Karan Wadhwa was still very much present in her life. And she was still standing exactly where he could see her.
CHAPTER 33
Karan stood on the darker edge of the resort garden, away from the lights, watching Mishti, who stood on the balcony above, wrapped in stillness. When their eyes found each other, locked across the vast stretch of the garden, something old and raw stirred in his chest.
Life was strange. Once, there had been only one woman who hated him. Now there were two.His sister. And his wife.
And the cruellest part was not the hatred itself, but the way fate had twisted things further. Avni and Mishti were now friends, almost like sisters. The two women he would burn the world down for, standing on the same side, while he remained the villain in both their stories.
The thought curled bitterly inside him.
He lifted the bottle again, took another swig of the aged single-malt whisky, and let memory do what it always did when he was tired enough to stop fighting it, without ever breaking his gaze.
It all started after his mother was shot, and Karan burned with the thought of wanting to avenge the Goels. His sister, Avni, was 11 then. Too young to carry the weight of blood and vengeance. Too soft for the shadows he had chosen to walk into. He wanted her world to stay clean, untouched by the ugliness that consumed his own. He wanted her to grow up laughing, dreaming, unafraid.
And there was another reason. One that he still feared. Even after his arrest and imprisonment fifteen years ago, Dilip Goel never stopped tormenting Karan and Avni. He had men outside, connections he continued to pull strings through. Once, Avni was nearly abducted from school while returning home. Luckily, the driver who had the responsibility for her school pick up and drop off, fought every bit with the thugs and safeguarded her and brought her home. It was a terrifying incident that shattered whatever little hope Karan had left for peace. That threat, along with the constant looming danger, forced a decision he did not want to make. To send Avni away, discreetly, to London with Rajat’s father, who lived there. Karan did it for her safety, to protect her. Instead, it became another deep wound and distanced him from his sister forever.
Avni had endless questions for him when he made that decision.
Why couldn’t she stay with him in Mumbai?
Why did she have to live so far away?
But Karan couldn’t tell her the truth, that she wasn’t safe here anymore, or that he couldn’t make her part of his revenge game because it was dangerous.
She was too young to understand how lies are sometimes built from fear, not malice. She wanted her brother. She wanted home. She wanted answers. And when answers did not come, the mind of a growing girl did what it had to do to survive the silence.
VK had told her what they all agreed she needed to hear.
That her brother Karan did not want her there, and Avni filled in the gaps herself. She thought that after their parents’ death, Karan had chosen wealth, power, and inheritance all for himself. She told herself that her own brother had pushed her away because she was inconvenient, because she did not fit into the life he wanted to build.
It was easier to believe greed than cruelty. Easier than accepting that blood could abandon blood for reasons too dark to speak aloud. No one corrected her theory that time, because Karan wanted her to believe that and stop demanding to stay with him in Mumbai instead.
Karan had watched her leave, knowing she would hate him for it one day. Knowing she would grow up believing he had chosen everything except her. He accepted that hatred without protest because hatred was better than losing her, if Dilip Goel kept trying to hurt them again.
Even over the years, Avni kept believing that he was a bad brother. And Karan never tried to change her mind. Never asked VK or Rajat to correct her. Never once did he defend himself. Because the truth would have shattered the last fragments of her childhood. Because telling her would have meant describing how brutally their mother had been killed. How revenge had hollowed him out from the inside. How every breath he took after that day had been fuelled by one singular purpose.That the Goels had taken everything from him. And he had sworn they would pay.
In fact, Karan had even asked VK to change her surname on all legal documents. That was how she became Avni Mathur, not Avni Wadhwa. Every step was taken for security, to ensure that Dilip Goel’s men could never trace her or reach her again. VK had raised her like his own daughter, loved her fiercely, and protected her with a devotion Karan could never publicly claim.
Every year, Karan met Avni in London. And every year, she greeted him with cold politeness at best, venom at worst. Their meetings were strictly formal, filled mostly with her bitterness and poison-laced words directed at him. But Karan took them all. He let her believe he was the monster because he could not tell her the truth about the brutal past, at least not until his revenge against the Goels was complete.
Avni, who already hated Karan, knew that he had gotten married. But she never once searched for his wife. She never Googled her, never showed any interest in knowing who she was, not even enough to look up a photograph. That was why she never realised that the Mishti who had joined their NGO was the same Mishti who was Karan’s wife.
Karan’s best friend, Rajat, was the one thing life had given him without calculation. Rajat had stayed back in Mumbai when everyone else had left. Fifteen years ago, when Karan’s world collapsed, Rajat had refused to abandon him. He knew his best friend needed him more than anything. So even when his father asked him to come along to London, Rajat refused and chose to stay back. VK had his business to run in London, so he left the children, Rajat and his sister Kanika, in Mumbai, while he left with Avni.
Rajat studied in India, in Mumbai, with Karan, always being the support Karan needed in his grief and anger. But Rajat kept travelling back to London twice a year, sometimes even more, to see his father. That was how Avni and Rajat grew into friends, slowly, naturally, and somewhere along the way, those feelings turned into something deeper.
A few months before Karan and Mishti got married, Rajat and Avni’s relationship properly took shape as a long-distance affair. Karan was too consumed by revenge to notice the signs at first. The secret calls. The distracted smiles. The way Rajat guarded his phone was as if it held his heartbeat. It was only recently, after Mishti was gone, that Rajat could no longer hide it from his best friend. He finally told Karan that he was in love with Avni, had been dating her for about a year and a half, and that he wanted to marry her.
Everything suddenly made sense to Karan then. And instead of anger, he felt relief. He was genuinely happy that Rajat would be Avni’s life partner. Rajat was the one man he trusted withoutreservation. If Avni had to belong to someone, if someone had to stand beside her for life, he could not have chosen better. Even VK wanted the same. He already loved Avni like his own daughter, so the moment this came out, he wasted no time and immediately set the wedding preparations in motion.
Now, standing here at the resort in Jaipur, Karan took another slow drink, the whisky burning down his throat, as his eyes stayed fixed on the balcony above. Mishti was still standing there, watching him, unaware of how many ghosts stood between them.
He recalled her words earlier today.
“Marriage doesn’t cage. Marriage doesn’t make a woman feel like she has to disappear to breathe. I didn’t leave to bruise your ego. I left to survive.”
She had every right to survive, yet why did her survival without him affect him so deeply? When she was close to him, he had been the one creating distance between them. And when she finally chose distance for herself, he was so desperate to erase it. What did he truly want from her? That was the one question he could not answer, not even after these eleven long months of separation.
