Page 10 of The Promise of a Traitor

“I’m ready to settle down,” he said now. “She seems nice enough. You guys like her and her family. What more is there to it?”

“A hell of a lot more!” Yash exploded.

“Tone, Dad, tone,” Advik’s lips twisted in an approximation of a smile, knowing his father was a second away from strangling him.

“I will smack you,” Yash warned.

“You didn’t when I was a kid. I doubt you’ll start now.” Advik’s grin widened. “It’s an arranged marriage, Dad. This is the deal. An arranged marriage by default rules out a love marriage meaning no love involved, not in the beginning and maybe not ever.”

His chest burned even as he spoke the words, his heart twisting.

“We don’t want you to get engaged and married in a traditional arranged marriage set up, Advik,” Maya said quietly. “I just thought I’d introduce you to a nice girl and maybe you guys would hit it off and find…” Her voice trailed off helplessly.

“What did you guys expect? That this would spark a crazy, epic kind of love.”

“Don’t you want that?” Yash asked, his perceptive gaze skewering his on. “A crazy, epic kind of love.”

The words were a dagger through his aching heart. He’d had a crazy, epic kind of love. And it had torn his bruised, battered, bleeding heart out of his chest and stomped on it.

“No,” he said simply, the single word silencing any arguments his parents might have had.

He didn’t want a crazy, epic kind of love anymore. That kind of love hurt.

This kind of revenge healed.

Chapter Six

Aastha

Aastha stared at the new contact on her phone screen. It hadn’t taken much to get it. Not much. Just the complete obliteration of her self-respect. She’d swallowed her pride and asked her mother to get it from his mother. Binita had stared at her with narrowed eyes clearly wondering why they hadn’t exchanged numbers when they’d met. But for once, her mother had held her tongue and just done what Aastha had asked for.

And so now, she had his number. A new one. Not the old number she’d called and messaged endlessly in the past.

Advik Malhotra.

The love of her life. The fiancé who hated her.

Tears clogged her throat at the memory of the anger and disgust that had blazed in those dark, intense eyes of his as he’d looked at her earlier that day. Her finger hovered over the call button. Should she?

“Aastha Di!” Amyra’s call broke through her tortured thoughts, and she got to her feet, hurrying over to where her sister sat in front of her laptop.

“What’s wrong?” She took the seat beside Amyra and frowned at the screen in front of them. Amyra’s twelfth grade economics presentation looked like someone had chucked a bunch of letters at the screen at random and none of it made sense.

“Everything,” Amyra said grimly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Does any of this make any sense to you?”

“The role of the Central Bank in controlling credit,” Aastha read, her eyes already crossing at the thought of deciphering this mess.

With a despairing groan, Amyra shut the laptop. “I’m going to fail.”

“Well, no,” Aastha said unconvincingly. “We can figure this out.”

“Right.” Bitterness leaked into Amyra’s voice. “Like we figured everything else out, right? By bartering you away?”

“Amu.” Aastha’s exhaustion was palpable. “Let’s not do this again.”

“We won’t. Why would we want to do that?” Amyra shoved back from the table. “We never talk about anything in this family.”

Aastha sat in her chair, watching her baby sister storm out of the room. Her gaze shifted from Amyra’s stiff back to her father who’d just entered the room. He looked at her for a long moment before looking through her and to the room where her mother sat chatting with one of her friends, excitedly making plans for the engagement. Plans they had no hope of affording unless the Malhotras were footing the bill. Her father turned on his heel and walked away.