CHAPTER 26
The sky outside Bharat’s city office windows was streaked with fading amber and deepening blue when his private line vibrated once.
He answered immediately.
“Yes.”
Imran’s voice was controlled, but tight beneath the surface. “Sir, there’s been an incident at the Gulwama unit. Furnace line three experienced a pressure surge. One technician sustained burns, but he’s stable. The line has been shut down.”
Bharat’s pen stopped over the document he had been reviewing.
“Cause?”
“Preliminary system logs indicate a manual override.”
Not malfunction. Or corrosion. Or operator error.
Override.
Bharat leaned back slowly in his chair.
“Media presence?”
“Increased within thirty minutes. Protest activity outside the gate escalated almost immediately.”
Too quickly. They were prepared.
“Secure the internal logs. Begin a quiet audit of override permissions. No plant-wide announcement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And increase personal security allocation around the palace perimeter,” Bharat added after a brief pause. “Extend the security radius for my wife. Effective immediately.”
There was no explanation in his tone. Only instruction.
Imran did not question it. “Understood.”
The call ended.
Bharat remained seated for a long moment before activating the security feeds. Multiple screens illuminated the wall in a soft grid of angles and time stamps.
He began with factory footage, scanning override logs and cross-referencing technician movements, filing away anomalies with clinical precision.
The coastal plant's timestamp appeared in the lower corner of one feed: two days prior.
He did not seek it deliberately. But his eyes stopped there.
The office. The chair. Yamini lowering herself onto his lap with that particular blend of impulse and calculated nerve that he had come to recognize as entirely her own.
The moment she made contact, his system had locked.
Every muscle had stilled, an involuntary arrest that hit him when stimulation arrived without preparation.
The warmth of her weight. The unfamiliar press of her against his thighs.
Her arm settling around his neck with a stiffness that suggested she was less certain than she appeared.
The scent of her, something faintly floral, and beneath it the cold mountain air that had begun to attach itself to her skin from weeks at the palace.
His hands had remained on the armrests because moving them required deciding where they would go instead. And that calculation had no clean answer.
His body had not consulted him before responding. He had been acutely, inconveniently aware of that.
When he told her not to sit on him in public again, she responded with a challenge.
Even after she left, he remained seated to gather control. It took him 102 seconds.
He had called Imran then with an order. Remove Tina Mehta from all Jogra project affiliations, effective immediately.
Imran had obeyed. But Bharat had registered the two-second pause.
He knew the pause was to gather a moment to understand the weight of the order. Tina was the chief minister's daughter. There was a government partnership in active negotiation. The political capital required careful management in the weeks ahead.
Bharat had known the consequences before he gave the order. He had given it anyway.
He sat back as he closed the factory footage.
Then, almost without conscious decision, he shifted to palace cameras.
Feed 21: the palace kitchen.
Yamini stood near the long marble counter, laughing at something one of the maids had said. The staff around her looked relaxed, almost familial in their ease.
He paused the footage.
Replayed it.
Though he could not hear the audio clearly, he could see the unguarded nature of her expression, the way her shoulders loosened, the way her eyes crinkled slightly when she laughed.
There was no calculation in that moment.
He changed feeds.
The newly set-up studio wing inside the palace came into view.
The kitten darted across the polished floor, clumsily chasing a ribbon. Yamini crouched beside it, her long skirt pooling around her. When the kitten leaped awkwardly into her lap, she laughed again, head tilted back, emerald pendant catching the light.
Bharat’s fingers stilled on the control panel.
He watched longer than necessary.
Her laughter did not align with the structured tension that usually defined her posture around him. It was spontaneous. Uncontained.
He advanced the footage to later that evening.
Feed 08: main palace entrance.
Yamini stepping out of the helicopter. Her expression was different now.
Rigid. Jaw tight. She acknowledged no one.
Her movements were clipped as she walked through the corridor toward her suite.
He knew why.
The previous night. Her deliberate attempt to conceive. His refusal.
The anger and humiliation in her eyes at breakfast.
He had seen it. Cataloged it. Understood it. But he had not addressed it.
He turned off the screen.
The darkness that followed felt deeper than before.
On his tablet, the physician’s secure confirmation remained open.
Compliance verified.
He read it again, not because he doubted the report, but because repetition grounded him.
The decision had been necessary.
He could not allow impulse to dictate lineage.
But as he sat there, the image of her laughter lingered in unexpected contrast to the memory of her anger.
The sight of her playing with the kitten, unguarded and alive, unsettled something in him that had nothing to do with corporate sabotage or industrial safety.
She disrupted pattern.
He placed the tablet away, aligning it precisely on his desk before checking the time.
There were still two hours before he needed to return to the palace.
He sat back down at his desk and opened the next document in the queue.
His pen was precise and unhurried.
The city continued to light itself below him. He returned to the next document and did not look at the palace feeds again.