Chapter Three The Locked Door #2
Anshira dragged her hand along the textured wallpaper, barely able to keep herself upright. The drug was pulling her under.
At the end of the hall, the mahogany door to the Presidential Guest Suite was clicked slightly ajar—a careless mistake by a room service attendant who had delivered fresh towels earlier in the evening.
Anshira didn't look at the room number. She was completely unaware of whose room it was. To her fevered, disoriented brain, it was simply an open door leading to a dark, quiet sanctuary.
She pushed the door wide and stumbled inside. The suite was cavernous and pitch dark. Anshira took three uncoordinated steps into the living area before her knees finally gave out. She collapsed onto a massive, velvet-upholstered couch, her saree tangling around her legs.
Within seconds, she fell asleep, oblivious to the fact that the suite belonged to Rovanth Kalresh-Dhen, and that he was, at that very moment, asleep in the master bedroom just a few walls away.
Sometime in the darkest hours of the early morning, driven by a subconscious, shivering need for warmth as the suite's air conditioning dropped the temperature, Anshira dragged herself up from the couch.
Blind and operating on pure chemical instinct, she stumbled through the dark suite until she found the master bedroom.
She crawled onto the far edge of the massive mattress, pulling the duvet over her shoulders, and sank back into oblivion.
Neither of them stirred.
The sharp, synchronized click of a keycard unlocking the main door sounded like a gunshot in the oppressive silence of the suite.
It was 6:30 AM.
Ishwari Dhen did not believe in sleeping late, nor did she believe in knocking when she possessed a master keycard to every room booked under the company’s name.
The seventy-eight-year-old matriarch had come down from the penthouse to discuss a sudden, troubling fluctuation in their media stock with her grandson.
She stepped into the living room, her silver-headed cane tapping sharply against the hardwood floor. “Rovanth,” she called out, her voice carrying an undeniable, commanding authority. “Wake up. The Satyavani editors need clearance on the morning broadcast.”
Silence answered her.
Frowning, Ishwari walked toward the master bedroom. She pushed the door open, reaching out to flick the brass switch on the wall.
The room flooded with brilliant, unforgiving light.
Ishwari stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand froze on the light switch. Her sharp, highly intelligent eyes widened in utter, unadulterated horror.
There, on the far side of the massive bed, tangled in the high-thread-count sheets and a rumpled navy saree, was a young woman. Her dark hair was splayed across the pillows, her face pale, her breathing shallow.
And on the other side of the bed, blinking furiously against the sudden light, a deeply disoriented Rovanth was pushing himself up on his elbows.
For three agonizing seconds, the matriarch and the heir stared at each other over the sleeping body of Anshira Kaul.
Then, the legendary strategist in Ishwari took over.
She stepped fully into the room, grabbed the handle of the bedroom door, and slammed it shut. With a sharp, definitive motion, she threw the deadbolt. The click of the lock echoed in the quiet room like a gavel striking a block. No one was coming in. No one was getting out.
“Dadi,” Rovanth muttered, his voice thick with sleep and confusion, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “What are you doing? What time is it?”
“What am I doing?” Ishwari hissed, her voice vibrating with a suppressed, lethal urgency. She pointed a trembling, manicured finger at the far side of the bed. “The question, Rovanth, is what on earth do you think you are doing?”
Rovanth frowned, still shaking off the fog of sleep. He followed the line of his grandmother’s finger.
His breath hitched in his throat. His entire body went rigidly tense.
He stared at the woman sleeping beside him. He recognized her immediately. The junior communications employee. Anshira.
“Is this truly the kind of relationship you want?” Ishwari demanded, stepping closer to the bed, her voice a razor-sharp whisper.
She was calculating the damage in real-time, her mind moving at a thousand miles an hour.
“Are you out of your mind? You are engaged in all but name to Ananya Singhania! The legal merger with her family is paramount to the telecom deal. And you bring a junior staffer into your bed during the company gala?”
“Dadi, stop,” Rovanth ordered. The disorientation evaporated instantly, replaced by a cold, adrenaline-fueled clarity. He sat up, the sheets pooling around his waist. “I didn't bring her here. I have no idea how she got in.”
“Do not lie to me!” Ishwari snapped, her knuckles white as she gripped her cane.
“Did anyone else see her come in? Were there security cameras in the hallway? Answer me! If the press gets ahold of this, if the Singhanias get ahold of this, it is a full-blown scandal. The stock will plummet. This has to be contained!”
The sheer panic and fury in his grandmother's voice triggered something dark in Rovanth. He looked back down at Anshira, who was beginning to stir, letting out a soft, confused groan as the loud voices pierced her sleep.
Rovanth was boiling with anger. He didn't make mistakes like this. His security detail was flawless. His doors were always locked. How had she bypassed the perimeter?
Then, the dots connected in his mind with brutal, sickening precision.
She has a shadow on the lower floors, Ananya’s voice echoed in his memory, a conversation from months ago in his penthouse. The girls in legal seem to think she's a schemer. Trying to orchestrate a moment with the undisputed heir.
He had dismissed the warning as irrelevant at the time. He had thought Anshira was just an insignificant girl with a harmless infatuation, not worth his attention. Now, staring at her in his private suite, in his bed, the pieces fell into a horrifyingly logical pattern.
In his fury, it seemed to confirm every ugly assumption Ananya, and the rest of the company had made.
Anshira wasn't an innocent dreamer. She was a calculating opportunist. She had engineered her way into his room while he was exhausted.
She had placed herself in his bed to create a compromising situation.
She was trying to trap him into marriage, or at the very least, an extortionate payout.
The sheer audacity of the scheme made his blood run cold.
On the far side of the mattress, Anshira finally forced her eyelids open.
Her head was pounding with a sickening, rhythmic throb. Her mouth tasted like ash. She felt disconnected from her own limbs, her brain swimming in a thick, nauseating fog. The harsh overhead lights stabbed at her retinas.
She blinked, trying to piece together where she was. She remembered the loud music. She remembered the pink drink. She remembered feeling like she was going to die.
“What is this?”
The voice cracked through the air. Anshira flinched, clutching the white sheets to her chest. She looked up, her vision blurry, and found herself staring at two figures standing at the foot of the bed.
One was an elderly woman leaning on a cane, her face twisted in an expression of absolute, terrifying disgust. The other was Rovanth Kalresh-Dhen. He was staring at her with a look of such profound, icy hatred that Anshira felt the breath physically knocked out of her lungs.
Ishwari stepped forward, her cane thudding heavily against the carpet. The matriarch's eyes were sharp, scanning Anshira's disheveled state with ruthless calculation.
“What exactly are you doing in my grandson's bed?” Ishwari asked sharply, her tone leaving no room for evasion. “Are you alright? Speak up, girl.”
Anshira’s heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.
The room spun violently around her. She had no idea what thoughts were racing through Rovanth’s mind.
She knew nothing of Ananya’s warning, or the vicious rumors on the lower floors, or the corporate crisis Ishwari was currently trying to smother.
All she knew was that she was in a stranger’s bed, her head was swimming in a chemical haze, and the man she had quietly, innocently adored for a year was looking at her as if she were poison.
“I...” Anshira stammered, tears springing to her eyes as the profound disorientation overwhelmed her. “I don't know... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry...”
It was all she could manage. A mumbled, pathetic apology.
Her tongue felt too thick, her brain too sluggish to articulate the spiked drink, the dizzying stumble through the hotel, the desperate need to just lie down.
She simply didn't understand what had happened to her body, let alone how she had ended up in this specific room.
Rovanth let out a low, harsh sound of disgust.
To him, the mumbled apology wasn't confusion; it was the pathetic act of a schemer who realized she had been caught by the matriarch before the trap could fully spring.
The silence in the locked room grew heavy and toxic.
Ishwari stood rigidly by the door, her hand resting near the deadbolt, her mind already running through crisis management protocols, weighing the catastrophic fallout of a forced marriage scandal.
Rovanth sat frozen with fury, his jaw clenched so tight it ached, staring down at the woman who had just compromised his entire carefully structured life.
And Anshira remained paralyzed on the mattress, her head spinning, tears of pure confusion slipping down her cheeks. She was caught helplessly in the crossfire of an empire's rage, utterly unable to even explain herself, as the narrative of her guilt was permanently, silently written into reality.