Chapter Ten The Commercial Flight
The Kalresh-Dhen Group headquarters was a vertical city of glass, steel, and meticulously engineered isolation.
For over a year, Anshira had navigated its sprawling corridors, private elevators, and expansive lobbies with the hyper-vigilant precision of a ghost. She knew the schedules of the executive board, the preferred meeting rooms of the senior partners, and the exact times the legal department occupied the forty-second-floor cafeteria.
She had mapped out her existence within the tower to ensure she remained invisible to the one person whose presence had the power to shatter her hard-won, fragile peace.
She had successfully avoided Ananya Singhania for three hundred and eighty days.
But the architecture of corporate life eventually demands a collision.
It happened on a quiet Tuesday afternoon in the atrium of the philanthropic foundation’s wing, a space flooded with natural light and lined with tall, potted Ficus trees.
Anshira had just finished a lengthy briefing with the rural education committee and was walking toward the main elevator bank, her mind already transitioning to the logistical details of her afternoon schedule.
The soft, authoritative click of expensive heels on polished marble echoed from the intersecting corridor.
Anshira paused, instinctively stepping toward the periphery of the hallway, a habit ingrained from twelve months of trying to occupy as little space as possible. She looked up, and the breath hitched sharply in her throat.
Ananya Singhania stood less than ten feet away.
The senior legal counsel looked as flawless as she had on the day of the intern orientation two years prior.
She wore a sharply tailored, deep emerald suit that draped perfectly over her frame, her dark hair pulled back into a sleek, unforgiving chignon.
She carried a leather portfolio under one arm, the very picture of elite, untouchable corporate royalty.
For a fraction of a second, Anshira considered turning around and walking back toward the foundation offices. But the elevators chimed, and Ananya’s sharp, intelligent eyes locked onto hers. The invisible tether of shared, tragic history snapped taut between them.
Anshira stood her ground, clutching her notebook to her chest. She offered a polite, muted nod, preparing to simply step onto the elevator and vanish.
Ananya did not nod back. Instead, she altered her path, walking slowly and deliberately toward Anshira until they were standing face-to-face in the quiet, sunlit atrium.
The air between them instantly thickened. Anshira could feel a quiet, resentment radiating from the older woman—a palpable, almost vibrating bitterness that seemed to lower the temperature in the corridor.
Anshira stared back at her, genuinely baffled.
She couldn't fathom the source of this intense, focused hostility.
In Anshira's highly logical, compartmentalized mind, the equation had already been solved. The truth about the gala had been exposed. The petty, cruel prank orchestrated by Ananya’s own subordinates had been brought to light. Rovanth knew Anshira was innocent.
More importantly, Anshira had explicitly asked for a divorce.
To her understanding, the legal machinery was merely waiting for the appropriate, scandal-free moment to execute the separation.
In Anshira’s mind, divorce was imminent, and Rovanth would soon be free to marry Ananya, returning their elite, perfectly matched universe to its original, intended state.
Ananya had won. She was getting exactly what she had always been promised.
Why, then, was she looking at Anshira as if she had stolen the sun from the sky?
“Ananya,” Anshira said softly, breaking the silence, her voice maintaining the polite, detached professionalism she wore like armor. “Good afternoon.”
Ananya’s eyes narrowed slightly, sweeping over Anshira’s simple, understated beige saree, lingering on the lack of jewelry, the complete absence of the ostentatious wealth one might expect from the wife of the undisputed heir.
“I have spent the last month watching him,” Ananya said, her voice a low, lethal hum that barely carried over the ambient noise of the atrium.
She didn't bother with a greeting. She didn't bother with corporate pleasantries.
“I have watched the way he operates in the boardroom. I have watched the way he dismantles negotiations. He is exactly the man he has always been.”
Anshira blinked, confused by the direction of the conversation. “I... I don't follow.”
“But then,” Ananya continued, taking a half-step closer, the bitterness finally bleeding through her polished veneer, “I watch him when someone mentions your name. I watch him when a memo from the foundation crosses his desk. His entire posture changes. The temperature in the room shifts.”
Ananya let out a short, hollow laugh that held absolutely no humor. Her grip on her leather portfolio tightened until her knuckles turned white.
“You must be very proud of yourself, Anshira,” Ananya remarked pointedly, her voice trembling with a complex, agonizing mixture of grief and envy.
“Against all odds, against every established rule of our world... you managed, in the end, to capture the heart of one of the most remarkable men alive.”
Anshira stared back at her, completely and utterly derailed.
Capture his heart?
The phrase echoed in Anshira’s mind, sounding so absurd, so disconnected from the cold, brutal reality of her life, that she almost thought she had misheard the woman. She looked into Ananya’s eyes, searching for a sign of sarcasm or a cruel joke, but found only raw, bleeding sincerity.
Anshira’s brow furrowed in sheer bewilderment. She is delusional, Anshira thought, her practical mind immediately rejecting the premise. Or she is confusing his suffocating, overwhelming guilt with affection.
Rovanth didn't love her. He was a man drowning in the belated realization of his own moral failing.
He was hovering, yes. He was attentive, yes.
But that was the frantic, desperate behavior of a man trying to balance a karmic ledger, not a man in love.
Ananya, blinded by her own loss, was clearly misinterpreting the situation, projecting a romantic narrative onto a tragedy of errors.
Anshira felt a sudden, profound exhaustion wash over her. She didn't have the energy to correct the brilliant legal counsel. She didn't have the emotional capacity to stand in a corporate atrium and debate the psychological motivations of a man she was actively trying to divorce.
“I think you are very confused, Ananya,” Anshira said simply, her tone flat, devoid of any triumph or malice. “Excuse me.”
Without waiting for a response, Anshira stepped around the older woman, pressed the button for the elevator, and walked into the glass car the moment the doors parted. She didn't look back as the doors slid shut, sealing her away, completely dismissing the bizarre encounter from her mind.
Left alone in the sunlit corridor, Ananya watched the digital floor indicator tick downward. She stood frozen, nursing her quiet, suffocating bitterness alone.
It wasn't fair. The universe possessed a cruel, twisted sense of humor.
Ananya had been groomed for this life since childhood.
She possessed the pedigree, the intellect, the ruthless ambition required to stand beside a man like Rovanth Kalresh-Dhen.
She had put in the years of networking, the strategic alignments, the flawless execution of corporate loyalty.
And yet, this woman—this quiet, unremarkable girl from Pune who had done absolutely nothing to earn it, who had merely been a tragic victim of circumstance, drugged and abandoned in a hotel room—had still somehow ended up with the prize.
Anshira had walked away with the one, irreplaceable thing Ananya had wanted, and the ultimate, crushing insult was that Anshira clearly didn't even want it.
By the time Anshira returned to the sprawling Kalresh Bagh estate that evening, the bizarre encounter with Ananya had solidified a decision she had been turning over in her mind for weeks.
With Rovanth’s cruelty now firmly a thing of the past, and the rest of the family—Ishwari, Chandrasen, and Meenakshi—no longer treating her with icy contempt, the oppressive, suffocating atmosphere of the estate had lifted.
But the newfound respect did not make the house feel like a home.
It only made the waiting more pronounced.
Anshira sat at the antique writing desk in her guest suite, looking out over the dark, manicured lawns. She had survived. The truth was out. The family was accommodating. The divorce was merely a matter of administrative timing.
It was finally time to go home.
She needed to visit her parents in Pune.
She needed to sit on their balcony, smell the roasted cumin, and feel the grounding presence of a love that required no corporate strategy.
She reasoned that, with the divorce likely just around the corner, she should get her personal affairs settled, prepare her parents for the incoming transition, and begin emotionally packing up her life in Delhi before returning to Pune for good.
The decision brought a sudden, shocking lightness to her chest.
She stood up, smoothed the pleats of her saree, and walked out of the guest wing. She found Rovanth in his private study in the East Wing.
The big mahogany door was open. Rovanth was standing by the massive window, looking out into the night, a glass of water resting untouched on his desk.
When he heard her soft footsteps on the Persian rug, he turned immediately, his dark eyes locking onto hers with that familiar, intense focus that Ananya had so bitterly noted.
“Anshira,” Rovanth said, his voice lowering instinctively, softening in a way he reserved exclusively for her. “Is everything alright? Do you need something?”