CHAPTER 63! HIS APOLOGY #2
She leaned forward, refusing to let him retreat behind his regret, her voice rising in sharp, desperate edges.
"Then answer the rest, Aryav! If you cared so much about my survival, why did you take him from me after he was born? Why leave me with empty arms in that hospital?"
Instead of answering directly, Aryav leaned back, his gaze narrowing slightly.
"When was the last time you completed a collection for your fashion line?"
She blinked, thrown completely off balance by the sudden shift. "What?"
"Answer me."
"Eleven months ago," she said, her voice shaking with confusion and anger. "I was finishing my showcase in Milan."
"Exactly. Eleven month ago after that you were too busy being a mom, You were in Milan," he said, his voice steadying, though his eyes remained dark.
"You were building a name in an unforgiving industry. You were building a life that belonged to you. Do you remember how desperately you wanted that when you were younger?"
"Of course I do!" she said, tears blurring her vision again. "But what does my career have to do with you stealing my child from me?"
"Everything," Aryav said smoothly, though a muscle in his cheek twitched.
"If I had kept you with me back then—if I had handed you a newborn at nineteen and told you to be a mother—you would have done it. Because you are loving, fiercely protective, and selfless. You would have loved him enough to destroy your own future."
Aadhira went completely still, her heart slamming violently against her ribs.
"And you wouldn't have called it destruction," he added, his voice dropping to a low, painful murmur. "You would have called it motherhood."
The words landed with surgical precision, slicing straight through her defenses.
"So you made the choice for me?" Her voice rose, sharp with a fresh, explosive fury.
"Yes," he said quietly.
She stood up abruptly, her chair scraping harshly against the hardwood floor.
"Seven years, Aryav! Seven years of empty nurseries, waking up in the middle of the night wondering if my baby was crying for me—and you did it because you decided what I need in my life?"
"I knew what this world would do to you!" Aryav snapped, standing up with her, his voice hardening in desperate self-defense, though he didn't cross the distance between them.
"If you'd stayed with me, they would have praised you for giving up your youth. If you'd built your career while raising him here, they would have called you selfish. Either way, they would have made your motherhood the measure of your worth.
I wanted you to enter this world as a woman who had built something of her own—not as an eightteen-year-old girl everyone expected to sacrifice herself."
A suffocating silence settled over the bedroom.
Aadhira stood trembling, clutching her hands against her chest. Aryav hadn't acted out of hatred. He had acted out of a need to protect her and her future at any cost, even if it meant tearing her heart out in the process.
"You think ten moves ahead without ever asking anyone if they want to play your game," she whispered, shaking her head.
"You destroyed both of us to make sure I had a future. You don't get to call it protection just because your intentions were good. You took my son. You have no idea what it does to a mother to wake up every single day for seven years with empty arms."
Aryav’s jaw tightened, his thumb pressing hard into his palm until his skin paled, but he didn't break eye contact.
For the first time since she had known him, he had no answer.
"You broke me," she sobbed softly, the confession tearing out of her chest.
"I don't want to," he said, the two words barely audible, stripped of every ounce of pride he possessed.
"And you expected me to forgive you? You thought explaining this would make me understand?"
Aryav looked up into her eyes, offering no defenses, no excuses, and no shields.
"No," he said quietly. "I never expected forgiveness. I want you to hate me."
Aadhira wiped her face with the back of her wrist, staring at him through blurred vision. "What? Why?"
"I thought if you hated me," he said, his voice dropping into a quiet, broken register, "you'd at least be free of me. Free to rebuild your life."
The words settled somewhere beneath her ribs, heavier than any apology could have been.
For eight years, she had believed he had never cared whether she hated him.
Now she understood something far worse. He had cared. He had simply believed her hatred was the price of her freedom.
"I was arrogant enough to think I could survive without you," he added softly, looking away toward the dark window.
Aadhira’s heart twisted painfully in her chest. "Did you?"
A long, excruciating silence passed before he gave his answer.
"No."
The single word sounded more broken than anything else he had said that afternoon.
Aadhira stood there, processing the absolute ruins of their past. The grief of seven lost years couldn't be erased by an explanation, but the suffocating darkness that had trapped them for a decade was finally breaking apart, leaving behind a quiet clarity.
She took a steadying breath, pressing her palms against her face to wipe away the dampness.
When she finally pulled her hands away, there was still one lingering detail—one last piece of the puzzle that felt wildly out of place alongside his grand, tragic sacrifice.
"Everything was going great than why you made the contract?" she asked, her voice regaining a thread of quiet composure.
Aryav’s expression shifted instantly. The dark, tortured weight in his posture vanished, replaced in a split second by a pull of his dark brows and a look of sheer, profound annoyance.
Aadhira blinked, caught off guard. "What?"
"The contract," she repeated, watching him closely. "Why did you force me to sign a one-year marriage contract before letting me move in?"
Aryav leaned back against the edge of the bed, his jaw flexing tight.
"That wasn't me."
Aadhira stared. "What do you mean it wasn't you?"
"It was your fucking brother."
Aadhira’s mouth fell open. "Shourya Bhai?"
"Yes," Aryav said, sounding thoroughly irritated. "I intended to marry you without one. Your brother refused to let it happen unless we both signed the agreement he drafted."
"What? Why? And You agreed? You listened to Shourya bhai?"
Aryav gave her a flat, unamused look.
"He threatened to take you out of the country. I couldn't even kill him for it because the asshole is my friend. He made it very clear that if I wanted you in this house,
I had to prove I wasn't going to treat you like an asset or lock you into a marriage you couldn't walk away from if I stepped out of line."
Aadhira stared at him, the heavy sorrow in her chest suddenly yielding to a strange, unexpected swell of absurdity.
"Shourya bhai bullied you into signing a marriage contract?"
"He did not bully me," Aryav snapped, looking visibly offended. "He was persistent. And deeply unreasonable."
"Just accept,You were scared of my brother," she said, a tiny, reluctant hiccup of a laugh breaking through her wet lashes despite herself.
"Scared is not a word I would use. Annoyed, perhaps."
"You look annoyed right now just thinking about it."
"I am annoyed," Aryav insisted, crossing his arms over his chest like a man whose pride had suffered an embarrassing, unrecoverable blow. "He's an asshole."
A soft, genuine laugh finally escaped her lips—a small, fragile sound that broke the heavy air that had suffocated the room for hours.
Aryav looked at her, but the lethal edge in his posture had completely melted away, he never knew he need that sound in his life more than anything, but now he is confirme that he can sell his empire if the price was her smile.
She shook her head, letting out a soft, trembling breath. "He's protective."
Aryav stared at her for a long, quiet moment, taking in the faint curve of her lips and the quiet warmth returning to her eyes. Then, with the exhausted sigh of a man accepting complete defeat, he muttered, "Only if it makes you happy. He's still an asshole."
"Better," she murmured softly.
She didn't rush across the room. She didn't wrap her arms around him, and she didn't offer a clean absolution for seven years of stolen time.
The pain was still real, resting between them like an unhealed scar.
The room was completely still. the air in the bedroom was cool.
Aryav sat on the low edge of the mattress, his frame bent slightly forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees.
Aadhira sat in the wooden armchair beside him. The space between them was barely two feet, yet it felt vast—the quiet weight of eight lost years sitting between them.
There was no anger left in the air, only the heavy silence that comes after a storm has passed.
Aadhira looked down at her lap. Her hands were still pale from where she had clutched her dress earlier, her knuckles slowly returning to their normal color. She took a deep, quiet breath and let it out.
Aryav didn't move. He kept his eyes on the floorboards, waiting with the endurance of a man used to taking hits.
Minutes drifted by.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked softly.
"When are you going to forgive me?" Aryav asked.
The question didn't carry his usual authority. It was quiet. Unadorned.
Aadhira turned her head slowly, looking at his profile. "I don't remember hearing an apology."
Aryav creased his brow. "I explained everything."
"Yes." She nodded solemnly. "You explained everything. You explained why you did what you did. You explained why you left the money. You explained why you took Ayaan. You explained the contract." She paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make his jaw tighten.
"Explanations aren't apologies, Aryav."
Aryav stared at her. For perhaps the first time in his life, the man who could face armed men without blinking looked completely lost.
"I don't know how to say it," he admitted, his voice dropping, rough around the edges.