The sky outside Bharat’s city office windows was streaked with fading amber and deepening blue when his private line vibrated once.
He answered immediately.
“Yes.”
Imran’s voice was controlled, but tight beneath the surface. “Sir, there’s been an incident at the Gulwama unit. Furnace line three experienced a pressure surge. One technician sustained burns, but he’s stable. The line has been shut down.”
Bharat’s pen stopped over the document he had been reviewing.
“Cause?”
“Preliminary system logs indicate a manual override.”
Not malfunction. Or corrosion. Or operator error.
Override.
Bharat leaned back slowly in his chair.
“Media presence?”
“Increased within thirty minutes. Protest activity outside the gate escalated almost immediately.”
Too quickly. They were prepared.
“Secure the internal logs. Begin a quiet audit of override permissions. No plant-wide announcement.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And increase personal security allocation around the palace perimeter,” Bharat added after a brief pause. “Extend the security radius for my wife. Effective immediately.”
There was no explanation in his tone. Only instruction.
Imran did not question it. “Understood.”
The call ended.
Bharat remained seated for a long moment before activating the security feeds. Multiple screens illuminated the wall in a soft grid of angles and time stamps.
He began with factory footage, scanning override logs and cross-referencing technician movements, filing away anomalies with clinical precision.
The coastal plant's timestamp appeared in the lower corner of one feed: two days prior.
He did not seek it deliberately. But his eyes stopped there.
The office. The chair. Yamini lowering herself onto his lap with that particular blend of impulse and calculated nerve that he had come to recognize as entirely her own.
The moment she made contact, his system had locked.
Every muscle had stilled, an involuntary arrest that hit him when stimulation arrived without preparation. The warmth of her weight. The unfamiliar press of her against his thighs. Her arm settling around his neck with a stiffness that suggested she was less certain than she appeared. The scent of her, something faintly floral, and beneath it the cold mountain air that had begun to attach itself to her skin from weeks at the palace.
His hands had remained on the armrests because moving them required deciding where they would go instead. And that calculation had no clean answer.
His body had not consulted him before responding. He had been acutely, inconveniently aware of that.
When he told her not to sit on him in public again, she responded with a challenge.
Even after she left, he remained seated to gather control. It took him 102 seconds.
