Page 7 of The Promise of a Traitor

“She was worse,” Adi said shortly.

Anyway,” Vik continued, cautiously, feeling his way through this confusing maze of a conversation. “We’ll talk more over dinner. Forget about her. All you need to do is tell your mom to say no and then you can just wipe this whole morning from your mind.”

All he needed to do was tell his mom to say no. The words echoed in his head, a silent counterpoint to the rapid, agitated beat of his heart in his chest.

“But I’m not going to say no,” he said, an icy calm settling over him, bringing with it a fierce, feral satisfaction.

“What?” Vikram got very quiet on the other end of the phone. “Adi-“

“I’m going to say yes,” Advik cut Vikram off. “I’m going to marry her.”

“You just said she’s everything you despise in a woman.”

“She is.” Advik smiled, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the café mirror. He looked strangely alive. “But she’s still going to be mine.”

Chapter Four

Aastha

The sharp, smoky scent of incense greeted her the moment she stepped into the flat. The Agarwal household’s evening prayers. She must have missed them.

Her father’s ritual had been a non-negotiable affair for as long as she could remember, enforced with the kind of rigid devotion that left little room for excuses or personal preference. If you were in town every member of the family attended, whether they wanted to or not.

Except today, apparently.

Today she’d been granted a rare exemption in light of her very important mission, snagging a rich husband.

The thought curled bitterly in her brain as she let her gaze sweep across the living room, only to find it empty for the moment.

Her eyes burned, her nose still red and runny from her marathon sobbing session on the side of the road. She’d made such a spectacle of herself that a kind, elderly man had stopped next to her to offer her some money mistaking her heartbreak for hunger.

She dropped her purse onto the console table, her shoulders sagging as she braced herself against the edge. Her head fell forward, her hair curtaining her face. She blinked back a fresh bout of tears. Damn, hadn’t that well run dry?

“Aashika?”

She tensed at the sound of her mother’s voice, every nerve in her body going on alert.

“How did it go?”

She cleared her throat, forcing the last of the tears away before turning to face her mother. “Horribly,” she said bluntly, shoving away from the table and heading towards the room she shared with her sister.

“Why? What did you do?”

The immediate assumption that this failure too was her fault was another little nick in her already battered heart but then…this failure was definitely all her fault. There was no one to blame but herself. She shut her eyes, trying to banish an image of Advik’s hard, angry face but it seemed to be burned into the backs of her eyelids too.

“I don’t know Ma,” she replied, her voice breaking a little. “I’m sure you can choose something from the laundry list of my faults that you have running through your head.”

“Don’t be such a drama queen.” Her mother’s voice sliced across the room, carrying the familiar bitterness that always seemed to surface around Aastha. “Tell me what you did and I’ll call Maya and fix it.”

“You can’t fix it,” she replied dully, walking past her mother and heading to the sanctuary of the room she shared with her younger sister.

Her mother’s hand wrapped around her wrist, the perfectly manicured nails digging into the soft flesh there and making her wince.

“What the hell did you do?” Ma hissed.

Before she could respond another voice interrupted the hushed exchange. “Aastha Di, you’re back.”

Long, tangled sweaty curls framed a small, pixie face as her little sister threw herself at Aastha, her thin arms going around her waist to hold her tight. Aastha smiled, hugging her sister back just as tightly, the knot in her chest starting to dissolve.