Next Morning - Raghbir's Study, 9:14 AM
Raghbir was on his second cup of tea when his eldest son entered and closed the door.
He looked at Samarth's face and set the cup down.
"Sit," he said.
"I'd rather stand."
"Sit, Samarth."
His son sat, which told him everything about the weight he was carrying.
"Kabir Malhotra tried to have Nimisha kidnapped," Samarth said. No preamble. No softening. "Yesterday. At the bookstore in Bandra. Three hired men. Bruno intervened before they could get her into the vehicle."
The room was very quiet.
Raghbir had lived a long life in a complicated world. He had made decisions that most men couldn't make and slept afterward without particular difficulty. He believed in protecting what was his. He believed in loyalty and consequence in equal measure.
He looked at his son's face—at the control there, so absolute it was its own kind of violence—and understood exactly what was being asked of him.
"Show me," he said.
Samarth laid the evidence on the desk. The security footage from the bookstore. The intercepted communications betweenKabir and the men he'd hired. The testimony of the survivor, recorded and transcribed by Armaan. The paper trail—three cash transactions, untraceable on the surface, traced anyway by men who were very good at finding things that didn't want to be found.
Raghbir reviewed each piece without rushing.
The room was silent except for the sound of papers turning.
When he finished, he looked up.
"What do you want to do?" he asked, though they both knew the answer.
"I want him dead." No performance in it. No drama. Just a man stating a fact. "He put his hands on my wife. He planned to keep her. He's been harassing her for months while we gave him access to this family." Samarth's jaw tightened. "He's going to die for it."
"He's Tanisha's fiancé."
"He's a dead man. Those two things aren't incompatible."
Raghbir was quiet for a moment.
"And Tanisha?"
"She'll be told he left. That he couldn't handle the pressure of the family, decided it wasn't worth it." Samarth met his father's eyes. "It will hurt her. I know that."
"You're willing to accept her anger."
"I've accepted worse things for this family." Something shifted in his expression—brief, honest. "But this one I'm doing for Nimisha. Not the family. For her."
Raghbir studied his son for a long moment.
He thought about the girl who'd come into this family a year ago—quiet, composed, impossible to read. He'd thought her unremarkable. He'd been wrong. He'd also been a coward about correcting his wife when her treatment of the girl became unkind, which he would have to reckon with separately.
He thought about what it meant that his son—who had never done anything in his life that wasn't calculated, measured, controlled—was sitting here with barely contained fury because someone had frightened his wife.
"Make it clean," he said.
Samarth stood. "No promises."
