MALHOTRA’S OBSESSION

Some traps are built with gold and velvet... you never feel the cage until the door locks.

Aarav Malhotra didn’t believe in fate.

He believed in strategy. In numbers. In the kind of cold, calculated precision that had turned his father’s struggling empire into a billion-dollar dynasty before he was thirty. He didn’t chase things. Things came to him deals, contracts, people because the world had quietly learned that resisting Aarav Malhotra was a war nobody won.

So when he saw her at the temple

Standing barefoot on the cold marble steps, dupatta slipping off one shoulder, completely unbothered by the chaos around her, lips moving in quiet prayer like she was the only person the gods were actually listening to

He told himself it was nothing.

He was wrong.