He pulled her against his side and she settled there like she belonged—which, he was slowly accepting, she did.
"Samarth?" she said eventually, her voice already soft with approaching sleep.
"Hmm."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For trying." A pause. "Even when you're afraid of doing it wrong."
His arms tightened around her.
"I'll keep trying," he said.
It wasn'tI love you.
But it was the truest thing he'd said in years.
And she was asleep before he could say more.
He lay in the dark, her breathing steady against his chest, Bruno a warm weight across their feet from where he'd apparently decided to sleep, and thought:
I love her.
He was going to have to figure out how to say it out loud.
Soon.
Before he ran out of time to deserve it.
CHAPTER 18
Crossword Bookstore, Bandra - 3:17 PM
The bookstore smelled exactly the way bookstores should—paper and possibility and the particular stillness of places where stories lived between covers.
Nimisha had been here for two hours, moving through the shelves with a researcher's focus, pulling books and setting them back, making notes on her phone. Her current manuscript required accuracy about vintage jewelry markets in Mumbai, and three books on the craft history of Zaveri Bazaar had caught her attention.
She was genuinely happy, which still surprised her sometimes. The simple, uncomplicated happiness of being somewhere she loved, doing work that mattered to her, without the weight of the estate pressing down on her shoulders.
Her security detail—Prakash and Suresh—stood near the entrance. They'd been her shadows for three weeks now. Professional, unobtrusive, unfailingly polite.
Also, she noticed, increasingly relaxed.
Three weeks without incident had a way of making people comfortable.
She pulled a particularly beautiful illustrated volume from the shelf and turned it over to read the back, completely absorbed.
Which was why she didn't notice the two men enter through the back service entrance.
Or the third through the side emergency exit.
The first sign of trouble was Prakash's voice from the front, suddenly sharp—"Wait, who are—"
Then silence.
Nimisha looked up.
