CHAPTER 40! BETRAYAL #3
The Commissioner murmured, his voice dripping with years of suppressed animosity.
"Fifteen years?" Aryav glanced down at the steel around his wrists.
A faint smile touched his mouth, cold and brief.
"Fifteen years."
He looked at the cuffs.
"My wife managed it in fifteen minutes."
Pause.
"You should be embarrassed."
Before the Commissioner could process the words, Aryav was escorted into the back of the armored SUV.
The door slammed shut.
The SUV pulled away beneath the flashing lights.
Nobody chased it. Nobody could.
Reyansh stood rooted to the asphalt, his fists trembling.
Tara stared at the empty road as though willing the vehicle to return. Shourya was already on his phone, issuing clipped instructions between measured breaths.
Vivaan hadn't moved at all. His eyes remained fixed on the disappearing convoy.
Only when the last red light vanished into the fog did he holster his weapon.
For twenty-four hours, the state held him.
The concrete cell was small, stripped bare of comfort, and smelling faintly of damp stone and industrial cleaner.
Morning became afternoon.
Afternoon dissolved into another stretch of artificial light.
Guards changed shifts.
The tray of prison food arrived and went untouched by the door.
Aryav never asked what time it was.
He never asked for his lawyers.
He never asked for a phone call.
When his defense attorneys requested emergency meetings, Aryav refused them all.
He simply sat motionless on the narrow iron cot, his tailored overcoat draped over his shoulders against the subterranean chill.
Every few hours, a guard glanced through the observation slot.
Every single time, Aryav was sitting in exactly the same position, staring forward into the shadows.
He didn't care about the federal charges, the evidence the prosecution was frantically trying to compile, or the frantic political maneuvering happening beyond the thick stone walls.
His mind was elsewhere.
He was seeing only the phantom impression of Aadhira's retreating form.
The weight of Ayaan's absence was a physical ache in his chest. For the first time in his life, the walls around him weren't a cage built by his enemies; they were a boundary line drawn by his wife.
She had engineered this isolation with surgical precision, leaving him in the dark to face the one thing he had spent a lifetime avoiding: the wreckage of the past.
Outside, the Singhania machinery roared to life. Every senior advocate connected to the Singhania name was awake before sunrise.
Court registries that usually opened at ten were receiving calls before dawn.
Judges were approached through emergency constitutional procedures, and ministers suddenly found themselves answering unfamiliar numbers.
Shourya worked through the night, commanding an army of partners, pulling judicial favors, and invoking archaic loopholes that hadn't been touched in a century.
Vivaan executed wire transfers, leveraging political entities and applying pressure to the highest tiers of the ministry.
By the following midnight, the arrest warrant was dismantled by a supreme injunction.
The cell doors slid open, and Aryav Rai Singhania walked back out into the night, a free man.
The mansion had never sounded so empty. No servants spoke. Nobody welcomed him.
His footsteps echoed through marble corridors that usually buzzed with family, the silence hanging like a shroud over the vast estate.
The library was empty when he returned.
Aryav sat behind his massive mahogany desk, the heavy silence of the room pressing inward.
He had poured himself a glass of neat scotch, the golden liquid completely untouched.
His thumb slowly, repeatedly traced the faded blue thread wrapped around the worn bundle of currency notes Aadhira had left in his palm.
It wasn't money anymore.
It was evidence.
Not for a courtroom, but for him.
The heavy double doors of the library slammed open.
The family poured into the room, their faces pale under the massive crystal chandelier.
No one sat. Tara stood near the fireplace, her eyes red and hollowed out.
Reyansh paced the perimeter like a caged wolf, while Arush sat in the corner, his head buried in his hands.
Shourya strode in last, his tie loosened, his coat gone. The calculated, calm lawyer who had systematically dismantled a federal arrest vanished.
In his place was a brother pushed to the absolute edge of his sanity.
Nobody greeted him.
Nobody asked if he was hurt.
They simply watched.
Shourya took one step. Then another. Then he crossed the room, reached across the mahogany, closed his fist, and violently grabbed Aryav by the collar of his shirt.
"I destroyed my own credibility getting you out of that cage," Shourya growled, his voice vibrating with a dangerous, fractured rage.
"Don't insult me by expecting me to believe my sister betrayed you for nothing. She would never pull the trigger on you without a devastating reason."
Aryav didn't move.
He didn't strike back.
He simply looked up at Shourya through a veil of dark, unreadable intensity.
"Tell me what happened between you two," Shourya demanded, his grip tightening, his knuckles turning white.
"Tell me why the hell she had legal custody documents for your son. How did a judge sign away a Singhania heir to an Agrawal?"
Aryav's gaze remained perfectly level. Slowly, deliberately, he reached up and wrapped his fingers around Shourya's wrist, applying just enough pressure to force the lawyer to release his collar.
Aryav didn't move.
He remained entirely motionless, a statue behind the dark mahogany.
"Correct your phrasing," Aryav murmured, his voice dropping into a cold, terrifying register that sent a shiver down the spine of everyone present.
Aryav looked directly at Shourya.
"He isn't my son."
The grandfather clock ticked once. Somewhere beyond the library doors, the courtyard fountain continued to run. Inside, nobody moved.
No one seemed to remember how to breathe.
"He's ours."
Nobody understood. Aryav looked at each of them in turn, letting the silence stretch.
"Aadhira gave birth to him."
Tara staggered backward, her hand flying to her mouth. "No... No, that's impossible."
Tears spilled down her face, glistening under the chandelier light. " Bhai you are lying right."
But aryav didn't said anything it's was answer itself.
"That's not possible," her voice cracked, her knees nearly buckling against the hearth. "I was there... I held him when he took his first steps. She was there too."
She looked at Aryav, her chest heaving as the horrifying realization set in.
"Oh God... she was there."
"No..." Reyansh laughed once.
It was a completely disbelieving sound. "No." He looked around the room, freezing mid-stride.
"Somebody tell me he's lying."
Shourya's face contorted, his head shaking in violent denial.
"You're losing your mind, Aryav. Aadhira is twenty-six years old. You're trying to tell me she gave birth to Ayaan when she was a nineteen-year-old college student?"
Tara stepped forward, her voice barely more than a whisper. "Where was she?"
Nobody answered.
The question settled over the room like ash.
Shourya staggered back a step, his grip slipping from the edge of the desk.
"Nineteen..." he repeated hoarsely. His eyes unfocused, as though searching through years of memories that suddenly no longer fit together.
"She called me every week."
Another step back.
"I picked her up from college... She celebrated Raksha Bandhan with me." His voice cracked, the disbelief giving way to a devastating, crushing guilt.
"How... How did my little sister carry a child... and I never knew?"
Aryav met his eyes.
There was no accusation in them. Somehow, that was worse.
"Because we made sure none of you knew," Aryav said. His voice was almost emotionless, clinical.
"She disappeared. No one came looking. She suffered. No one noticed. She gave birth, and her family never knew."
Shourya sank into the nearest chair without realizing he'd moved, his hands instantly covering his face.
For years, he had won impossible cases, navigating the most treacherous legal battlefields. Tonight, he couldn't defend himself.
"She was a kid," Reyansh's voice cracked, the raw shock breaking through his anger. "She was just a kid."
"She never asked for help," Tara whispered.
Nobody answered her.
Because suddenly, everyone in the room remembered how often Aadhira had smiled in past.
Aryav looked down.
His thumb rested against the blue thread of the cash bundle.
"She was nineteen," Aryav said softly. "And everyone who should have protected her... failed including me."
Nobody asked another question.
Because for the first time that night, the betrayal no longer seemed like the mystery.
The past did.
___________________________________________
So many questions, huh? ??
Go on... start asking. I'm waiting. ??