CHAPTER 14! IT SHOULDT MATTER #3
"You tuck your feet under yourself when you're comfortable."
Aadhira blinked, caught entirely off guard. "What?"
"I've seen you do it," Aryav said softly, his dark eyes rising to meet hers. "Three times. You aren't doing it now."
Aadhira stared at him, her chest tight. He wasn't just managing the room; he was managing her. He was cataloging her quirks, remembering her habits.
Nobody had ever said something like that to her before.
Not because nobody cared.
Her family cared.
Fiercely.
But love, in her world, had always been loud.
Plates of food.
Scoldings.
Phone calls.
Warm hands checking her forehead when she was sick.
Nobody had ever loved her through observation.
Nobody had ever noticed the tiny things.
The way she tucked her feet beneath herself while reading.
The way she hummed when she cooked.
The way she twisted her bangles when she was anxious.
Aryav noticed all of it.
And somehow that frightened her more than his power ever could.
But instead of the validation or relief he might have anticipated from his protection, she looked deeply disturbed.
Not by the women kneeling before her, but by him. By the clinical ease with which he dismantled lives.
Aryav had expected relief. Gratitude, perhaps. What he found instead was alarm, her dark eyes looking at him as if he were a monster she had accidentally unchained.
The discovery landed somewhere unpleasant and unexamined in his chest. His expression darkened, his posture growing tighter as he confronted her silent judgment.
Then, he spoke calmly to the trembling director. "My name is attached to this building." His eyes moved across the boutique slowly, freezing the air.
"Remove everything unworthy of it."
A heavy, violent pause dropped over the room. Then, Aryav's eyes shifted lazily downward toward the women still kneeling near her feet, his voice dropping into a soft, dangerous register.
"Try harder. The next time you discuss her, remember you're discussing the future Mrs. Shinghania."
Wife.
The room changed. Not visibly, but every single calculation in it did. The kneeling women went translucent with a newfound, existential horror.
They had mistook her for someone protected merely by a billionaire's passing attention; they hadn't realized she was protected by his name.
Aryav watched none of their terror directly. That was the cruelest, most lethal part of his execution. He wasn't humiliating them with emotional rage; he was dismantling their lives while remaining completely, clinically detached from the outcome.
Beneath the warm amber lighting, with the storm howling violently against the glass outside, Aryav adjusted the delicate strap around her ankle himself, his large fingers precise against her skin despite the destruction still echoing through the room.
Then quietly-
"Does it hurt?"
Aadhira's breath caught. He could have been asking about the shoe. Or the humiliation.
Or the realization of the absolute titan she was now bound to.
She pulled her hand from his grip, a trace of sharp defiance cutting through her fear.
"The shoe doesn't hurt," she whispered, her voice shaking. "And I didn't ask you to destroy them."
Aryav held her gaze, his dark eyes unreadable.
A loose strand of hair had escaped near her temple. She kept pushing it back every few seconds without realizing it.
Aryav found himself watching the movement. The realization irritated him immediately.
"Do you know what the worst part is?" Aadhira's voice fractured, her eyes swimming with sudden, hot anger. "They
were cruel. They were mean. But somehow... somehow you've made me feel worse."
The sentence landed harder than it should have.
Aryav had negotiated hostile acquisitions worth billions. He had sat across governments. He had walked away from men twice his age without blinking. Yet for one irrational second, standing beneath the amber lights of a bridal floor he never wanted to be on, he felt something dangerously unfamiliar.
Regret.
Aadhira looked at him, her chest heaving slightly, her fingers reaching up to brush that loose strand behind her ear yet again.
"Why does it matter so much to you?" she demanded, her voice barely a whisper against the roaring storm. "Why do you care what they say?"
Aryav looked away first. It lasted less than a second. But it happened.
"I don't know," he said. His voice was terrifyingly quiet. "And that's becoming a problem."
He turned his head back slowly, his eyes locking onto hers as the rain slammed against the glass behind him.
"That's the problem."
Rain hammered violently against the glass. Aryav's gaze didn't leave hers.
"It shouldn't matter."
Another pause. For the first time all evening, Aryav sounded almost irritated with himself.
"It does."
Aadhira should have felt relieved.
Instead, something inside her chest tightened.
Because for the first time since meeting Aryav rai Shinghania, the thing frightening her wasn't his power.
It was the possibility that he genuinely meant every word.
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