Her Merciless Husband (Unlikely Lover Series, #2)

PROLOGUE

The marigolds had taken over everything.

They hung in fat, fragrant ropes from every arch of the Dhawan haveli, pooling gold and amber light into every corner the fog-lamps didn't reach.

The courtyard smelled of turmeric and sandalwood and the particular nervous sweat of a household bracing for spectacle.

Three days. Three days before the wedding, the Dhawan family's older daughter was to become a Goenka.

Mihika Dhawan had been on her feet since five that morning.

She was not the bride. She was, as she had always been, the one who made sure everything ran.

She moved between the catering contractors with her clipboard and her quiet authority — the same authority she used at Sattva, her restaurant in South Delhi, the life she had built with deliberate care in the margins of this family's larger story.

She tasted the dal-baati. She redirected the paneer delivery.

She told the florist, very gently and very firmly, that the marigold ropes on the east arch were uneven, and watched him fix them without argument.

She was good at this. She had always been good at this.

It was Sanjana who was good at everything else.

"Mihika."

The voice came from the upper terrace — low, urgent, stripped of its usual ease.

Mihika looked up. Sanjana was standing at the stone railing, her dupatta pulled tight around her shoulders despite the warm evening.

She was not looking at the courtyard below.

She was looking at Mihika with an expression Mihika had never seen on her sister's face before.

Fear.

Mihika handed her clipboard to the catering manager and went upstairs.

The terrace room was small and cluttered with wedding overflow — boxes of bangles, a half-assembled floral mandap centrepiece, three saris in plastic wrapping waiting to be delivered to the relatives' rooms. Sanjana was sitting on the low window seat with her knees drawn up, and she was shaking.

Not in any dramatic way. Just a fine, contained trembling, the kind that lives in your hands when you have been holding something back for a very long time.

Mihika closed the door. "Didi. What's wrong?"

Sanjana looked at her. Her eyes were red at the rims, carefully not spilled over, the way their mother had trained them both. Dhawan women do not cry where people can see. She said, "I can't do it."

Mihika was quiet for a moment. The sounds of the courtyard floated up: the contractor's radio, someone calling for another box of diyas. She said, carefully, "Can't do what?"

"This." Sanjana's voice cracked on the single word. "The wedding. The Goenka wedding. I can't — Mihika, I cannot marry him."

"You've never even met him."

"I know." Sanjana's chin came up. "That's not the reason."

Mihika sat down on the footstool across from her.

She looked at her sister — twenty-seven years old, the family's pride, their father's proof of his own success, beautiful in the way that got you photographed and admired and used — and she felt something cold settle in her chest. "Tell me the reason," she said.

It came out in pieces. A name: Arjun. A year of meetings that started as accidental and became necessary.

A man who sold handmade furniture in Jaipur's old city quarter, who had no family name worth anything, who had nothing that Mahendra Dhawan would ever consider adequate.

A love that Sanjana had not intended and could not undo.

"He wants to marry me," Sanjana said. "He's been asking me for months. And I've been saying no, because — because I thought I could do this. I thought duty was enough." She looked at the window. The marigold light came through it and painted her gold. "I was wrong."

Mihika stared at her. "Didi. There are two hundred guests arriving in three days."

"I know."

"Shivansh Goenka—"

"I know who he is, Mihika. I know what he is.

" Sanjana looked at her sharply. "That's part of it.

He runs the north Delhi territory for his father.

Everyone smiles to his face and no one crosses him.

And I am supposed to spend the rest of my life as the wife of a man I have never spoken to, in a family that will always see me as a piece in an alliance. " She shook her head. "I can't."

"Then tell Papa."

The silence that followed was its own answer.

They both knew what Mahendra Dhawan would say.

They had been raised in the knowledge of what he would say.

The alliance with the Goenkas had been fifteen years in the making.

It was not about love. It was not about Sanjana.

It was about territory and legacy and the slow, careful merger of two families who controlled between them a significant portion of Rajasthan and Delhi's less official economies.

"He won't let me go," Sanjana said quietly.

"So what are you going to do?" Mihika asked. Her voice came out harder than she intended.

Sanjana looked at her. Just looked at her, with those red-rimmed eyes and that familiar face — the face Mihika had grown up beside, fought with, loved fiercely and occasionally resented.

"I'm going to leave," she said. "Tonight.

And I need you to cover for me. Just until morning.

Just long enough for Arjun and me to get to—"

"No." Mihika was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. "No, Sanjana, absolutely not. Do you understand what you're asking me to do? Do you understand what it will mean for this family? For Papa? For—"

"For you?" Sanjana's voice sharpened. "That's what you're really asking, isn't it? What it will mean for you."

"That's not—"

"You've given your whole life to this family, Mihika.

Your restaurant, your independence — and you still come running every time someone needs something managed.

You're the good one. The quiet one. The one who never makes trouble.

" Sanjana's voice softened, and somehow that was worse.

"I love you for it. I have always loved you for it.

But I cannot be you. I cannot swallow what I feel and call it duty and pretend it is enough. "

Mihika stood in the middle of the terrace room with the marigold scent drifting through the window and the sounds of a wedding being assembled below her feet, and she said, "You are being selfish."

"Yes," Sanjana said simply. "I am."

"People's lives will be disrupted. The alliance—"

"Is not my life."

"Papa will—"

"Yes." Sanjana stood too, and came to take Mihika's hands.

Her grip was very tight. "He will be furious.

And I will not be here to bear it." Her eyes held Mihika's.

"You've always been the one who survives, Mihika.

You bend without breaking. I've watched you do it your whole life.

I don't know how." Her voice dropped. "I've never known how. And I can't learn now."

Mihika looked at her sister's hands around hers. She looked at the bridal lehnga hanging in its garment bag on the hook by the door — red and gold, Sanjana's exact measurements, made by the family's tailor in three weeks of intense work.

She did not say yes.

She did not say no.

She looked at her sister, and her sister looked back at her, and the marigolds swayed in the evening wind, and the courtyard below them hummed with the preparations for a wedding that was about to become something else entirely.

She helped Sanjana pack at midnight. The haveli was quiet by then — the contractors gone, the relatives asleep, the guards on their predictable rotations.

Sanjana moved with the efficiency of someone who had been planning this for longer than one evening, pulling only what was necessary: identification, a few changes of clothes, the small stack of letters Mihika had not known she'd been keeping.

Mihika folded a shawl and put it in the bag without being asked.

Her hands were steady. She did not understand how her hands were steady.

She pressed the money into Sanjana's palm without letting herself calculate what it was — three months of careful savings, the cushion she kept for Sattva's slow season. Sanjana started to say something. Mihika shook her head.

At the door, they held each other.

It was not a brief hug. It was the kind of embrace that knows it is a threshold — that the person you are holding is about to become someone you knew before everything changed.

Mihika breathed in her sister's perfume, the rose attar she'd worn since they were teenagers, and pressed her face against her hair and did not make a sound.

"Thank you," Sanjana whispered.

Mihika said nothing.

She stood at the window and watched the car pull out of the side gate, its headlights off until it reached the road. She watched until the taillights disappeared around the corner and there was nothing left but the empty lane and the smell of marigolds.

Then she sat down on the floor of Sanjana's empty room, in the dark, with the bridal lehnga glowing softly on its hook, and let herself feel the full shape of what she had just done.

It was enormous. It pressed against the inside of her chest like something with no name.

She had let her sister go. She had handed her the money and the time and the cover of silence, and now there was a wedding in three days and no bride for it, and every consequence of that absence was going to land on people she loved.

She pressed her palms flat against the cold marble floor and breathed.

She could still wake her mother. She could call Ruhaan. She could raise the alarm right now and there would be time — just barely — to send someone after Sanjana, to drag her back, to force the seams of this situation to hold for three more days.

She sat in the dark.

She did not move.

Outside, the marigolds shifted in the breeze, fat and golden and indifferent to everything.