December 2019 — The Imperial Palace Penthouse, 11:30 PM, Delhi

“Get out.”

The word landed like a slab of concrete. His face stayed a mask — chiseled, unreadable — but his eyes were a different thing: molten, black with a heat that made the air between them thin. The woman his cousin had sent to soothe him froze, coat half off, handbag abandoned like surrender. She had come as bait; she fled like prey that finally understands the predator.

He had worked until his bones felt hollow. All he’d wanted tonight was the usual—sink into the dark with a bottle, let alcohol and memory carry him until the bed swallowed him whole.

He’d washed, changed, and walked out into the dim living room only to find a stranger removing her coat, moving toward him with a practised, cheap grace that reeked more of desperation than seduction. One look at his face, four faltering steps — and she knew she wasn’t in a glossy fantasy with some indulgent billionaire. She was inside a living hell named Irya Rajvir Singh: boardroom tyrant, rumor-haunted, a man the world learned not to cross.

The guards who’d brought her had followed instructions: blindfolded, handed terse orders, told not to speak, not to describe what happened inside. The plan had sounded sensible on paper; in the moment, the blindfold came off and the room’s truth revealed itself. Her plan to perform dissolved into a single thought: run. She bolted, heels clattering against marble, the doorway swallowing her escape.

Good. Let his cousin learn that not everything can be bought, not every ten-minute favor is without consequence.

Anger is an internal volcano. To temper it he went to the bar. He poured himself a heavy drink with the automatic precision of a man who has done this before — glass in one hand, bottle in the other — and retreated to the sanctuary of his bedroom. He stretched long legs over the black recliner and watched the city smear into night through floor-to-ceiling glass. The skyline could have been a painting; to him it was a record of absence.

He began counting into the dark like a litany. Numbers steadied him the way prayer does to others.

“It’s been four years, eight months, three weeks and fourteen days,” he said aloud to the empty room, each increment a wound he re-opened by choice. “Since that night. Since I last saw you.” The memory was a religion, practiced and precise. He could name the tilt of her chin, the color of the light on her skin, the small sound she made when she broke.

He remembered how his world rearranged the first time his eyes fell on her—the most breathtaking eyes he’d ever seen. He remembered the rest with a detail that was almost obscene: the softness of her lips, the way her body trembled beneath him, how he’d devoured her until there was nothing left to take.

He spoke it like a confession and a promise. “Kissing your lips, holding you beneath me, taking you until I had nothing left — I remember it all.” His voice fractured with something that could have been grief or hunger. “That night wasn’t supposed to be a single thing. My desire for you isn’t a night’s appetite. It’s an eternity. Every day. Every hour. Until my last breath.” He closed his eyes and the memory slid back in, carrying with it the scent of her hair, the phantom weight of her body.

Then rage moved through him like electricity. He smashed the glass in his hand against the floor; crystal exploded, a bright punctuation in the dim. Without pausing, he strode to the bathroom and let the shower take him.

Cold water hammered down on him from every angle, stinging his skin, lancing through whatever haze the alcohol had fogged. He planted his palms on the tile, jaw clenched until the taste of metal filled his mouth, breath ragged and raw. The cold was supposed to wash the ache away, to put distance between him and the molten center she occupied in his mind. It didn’t. It only sharpened the hunger.

“How many more cold showers,” he demanded to the tiled wall, voice hoarse, “until I have you for real? How many?” He hit the wall with his fist—hard. Knuckles bloomed purple, a white-hot pain that sent a bright flare behind his eyes. Instead of a groan he let out one word, simple and brutal with longing and accusation.

“Saara.”

The name came out like a prayer and a curse both. For a moment he stood under the water and let it wash the word into nothing, as if the torrent could carry it away. It did not. The name settled like ash on his skin.

He left the shower and traded his shirt for sweatpants, the ritual of small comforts to hold against the vast emptiness. He picked up the bottle and drained the remaining scotch straight from it until the world softened at the edges. He fell onto the cold bed without ceremony.

The great king — the man who commanded boards and crafted empires — let his shoulders slacken. Tears stained the pillow, saline and stubborn; he did not bother to wipe them away. When exhaustion came it claimed him not as mercy but as a tentative truce.

This was the life he had carved: power, precision, and a private ache that refused relief. He cradled that ache like treasure and ruin both, storms and sanctuaries wrapped into a single name. Tonight it was louder than the city. Tonight, the dream with her inside it was the only place he could breathe. Tomorrow, he would wake and the hunt would begin again.

***