CHAPTER 39
It had been over two weeks since she had walked out of Bharat Jogra’s office.
Mornings changed first.
Yamini stopped going to the main dining hall. She woke early, before the palace fully stirred, and had breakfast in the smaller sitting room near her studio. A silver tray appeared quietly each morning without her having to ask.
Sheru curled in her lap while she fed him small pieces of boiled chicken.
“You don't ask,” she murmured one morning, scratching behind his ears. “You just take what you want.”
He could enforce a contract. He could not enforce her presence at his table.
But sometimes, when faint sounds drifted up from the main hall—the low, steady cadence of his voice—her steps slowed in the corridor. Just for a second.
Then she walked on.
The staff noticed. The housekeeper paused in the doorway one morning.
“Would Maharani prefer breakfast in the main hall today?”
“No,” Yamini said. “Thank you.”
Savita's eyes moved once to the blocked connecting door while changing the linens. She said nothing. The staff bowed when Yamini passed, and their eyes stayed with her a moment longer than usual.
The palace noticed everything. Silence had witnesses.
Work helped.
She spent longer hours at the studio, reviewing images from the factory visits.
At the steel plants, she was professional and focused. Bharat was present at most of them. Charcoal suit. Sunglasses. Immaculate posture. She would see him across the floor speaking to engineers, one hand resting in his pocket.
The same hand that had stayed at her waist through the entire announcement.
He never looked in her direction. Never called for her.
She told herself that was a relief. She didn't want a confrontation at a work site.
But her pulse didn't agree. His restraint irritated her, infuriated her, hurt her.
Pooja noticed when she visited the studio.
Her friend remained playful at first.
“So what are you and the handsome maharaja up to these days?”
“Nothing much,” Yamini said. “We've both been busy.”
A pause.
“You used to complain about him constantly. Now you don't mention him at all.”
“There's nothing to talk about.”
Pooja didn't push. But her silence on the way out was heavier than her words usually were.
After she left, the studio felt too quiet.
Nights were the hardest.
The chair stayed braced against the connecting door. Some evenings, Yamini stood in front of it longer than she meant to. One night, she rested her hand on the carved backrest, just to see.
The wood was heavy but not impossible to move. She knew that.
Her fingers tightened around it.
And then her mind did what it had been doing every night.
She recalled his mouth, the hunger in his kiss. Then the feel of his palm, warm and steady at her waist, while the courtyard full of guests watched them.
Her body remembered all of it clearly.
Her pride remembered everything else.
He destroyed your marriage. He dismantled your life piece by piece. He married you for revenge.
She stepped back from the chair.
“He planned all of it,” she reminded herself.
The thought didn't steady her the way it used to.
Some nights, she brought Sheru up to her room because the quiet felt too heavy. The kitten would pad across the floor and scratch at the base of the connecting door, sniffing at the gap.
She picked him up and held him against her chest.
“You are the only uncomplicated male in this entire palace,” she told him.
He purred.
The connecting door stayed silent.
Bharat never tried the handle. Never knocked. Never pushed against the chair.
He never tried at all.
She had expected him to push back. To enforce something. To do what he always did.
There was nothing.
She had wanted distance.
She had gotten it.
And yet every night she lay in the dark and listened for footsteps that never came.