CHAPTER 22 #3
They were tangled together in the white linen of the villa bed when he said: "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Samarth." She pressed her lips to his chest, over his heartbeat. "I love you. I love you. I've run out of different ways to say it."
"Keep saying it the same way."
"Forever," she said.
"Forever," he agreed.
Coming Home
The family was waiting.
This had not been coordinated—or perhaps it had, in the way that families sometimes coordinate things without quite admitting it.
Raghbir was in the entrance hall. Saroj beside him, which was unusual.
Shaurya barely contained his joy. Tanisha, still healing but present and genuine in a way she hadn't been before.
And Kritika, standing slightly apart, who met Nimisha's eyes and offered a smile that was small and real and cost her something and was given anyway.
Nimisha smiled back.
Bruno, released from his carrier, surveyed the assembled Ranawat family with his typical assessment, found them collectively acceptable, and then walked directly to Nimisha and sat beside her.
His tail wagged.
Once.
The family stared.
"Is he—" Shaurya started.
"Don't make it weird," Samarth said.
Bruno's tail moved again. Twice, this time.
"He's wagging," Tanisha said, awed.
"He wags," Nimisha said mildly, reaching down to scratch his ear. "Just not for everyone."
Samarth's hand settled on her lower back, warm and present and entirely natural.
She looked up at him.
He looked down at her with the particular expression that was, she'd decided, her favorite thing she'd discovered in a year of discoveries—the expression he wore when he'd stopped managing his feelings and was simply having them. Open. Certain. Completely unguarded.
"Thank you," she said quietly, for him alone.
"For what?"
"For becoming mine."
Something moved across his face—warmth and humor and love, the combination that still sometimes caught her off guard with its completeness.
"You were always mine," he said. "I just had to catch up."
"And now?"
He pulled her close, his arm around her shoulders, her home.
"Now you are magnificently mine," he said. "And I am, apparently, entirely yours."
She stood on her toes and kissed him in the entrance hall of the Ranawat estate in front of his entire family and his dog and the memory of everything they'd been before this.
He kissed her back.
Bruno sat, looked at the family, looked at his people, and closed his eyes with the satisfaction of a creature who has seen something difficult resolved correctly and is ready to move on to more important matters.
Like his dinner.
That Night - Their Bedroom
Their room.
She stood at the threshold for a moment, looking at the space that had been a prison and was now simply home.
The same bed. The same walls. The same city visible through the window.
Everything different.
He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her from behind, his chin resting on top of her head.
"Are you going to stand in the doorway all night?" he asked.
"I'm just—" She stopped. "Looking."
"At what?"
"At how much can change," she said. "In the same space."
He pressed his lips to her hair. "Come to bed, my love."
She turned in his arms.
They came together slowly, the way people do when they're not running toward something but simply arriving—at the right place, at the right time, having traveled the right distance to deserve it.
He was careful with her. Attentive in a way that felt less like technique and more like genuine interest—watching her face, following her responses, making every moment matter.
She gave him everything she had. Held nothing back.
I love you, she said.
I love you, he said.
Not urgently. Not desperately. The way you say something you know you'll say again tomorrow and the day after.
Easy. True. Permanent.
Afterward, they lay in the dark with the city moving outside their window and the comfortable weight of Bruno across their feet and her head on his chest and his hand in her hair.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. "That I'm the luckiest bastard alive."
"You are," she agreed.
He laughed—the sound moving through his chest under her ear. He pressed his lips to the top of her head.
"What about you?" he asked. "What are you thinking?"
She smiled against his chest.
"I'm thinking," she said, "that I have a new book to write."
"About what?"
"A beast who learned to love." She traced a pattern over his heart with her finger. "And the beauty who loved him first."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Our story," he said.
"Our story."
"Make sure it has a happy ending."
She pressed a kiss to his chest. "Ours does."
He pulled her closer. "Yes," he said, and she could hear the smile in it. "It does."
Outside, Mumbai went about its business—relentless and indifferent and vast.
Inside this room, in this bed, in the dark that had once been a hiding place and was now simply night, two people who had been forced together by other people's politics and had found their way to each other in spite of everything held on.
And kept holding.