never crossed certain lines, yet his touch left permanent marks in my memory. His words were few, but they made me feel… seen. As if I belonged somewhere. Maybe… to him.

I didn’t know if it was love or some shadow of it. But I knew it wasn’t the kind people wrote about in pretty, sunlit books.

It was love in the dark. Love for someone who barely stepped into the light.

The first time I’d met him, his presence was an unwelcome intrusion. Now, it was the only presence that felt like home.

But was I mistaking the absence of loneliness for love? The rare warmth in his eyes? His touches? His kisses?

I didn’t know.

What I did know was that I loved him.

And he was married. My stalker.

It would have been wrong if it was just me, loving him from a distance. But he had pulled me in. Claimed me without a word.

Somewhere deep down, my heart believed he’d keep it safe. But how could I tell him? What if he threw me away? What if Viola found out?

Should I hate myself? Or should I surrender to this?

"Anvaya."

I blinked, pulling myself back to the present.

"Huh?"

"We asked you something," Mimi said. "Where were you?"

"I… I don’t know how I fell, but I did. He never forced himself on me. He gave me comfort. He’s not like David. I was searching for someone like David, and somehow I found him instead." My voice was barely there.

"I’m scared," I admitted. "If I confess, what if he rejects me? What if his wife comes after me? I can’t lose what I’ve built."

Mimi squeezed my shoulder. "You can’t choose who you love, Ani. But he’s married. And that’s not something we can ignore. We can't support a relationship built from cheating."

Nitya tilted her head. "Something must have happened between you two. Right?"

My breath hitched.

How could I tell them? About the stalking, the way he had shadowed me. About the stolen moments, the kisses that shouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t risk the disappointment in their eyes.

"I don’t know," I said, "I need some time to think." And left it there.

•

7:05 p.m.

The door closed behind me with a dull, final thud that echoed through the room like the sealing of a coffin.

I walked toward the bed slowly, mechanically, as though my body no longer belonged to me—as though I were merely trapped inside it, forced to drag around the weight of a life I no longer understood. My knees hit the mattress and I collapsed forward without grace, without strength, without the energy to even care how broken I looked.

I was exhausted.

Not the kind of exhaustion sleep could cure.

This was deeper. Rotting. Bone-deep fatigue that came from carrying too many fears for too long. The kind that hollowed you out from the inside until even breathing felt like labor.

Career or love.

Friends or desire.

Safety or him.

Every choice felt like betrayal. Every path ended with me losing something I couldn’t survive without.

Fear slithered beneath my skin like poison, gnawing through every fragile thread holding me together. It lived in my chest now—heavy and alive—curling tighter whenever I thought about the future, about him, about myself.

My nose burned sharply, warning me of the tears gathering behind my eyes.

I pressed my lips together, trying to stop them.

Trying to stay strong.

But strength had abandoned me a long time ago.

The tears came anyway—slow at first, then hotter—slipping silently across my temples and disappearing into my hair as I stared blankly at the ceiling above me. The room felt too large. Too quiet. Like it was swallowing me whole.

I wanted to disappear.

Not die.

Just… vanish.

Become nothing for a little while. No expectations. No fear. No aching need clawing inside my chest every time Kaaryaksh looked at me.

The first time I had loved someone, it turned into a nightmare that still bled inside me.

Love had stripped me raw, left scars no one could see.

And the second time…

The second time, I had fallen for someone far more dangerous.

Someone untouchable to the world yet capable of reaching directly into me and tearing apart every wall I had spent years building.

Kaaryaksh.

A man people feared before they even understood him.

A man who carried darkness around him like a second skin.

And somehow, impossibly, terrifyingly—he had chosen me.

The thought alone made my chest tighten painfully.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

I—

The door to my room opened.

The sound sliced through the silence so suddenly that I jerked upright, my pulse stumbling violently inside my throat.

My eyes snapped toward the doorway.

Kaaryaksh stood there.

For a moment, neither of us moved.

His tie hung loose around his neck, half undone like he had tried to breathe and failed. The top buttons of his shirt were open, exposing the tense line of his throat. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms, veins visible beneath tan skin, while strands of dark hair fell messily across his forehead as though he had run his hands through it too many times.

But it was his face that made something uneasy twist inside me.

He looked exhausted.

Not physically.

Worse.

There was something dimmed in his eyes tonight—something dangerously quiet. The sharp cruelty people feared in him seemed muted beneath a heavy, suffocating weariness that made him look almost human.

Almost breakable.

And somehow that frightened me more.

“Come with me,” he said.

His voice came out rough, low, scraped raw like he hadn’t spoken in hours.

I frowned, quickly wiping at my cheeks. “Where?”

He didn’t answer.

Not even a flicker of expression.

Instead, he walked toward me with slow, deliberate steps until he stood close enough for me to feel the heat radiating from his body.

Then his fingers closed around my wrist.

Not violently.

But firmly enough to make it clear I wasn’t being given a choice.

He pulled me to my feet.

My breath caught as he led me toward the door, his strides long and fast, forcing me to keep up.

Something was wrong.

The tension rolling off him was suffocating.

“Kaaryaksh,” I said carefully, trying to match his pace, “where are you taking me?”

Silence.

Only the sound of our footsteps echoing through the hallway.

My heartbeat began to quicken.

“Answer me.”

Nothing.

His jaw tightened slightly, but he kept walking as though he hadn’t heard me at all.

Fear crawled higher inside my chest.

I tugged weakly against his grip. “You’re hurting me.”

He stopped so abruptly that I nearly crashed into him. My body collided lightly with his back and I hissed softly, stumbling a step away.

For a second, the hallway went completely still.

Then he turned his head slightly.

Just enough for me to see the sharp edge of his profile.

His eyes dropped to my wrist.

The skin beneath his fingers had reddened.

Something flickered across his face then—brief and unreadable. Guilt maybe. Or restraint hanging by its final thread.

Slowly, his grip loosened.

Gentler this time.

But he still didn’t let go.

And without another word, he continued walking.

I stared at the side of his face as we moved through the mansion’s endless corridors. Shadows stretched across the marble floors while dim lights painted harsh gold across his features, making him look even colder. More dangerous.

Yet beneath that danger, I could feel it—something unraveling inside him.

Something unstable.

“I trust you,” I whispered quietly.

The words left me before I could stop them.

And maybe that was the most terrifying thing of all.

Because I did.

Even now.

Even when every instinct warned me not to.

I wanted to say more. Wanted to ask what was happening, why he looked like he was carrying the weight of something unbearable tonight.

But the words died inside me.

We crossed the ground floor in silence, his pace never slowing.

Servants lowered their heads the moment they saw him coming. No one spoke. No one even breathed too loudly. The air itself seemed afraid of him.

Then suddenly—he turned toward the west wing.

My steps faltered instantly.

Cold dread flooded my veins so fast it made me dizzy.

The west wing.

A part of the mansion wrapped in silence and unspoken rules.

No one went there.

No one talked about it.

The servants avoided even looking in that direction. And whenever I had once asked about it, the fear on their faces had been enough to silence me forever.

Yet now, Kaaryaksh was taking me there.

Why?

My breathing turned uneven as we approached the dark corridor leading toward it. The lights grew dimmer here. The air colder. Every step felt wrong, like walking deeper into the mouth of something waiting to consume us whole.

My mind raced violently.

What was hidden there?

Why had he forbidden everyone from entering?

And why—why was he bringing me now?

A terrible thought suddenly slipped into my mind.

What if this was the moment everything changed?

What if trusting him had been my greatest mistake?

But even as fear clawed through me, another emotion rose beside it—equally dangerous.

Need.

Because despite the terror, despite the darkness surrounding him, some broken part of me still wanted to follow him anywhere.

Even into hell.