CHAPTER 21
Bharat noticed Yamini glaring at him.
He noticed that Yamini never hid what she felt. It was one of the more consistent things about her, the way emotion moved across her face before she could decide whether to allow it.
Across from him in the helicopter, she sat turned toward the window, though every few minutes her eyes shifted back to him with visible irritation before she caught herself and looked away again.
He returned his attention to the tablet.
She had thanked him. He had acknowledged it. The interaction was complete. And yet the irritation persisted, which meant the thank you had not been the point. Something else was sitting with her that she hadn't said.
He didn't ask.
Outside, the dry plains surrounding Gaur Palace disappeared beneath cloud cover.
He continued reading, or made the motions of it. But his mind kept returning to the visit with a persistence he found unhelpful.
Mahinder Gaur had ordered his own daughter thrown out of the house. Then, ten minutes later, she was welcomed with royal tradition.
Bharat understood transactional behavior. He encountered it daily in investors, politicians, and rivals. Men who adjusted their convictions based on whoever had just walked into the room. He had learned early to expect it and account for it. That part of the visit had not surprised him.
What had stayed with him was something else.
It was the way Yamini had stood in silence while her father spoke about her, calling her foolish, wayward, stubborn, and easily misled.
Her face had remained composed throughout. But her grip on the teacup had tightened exactly seven times during that particular speech.
He had counted. Counting was something his mind did independently of instruction, cataloging small repeated motions the way it cataloged distances and angles and the number of steps between two points. It was not a choice. It simply happened.
Seven times. And she had said nothing in response.
He set the tablet down on his knee and looked at it without reading.
Across from him, Yamini had stopped glaring.
She was looking at the window with an expression he hadn't cataloged before. It wasn’t anger. Neither was it the particular compression of her lips that meant she was suppressing a retort, nor was it the wide-eyed calculation she wore when she was processing something unexpected.
It was just stillness. The kind that came after something had moved through a person, leaving them quieter than before.
That expression was harder to categorize than the others.
He found that he was still looking at her when the helicopter began its descent and made no immediate effort to stop.
The Jogra Palace returned beneath them, its towers rising in familiar symmetry against the snow. Cold air hit when the doors opened, sharp and immediate. He stepped out.
Order returned quickly in measured footsteps, known corridors, the reliable geometry of a space he had lived in long enough to navigate without thinking.
Yamini walked beside him across the courtyard without speaking.
Halfway to the entrance, she asked, “Are you heading back to work?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” A pause. Then nothing else.
He glanced briefly toward her. She had the look of someone who had intended to say more and decided against it. He didn't ask what it was.
At the palace entrance, they stopped.
“I'll see you at midnight,” he said.
Her eyes widened slightly, and her cheeks heated before the familiar annoyance returned and settled back over her expression.
“Right,” she muttered.
He nodded once and walked away. He did not look back because looking back served no structural purpose, and he had already established that as a personal rule and intended to maintain it.
He maintained it.
His office was quiet and correctly lit, and the temperature was exactly as he had set it. The cufflinks went onto the desk in their usual position. He opened the reports, reviewed the numbers, and read through a legal brief regarding the eastern plant permits.
Thirty-seven minutes passed.
He had accomplished considerably less than the time should have produced.
He closed the approval document and sat with his hands flat on the desk. Then he opened a different file.
Imran had sent it that morning before the Gaur Palace visit. The internal audit results filled the screen.
Three information leaks. All precise. All limited to details that only someone with direct access to the plant operations would know. The protest groups had received internal emissions data, not the public version submitted to the regulatory board, but the raw figures from the plant floor itself.
Someone had given them exactly what they needed and nothing more. The audit had narrowed the access window to a specific two-week period. Bharat studied the dates.
The window opened two days after the environmental event. It closed the week after the Environmental team had completed their first full site visit at the steel plant.
His eyes moved lower.
The report listed every external vendor present during that period. Photographers. Media teams. Environmental consultants. Contractors.
His eyes stopped briefly on a familiar name. Yamini Gaur.
The report documented movement through operational zones that most external vendors rarely accessed. Financial instability after divorce. Limited assets.
Contract secured through a third-party vendor.
He closed the file.
Correlation was not causation. He knew that. He applied it as a principle daily. The dates aligned. The access aligned. Neither of those facts constituted evidence of intent.
Yamini was reckless, proud, and impulsive. Subtle, however, she was not.
Breakfasts returned unexpectedly to his mind. Deliberately scraped chairs. Sarcastic replies. Challenges issued with visible irritation and very little strategy. Then there had been the kitten. The anger in her voice. The relief in her eyes.
No. His wife was not subtle.
That thought stayed with him longer than necessary.
He turned away from the desk and walked toward the narrow door at the far end of his home office.
Unlike the rest of the palace, this door had no carvings, no ornamentation. Just smooth wood and a discreet lock.
The door slid open silently.
The studio beyond was dimly lit and spacious, and meticulously arranged.
Easels stood at measured distances from one another. Brushes were laid out by size and texture, aligned with mathematical precision. Canvases, some blank, some half-complete, some turned deliberately to face the wall, lined the room.
This space had existed long before boardrooms and steel plants.
He had been nine when one of the psychiatrists had suggested painting. Not as therapy, but as structure. A way to place thoughts somewhere outside himself when they became too numerous to organize internally.
Bharat closed the door behind him and crossed the studio, movements calm and practiced. He stopped in front of the largest canvas, the one positioned beneath the skylight.
For a long moment, he did nothing. Then he picked up a brush.
The act grounded him in a way nothing else did.
He studied the canvas with intense focus.
Outside this room, there were protests, politicians, environmental audits, legal reviews, and operational failures demanding resolution. There were his brothers coordinating across three empires and investors demanding answers to problems they barely understood.
Those things belonged outside. They remained easier to organize.
His attention returned to the canvas.
It didn't remain there.
Instead, his thoughts drifted elsewhere.
To Yamini. Running through overgrown grass with her lehenga lifted. Sitting in her father's drawing room, holding a teacup too tightly. Looking out a helicopter window with an expression he hadn't cataloged and couldn't quite set aside.
He dipped the brush into paint and lifted it slowly.
Hours passed differently inside the studio.
Not faster. Simply quieter.
When the clock struck half past eleven, his hands stilled.
The canvas remained unfinished.
Most things worth understanding usually were.
He cleaned the brush carefully and returned everything to its place.
Thirty minutes remained until midnight.
He switched off the lights and left the studio behind, already reorganizing his thoughts toward midnight.