CHAPTER 52
A week later, Yamini watched the familiar outline of the palace emerge from the shadows of the snowcapped peaks.
As soon as the helicopter landed, she stepped out. The air here was sharper. The mountains stood exactly as they had the day she left, white peaks, quiet, unmoved by anything that happened down here.
She pulled her coat tighter around herself.
I didn’t come for him. I came here for my pendant.
It's family history. It belongs to me. I will not leave the country without it.
She had come to take back the emerald fish pendant.
She even planned to pay him for it. It would take a while, but she intended not to be indebted to him in any way.
The guards at the gate straightened when they saw her.
“Maharani—”
She lifted a hand gently before they could say anything more.
“I'm just here to collect something,” she said.
Their expressions shifted. Relief, then confusion, then something close to hope.
Inside the courtyard, staff slowed mid-step. The housekeeper nearly dropped the folded linen in her arms.
“You're back home,” she breathed.
Yamini gave her a polite smile. “Just for a few hours, Kamla.”
Home.
Jogra Palace was no longer her home.
She walked through the long corridor toward the master's suite wing. The marble floors echoed faintly under her footsteps. The palace smelled the same as always, polish and pine smoke.
Her chest tightened because it did feel like home.
I'm here for the pendant, she told herself again.
She stepped into her bedroom first and searched.
It wasn’t in her jewelry boxes.
Then she turned.
The connecting door between their bedrooms was closed.
When she turned the handle, she noticed that it was unlocked.
Her fingers paused on the handle before she pushed it open.
His room was empty. She knew it would be because he was usually at the office during the day. He never broke his schedule.
Then she recalled that he had broken the schedule sometimes when she was working from the palace studio. He had joined her for lunch in the dining hall, and sometimes they even ate in the garden outside.
Pushing away the thoughts, she focused on his room.
I’m here for my pendant. Not reminisce about times when he only pretended to care.
The room smelled of clean linen and a trace of his cologne. The bed was made with the same precision it always had been. Pillows aligned.
She went to his closet and searched the drawers.
Her breath caught.
Her favorite silk scarf was in the drawer, folded neatly, tucked beneath his cufflinks.
At some point in the past three weeks, he had taken it off the chair where she had left it, then folded it and placed it carefully beneath his cufflinks, as though it belonged there.
Her jaw tightened.
Focus.
She moved to the dresser. Opened the top drawer. Empty.
The second. Empty.
She checked the desk. The wardrobe. The safe.
The emerald fish pendant wasn't there.
A flicker of irritation rose in her.
Why hadn't he sent it back? Why was he keeping it?
Was he doing it on purpose?
Annoyed, she left the bedroom and walked toward his office.
Using the code, which he had given her earlier, she unlocked it and stepped inside. She was surprised that he didn’t change any of the codes.
She looked around the office. Files were aligned. A pen was placed exactly at a right angle on the desk. And the leather chair was centered behind the desk.
She searched the office desk drawers, then the bookshelves. The pendant wasn’t found anywhere.
Where the hell did he keep it?
Her eyes fell on the wooden wall next to the bookshelves. It was heavily carved, but she noticed a small handle. It was a door. It blended into the wall so well that it could be easily mistaken for a decoration.
Rani Suchitra's words came back to her.
You photograph. Bharat paints.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She knew there must be a room behind the door.
Biting her lip, she held the handle of the door and twisted.
It didn't move. It was locked.
She knew she should step away and not care what was inside. But something stopped her.
Slowly, she reached out and pulled a hairpin from her hair.
With her fingers trembling slightly, she knelt and slid the pin carefully into the lock.
The palace was so quiet she could hear her own breathing.
There was a faint click.
She stood, twisted the now unlocked door, and pushed it open.
Darkness greeted her first.
Then the smell of oil paint and turpentine.
Her heart began to thud as she reached for the switch.
Then the lights came on.
For a moment, her eyes went to the nearest thing in the room, not the walls.
An easel, set apart from everything else, angled toward the window where the light would have been best during the day. A canvas rested on it, the paint catching the overhead light with a faint sheen that the older work around it didn't have.
It was painted recently.
She stepped closer before she understood what she was looking at.
He had painted her.
Her eyes looked bright with fury. But beneath it, the painting had captured something else. Hurt.
It was from their last breakfast together and at the exact moment before she'd torn the pendant from her neck.
He had painted this after.
After she had walked out of this palace, believing he felt nothing.
He had come into this room and painted the way she looked at him while she hated him.
Her hand lifted toward the canvas. Stopped just short of the surface. The paint hadn't fully dried. In places, especially around her eyes, it still had a faint sheen that the older work around it didn't have.
She pulled her hand back.
She turned from the easel, and only now did the rest of the room come into her focus.
Canvases lined three walls—framed, unframed, large and small, arranged in rows that ran the length of the studio.
The paintings nearest the easel were the most recent.
A frozen lake, silver under winter light, her own boots stamping the ice.
A wooden cabin in snow, firelight through a window.
An apple orchard in spring, petals caught mid-fall.
Soft golds and blues, nothing like the fire in the painting on the easel.
Then, further along, a smaller canvas.
Herself, asleep.
Her hair loose across a pillow. Her hand curled near her face. The angle was close, intimate, the kind of view only possible from someone lying beside her. She was wearing just the emerald fish pendant.
He had lain beside her and memorized her. Had carried it out of sleep and into paint.
Her throat tightened.
She looked at the other paintings.
There was one from the wedding. The temple, marigolds, and the fire between them during the ceremony.
Another one from the contract signing, her eyes defiant while her hand was captured on the frame, mid-signature.
Before the wedding, before the contract, there were others.
Her on the first day at the steel plant, camera lifted, the noise and heat of the factory floor all around her.
She remembered that day. He had walked past her without a glance, and she had told herself it didn't matter, that she was nobody to him, just another name on a vendor list. In the painting, there was an irritated, defiant look on her face.
Her standing against the wall of the chief minister's office, camera lowered, trying to take up as little space as possible during a meeting so he wouldn’t notice her.
Her half hidden behind a pillar at an environmental event, camera raised, deliberately out of his line of sight. She had hidden on purpose that day. She had been certain, completely certain, that he hadn't seen her.
And then, the paintings stopped.
A stretch of bare wall. Older frames hanging on either side of it, but nothing in between. Dust marked the wall in a pattern that suggested something had once been there and had been removed, or that nothing had ever been hung there at all.
She stood in front of the gap for a long moment.
She didn't understand it yet. She only knew, the way she knew most things about him now, that it meant something.
On the other side of the gap, the paintings continued. Older. Different in feel.
A formal portrait, heavier in color, deep blues and silver, the palette of ceremony.
A girl in blue and silver.
She stopped.
She knew this painting before she fully understood what she was looking at. It was her on their engagement ceremony.
She remembered that day—the silence beside her, the three times she had tried to speak to him, and the three times he had said nothing, hadn't even turned his head.
She had told that story to Pooja once. He never looked at me. Not even once.
She looked at the canvas now.
The angle of her own chin. The shy, hopeful smile she had before she tried talking to him.
He had looked. Closely enough, and for long enough, to paint it afterward from memory.
All these years, she had remembered that day as proof he never noticed her.
She had used it as evidence that she had never mattered to him.
The painting made it impossible to hold onto.
He had looked. She simply hadn't known he was looking.
Further along, the paintings grew younger still.
A sixteen-year-old girl in a turban, laughing among a crowd at a racetrack, dust rising around her.
She remembered this day too, vaguely. The bull race at Devara, which she attended with her brother. The thrill of being somewhere she wasn't supposed to be, dressed as someone she wasn't.
She had recently told Sanjana about it.
She had never imagined that Bharat had attended the bull race too and had been near her at that time.
Taking a deep breath, she continued to look at the other paintings.
One was from sometime during her early teens when she was crouched in a garden, a camera in her hands, sunlight catching her hair.
The next was of her climbing a stone wall, grinning at whoever had told her not to.
The paintings continued, each one older than the last.
At the far end of the row, set slightly apart from the others, almost like something placed deliberately rather than simply hung, was the smallest painting in the room.
The brushwork was different. It lacked the technique of the other paintings. It looked almost as if someone young had painted it.
The painting was of a muddy girl laughing and standing in a fountain.
She stepped closer.
Something about the image tugged at the very edge of her memory—a fountain, mud on her ankles, and being scolded, but not caring.
She knew it was when she visited the Rewa Palace with her mother.
Before the engagement. Before she ran away. Before any of it.
He had seen her then and painted her. He must have been a child at that time, too.
Her mind spun with questions.
She turned and stared at the gap on the wall where there were no paintings.
She realized the gap was between the engagement and the environmental event. Five years.
The years she had run away. The years she had been married to someone else.
Her chest tightened.
He had painted her for years. Then, during her marriage, nothing.
Just empty space.
She wasn't sure why that hurt.
It was the only gap in the entire room. The only years that weren't here.
He had not stopped because he forgot her. The rest of the room made that impossible to believe.
He had stopped because she had chosen someone else.
And he had let her.
Taking a deep breath, she turned away from the empty space and then looked at one more painting. It was the biggest one in the room.
She was wearing a simple blue dress, the emerald fish pendant resting at her throat. Every emerald rendered in careful, exact detail. The curve of the chain precise.
He had remembered the exact cut of the stones. He had painted the pendant the way she photographed things she loved. Patiently. Obsessively.
You both express your feelings through art.
She finally understood what Rani Suchitra had meant.
Her hand lifted slowly and brushed the edge of that frame.
The realization didn't come slowly. It struck all at once.
He hadn't just painted what mattered to him. He had painted her.
Not just once or twice. But for two decades.
There were no paintings of anyone else.
She stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by versions of herself as one thought arrived slowly yet firmly into her mind.
It was never revenge.
Bharat Jogra didn’t marry her for revenge.
Footsteps sounded somewhere beyond the studio door.
She knew the weight of them before she had time to think about how she knew. The rhythm. The particular quiet efficiency of the stride.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
She had come here thinking she hated him.
She no longer knew what she felt.
But she knew she wouldn’t leave without finding out the truth.