I groan. “I hate you.”
She laughs. “No, you love me.”
And for the first time in a long while, surrounded by marble walls and quiet power, with my best friend sitting across from me like she belongs here too—I realize something important.
Home isn’t always a place.
Sometimes it’s the people who show up.
And right now, somehow, impossibly—I have more of them than I ever thought I would.
The Most Unfair Rival
DHRUV
I haven’treallyseen Sitara in two days.
Yes, technically, we sleep in the same room. I wake up beside her. I fall asleep knowing she’s there. I hear her soft breathing at night, feel the faint warmth she leaves behind when she slips out of bed before me.
But that’s not what I mean.
I haven’thadher.
Her attention. Her rambling. Her half-finished thoughts that spill into full monologues the moment she’s comfortable. The way she sits beside me in the evenings, legs folded under her, doodling while telling me about something that happened in her head more than in real life.
That Sitara has been… kidnapped. By her best friend.
When she asked me a week ago—very cautiously, like she expected me to refuse—if her friend could come stay for a few days, I said yes without a second thought. Of course I did. Sitaradoesn’t ask for things easily. And she looked so hopeful that saying no wasn’t even an option.
Tia arrived like a cyclone—small, sharp-eyed, loud in the way people who are comfortable being themselves are loud. Within an hour, she’d claimed a corner of the palace like she’d been born here. Within two, she’d claimed Sitara.
And within twenty-four hours, I realized I had a rival.
I do not like rivals.
Especially not when it comes to my wife.
But I didn’t anticipate how quickly I’d be reduced to… this.
A grown man. A king. Sitting alone in his room at night, very much aware that his wife is down the corridor laughing at something that is definitely not him.
It’s ridiculous. I know that.
And yet, here I am.
The clock on the bedside table ticks past midnight when I hear footsteps outside. Light ones. Familiar. Paired with hushed laughter that immediately tightens something unpleasant in my chest.
I don’t move.
I’m sitting against the headboard, glasses on, a file open in my lap that I’ve read exactly zero words of in the last half hour. The lamp is on—low, warm—casting the room in soft shadows. I look up just as the door creaks open.
Sitara slips in, still smiling to herself, her pallu a bit loose around her shoulders, hair slightly messy like she’s forgotten to fix it after a long day. She freezes the second she notices me awake.
“Oh,” she says softly. “You’re still up.”
I lift an eyebrow. “It’s not that late.”
She squints at the clock. “It’s… past twelve.”
