Chapter 52 :

Anvaya's POV

I stood still, staring at the girl.

She had blue, upturned eyes and thin lips—the most striking details etched into her face. Something about her seemed carved too perfectly, as though the artist had been unwilling to let even a single flaw touch her features. Yet what unsettled me most wasn’t her beauty but the gnawing familiarity.

I had seen her before. Not here, not in this moment, but somewhere in my memory, like a ghost of a dream I couldn’t fully recall.

She looked familiar. Too familiar. Yet the name refused to come.

Who was she?

My chest tightened, my heartbeat quickened with each second of silence.

His first love?

Was she?

“Viola Dokuhana Moriyard.” His voice rang slow, deep, almost deliberate, and his footfalls came just behind me.

My eyes widened instantly, the name striking me like a bell.

“It’s her?” My words fell from my lips, fragile and breathless.

He hummed, a sound that confirmed and condemned all at once.

And then, everything came crashing on me.

The way her painted eyes seemed to hold an unreadable something whenever they lingered on Kaaryaksh… the way her lips curved with a quiet, knowing tenderness… the way she existed on the canvas not just as a figure, but as a memory.

So it was true. She was his first love.

Then what happened? What tore them apart so deeply that she was confined only to paint and strokes of pigment?

And if she had been his first, why me? What happened that made him pull me into his life, stake his claim on me? Did he truly stop loving her? Or was I only standing in a shadow, one that would never let me breathe freely?

The questions hammered inside me, ruthless, unanswered, and I wanted—God, I wanted—to turn to him and demand everything. But my eyes refused to leave the painting.

Did he smile like that for her? That gentle lift at the corner of his lips, that softness in his gaze? Because with me, he never smiled. Not once. His eyes were always steel—cold, impenetrable, distant. He claimed me, possessed me, tethered me to his world, but he never gave me that softness.

The girl in the painting had received something I had never touched.

The thought stung like shards pressing into skin.

His hand came to mine suddenly, firm, unyielding, pulling me away from the canvas and leading me to the other side of the room.

I followed, silent, my heart drowning under the realization that I might never truly mean much to him. He had smiled for her, even if he wanted me now. Maybe I was nothing more than a fixation, a fleeting obsession. Someday, perhaps, this intensity would fade, and he would cast me away too.

The ache in my chest deepened until it burned. My throat tightened. My eyes stung with unshed tears, but I bit them back, sniffing away the fragile crack in my voice.

Don’t cry. Not now. Not before him.

I shouldn't expect anything because I was wrong too. This whole thing was an… extra marital affair.

Maybe I had been a fool all along—foolish enough to believe he would stay with me always, give me his name, give me everything. Maybe I had grown selfish in the scraps he offered me. Maybe I was never meant to belong to him.

The thought was a blade. It cut deep, and it hurt—God, it hurt.

Blink. Don’t cry. Not now.

And then, we stopped in front of another wall.

At first, I thought the paintings there were the same. But as I looked closer, my breath hitched. They were not the same—no, they were similar, yet with one subtle, devastating difference.

The family was being looked at not from within but from a distance. A watcher’s perspective. A stranger’s. The painted family laughed, smiled at one another with warmth, but there was something else—an intruder. A fourth shadow.

My eyes narrowed. There were three people in the painting, yet four shadows stretching across the floor.

Why?

The fourth shadow didn’t belong. It lingered, cornered at the edges of their world. Existing, but never embraced. Present, but never significant.

“What do you see now?” his voice cut through me.

“A fourth shadow,” I whispered, my throat dry. “It exists out of choice but… it looks as if cornered.”

“That’s me.”

I turned sharply to him, startled, my brows furrowed in confusion. But he only stared at the painting, his face unreadable.

“What do you mean?”

“The shadow,” he said, his tone eerily calm, “it’s me.”

“What?” My voice faltered. “Then who was that boy?”

“My elder brother.”

I froze. My mind went blank, my lips parted.

He had a brother? An elder one? Then why… why had I never known? Why had he never mentioned him?

“Who’s he?” My question came out barely above a whisper.

The room seemed to close in around me. Too many puzzles. Too many missing pieces. And all of them—every answer—were in his hands.

“You know him.” His eyes found mine, dark and unrelenting. “A lot.”

My chest tightened. I shook my head slowly, confusion lacing my expression.

How could I know his elder brother?

“I don’t understand.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets, leaning closer, his lips grazing my ear as he whispered, “David Ashford. Neurologist. First date. Remember?”

I froze.

The air left my lungs. My heart hammered violently, threatening to break through my ribs.

David.

David was his brother?

But—

“He’s not thirty-one. He’s thirty-eight. Our parents were from Kingston Upon Hull. They never loved each other. My mother's British and father's Indian. Aristocrats, chasing power and control. They married for dominance, not for romance. They built their empire together, nothing else.” His words were sharp, slicing through everything I thought I knew.

This explained why he looked so Indian, yet not someone very much like that. He was half Indian, half British.

Even after he straightened, his voice continued to echo inside me.

The man I thought had been a dream, a savior, wasn’t even close to pure.

David lied. Lied about his age, his life, his story.

So what was real? Was anything real?

All the trust he had asked from me, the time I had given him, the care he had shown—fake? Lures, traps, manipulations?

But why? For what?

Why me?

He acted so good that it felt so real. It felt too real to even accept it now that I was just being fooled. Those eyes, that softness and gentleness—were fake?

The realization suffocated me. My throat closed, and every scar inside me tore open again.

“I was never their perfect son. While he shone, I was average. He was strong; I was silent.” Kaaryaksh’s voice came from behind me. Slowly, I turned to face him.

And there it was.

His eyes.

The rawness. The turmoil. His gaze flickered, stripped of armor. For once, he wasn’t stone or steel—he was human, bleeding behind walls no one had ever seen.

“They took your silence for weakness,” I whispered. It wasn’t a question. I knew it.

He didn’t answer. He only looked at me, and silence spoke more than words ever could.

“And what more?” My voice trembled as I took a hesitant step toward him.

He reached for my hand—firm, warm—and led me to the next painting.

A burning swing.

It hung by iron chains, suspended in darkness, and flames devoured it whole. Orange-blue fire swayed violently, desperate to burn everything around it. The silence of the painting only amplified the screams hidden in those strokes.

The next canvas froze me.

A boy, early twenties, dressed in black pants and a white shirt, crumbled on the floor. His hands gripped his head, his body curled in on itself. And from his back—white wings. Tall, magnificent, aching to fly. But something unseen, something invisible, bound them. Tethered him to the ground.

The third painting showed the sea. Against a sky of air-force blue, the water itself burned—fierce orange flames consuming the waves. Water, the eternal quencher, on fire. The irony clawed at my chest.

Next came two pieces that unraveled me further.

A young boy, standing before a door of light. He wore a white shirt, black shorts. His eyes lowered to the lifeless wooden floor. Yet his long shadow stretched behind him, and there—two vast wings rose from it. Not from him, but from the shadow.

Perhaps the truth of who he was lingered only in what others could never see. The physical self was the mask. The shadow was the soul.

And in the next—his bare back. The wings were gone, torn away. Only remnants clung to his skin, bleeding light. Behind him, soft radiance touched him like a mourning hymn.

My fingers trembled as they traced the edges of the canvas, brushing the scars of his wings.

And I realized—they mirrored my life too.

Was Kaaryaksh truly someone beyond what I saw? Was he only the mask he chose to show me? Or was he more—more fragile, more broken, more real than I could comprehend?

Did villains have their own stories? Or had we been wrong to name them villains at all?

I moved forward, compelled, desperate to know more.

And then—him.

A man in a black suit, surrounded by a blurry crowd, yet his was the only figure carved with clarity.

Kaaryaksh Oberoi.

The ruler. The untouchable.

My breath caught. My body stiffened.

“It’s me,” he said. “Who rules. The boy once called weak, now rules those who laughed.”

A shiver tore through me. The man in the painting wasn’t just a man—he was a force, a storm, an empire.

He was the ruler. And the world had made him so.

But then, an oddity.

A man in a room, bathed in golden rays spilling through glass. A shadow of himself, hazy, fever-dreamlike.

“It’s so… odd,” I murmured.

“You’ll understand the oddness when you know everything,” he replied.

My pulse quickened. Fear crept into me—not of him, but of what I might find within him. Because if I uncovered everything, if I saw him raw, bare, true—would I survive knowing? Or would it unravel me too?

That night was digging up the past.

And then—the last two paintings.

A tall shadow, masculine, glorious. And a single letter, K, painted in white. The boy’s once-white wings had turned black, fiercer, stronger. The cruelty of the world had forged its consequence—Kaaryaksh Oberoi.

Cold filled my body.

He had been remade. Scarred into power. Shaped into silence. Crafted into a sinner too clean for the world to accuse. They had birthed his demons. They had awakened them. And unlike most, he controlled them.

And then.

“Come here,” his voice called.

I turned slowly, my steps faltering against the cold floor as though the ground itself had begun resisting me.

The air inside the room felt different now.

Heavier.

Like the walls had been holding their breath for centuries, waiting for this exact moment to arrive.

My own breathing had turned shallow, uneven, each inhale scraping against my chest. A quiet tremor crawled beneath my skin—the kind born not from fear alone, but from the dreadful instinct that something irreversible was waiting ahead.

Something I would never be able to unknow once I saw it.

After everything he had shown me moments ago, my mind was already struggling to hold itself together. Thoughts collided violently inside my head, fragments refusing to settle into understanding. I needed time. Time to comprehend whether I was truly grasping the depth of what stood hidden beneath all this silence.

But the room did not give me time.

My eyes lifted—and landed on the pillar.

It stood tall at the center of the chamber like a sacred monument, bathed in molten golden light spilling from somewhere above. The glow wrapped around the stone surface in warm ribbons, illuminating every carved edge with haunting softness.

And my heart stopped.

Not slowed.

Stopped.

The pillar was covered in paintings.

No—not merely paintings.

Memories.

Obsessions.

Fragments of someone seen through worship.

My feet moved before my mind could command them. Slowly, almost unwillingly, I walked closer, my pulse climbing into my throat with every step.

The first painting came into view.

A girl beneath sunlight.

Brown eyes glimmering under golden rays, soft and alive, as if the painter had somehow captured warmth itself inside them. Her lips curved faintly—not quite a smile, not quite sadness—while sunlight poured across her skin like liquid gold.

Her hair flew wildly around her face, tangled by the wind, touched by strands of light so delicate they looked heaven-spun.

Around her bloomed tiger lilies soaked in the glow of dusk, their petals burning orange beneath the fading sky. Behind her stretched a forest drowned in golden hour light, every branch and shadow painted with aching tenderness.

The girl had no face.

And yet—something inside me recoiled.

Because she felt familiar.

Terrifyingly familiar.

My breath caught sharply.

I stepped closer to the next painting.

A girl standing near a window.

Her face hidden beneath cascading strands of brown hair as she tilted her head upward toward the light. Thin curtains billowed around her, restless in the breeze, while sunlight filtered through them in pale streams, touching her figure with ghostly softness.

The room in the painting looked lonely.

Quiet enough to hear sorrow breathing.

Above her hung a moon painted against darkness—but beneath it were two reflections, trembling upon water in opposite directions.

One moved left.

The other right.

As though two versions of the same soul were drifting away from each other.

A strange chill crawled down my spine.

My fingers twitched at my sides.

I moved again.

Slower this time.

Almost afraid of what waited next.

And then I saw the last painting.

The world around me seemed to disappear.

A girl stood by the sea.

Her gown flowed violently around her legs, caught in the ocean wind, the fabric appearing almost alive beneath the brushstrokes. Her hair lashed wildly behind her like dark waves colliding against the storm.

She stood with her back toward the ocean.

Toward the endless horizon.

Her body tilted ever so slightly, swaying as though the sea itself were calling her closer.

Faceless.

Still faceless.

Yet unbearably—horrifyingly—
familiar.

The sound of waves seemed to echo inside my ears despite the room being silent.

I stared at the paintings again.

And then again.

My chest tightened painfully.

Every single one carried the same invisible thread.

Golden sunlight.

Soft sorrow.

And one girl.

Always one girl.

The realization rose inside me slowly at first, like something crawling out of dark water.

Then it struck all at once.

Violently.

Brutally.

My breath hitched.

My stomach twisted so hard it hurt.

No.

No—

Was she…me?

The thought exploded through my mind like thunder.

Loud enough to drown every other sound.

Terrifying enough to make my entire body go cold.

Because suddenly every detail became unbearable.

The brown hair.

The shape of her shoulders.

The way loneliness clung to her in every painting like a curse.

It felt less like someone had painted a stranger—and more like someone had watched me.

Studied me.

Memorized me long before I ever arrived here.

A horrible feeling crept beneath my skin.

Not admiration.

Not affection.

Something far deeper.

Something ancient.

Obsessive.

My eyes remained locked on the faceless girl standing before the sea as a dreadful thought slowly unfolded inside me—

If those paintings were truly of me…
then for how long had he been seeing me before I ever saw him?

Every step I had taken, every question, every painting—had it all led here?

Was I the faceless muse he painted in gold?

And if so, then who was I in his world—his obsession, his ruin, or his salvation?

Then came his breaths on my nape.

"You're my salvation through this forbidden obsession."

This wasn't just a devotion. It was his way of devotion.

Devotion in Fractures.