Ananya
The house was quieter than a graveyard.Even the tick of the clock seemed too loud, accusing, marking the minutes she was losing.
Her window was barred shut, not with iron, but with the watchful eyes of her mother and cousin. Her bedroom door no longer opened freely; a lock clicked from the outside each night. Her phone was gone, her bag checked before and after classes, her friends warned to "leave her alone."
Her world had shrunk to four walls and the suffocating air of mistrust.
Still, she clung to small rebellions.A scrap of paper hidden under her mattress.A pencil mark carved faintly along her desk's edge: R.Her whispered prayers into the dark, hoping somehow he would hear them.
But the worst was the silence.No letters tucked in her books.No stolen notes passed under desks.No fleeting glances across the courtyard.
Nothing.
Had he given up?Or had they found a way to break him too?
She pressed her face into her pillow, willing herself not to cry, because even her tears felt like they belonged to her parents now. And yet, deep inside, a quiet defiance throbbed—her love for Riyan was still hers. They could cage her body, but not her heart.
Riyan
He knew something was wrong the moment she stopped looking at him.
Ananya had never ignored him before, not like this—not with her eyes sliding past him in class, her shoulders stiff when he passed by. At first he thought it was her fear, the pressure of whispers growing too loud. But then the letters stopped. The stolen moments vanished.
And then came the sight that gutted him: her cousin hovering near her like a warden, eyes scanning, watching.
That was when it hit him—She wasn't ignoring him.She was being cut off.
His blood burned hotter with every day of silence.
At night, he paced his room, fists clenched, replaying her last smile, her last words, her last kiss. He tore paper after paper trying to write a letter he couldn't deliver.
"She's mine," he whispered into the dark. "No one gets to steal her from me."
The fury inside him was sharp enough to kill, but beneath it was a deeper ache—fear. What if she believed the walls they had built around her? What if they convinced her he was the mistake?
No. He wouldn't let that happen.
If they had locked her in a cage, then he would be the storm that broke it open.
Ananya
That night, as she lay awake listening to the click of the lock outside her door, she whispered into the darkness:
"Find me, Riyan."
And in another corner of the city, at that exact hour, Riyan stood at his window, whispering into the wind:
"Wait for me, Ananya."
Their words never reached each other's ears—But they pulsed through the night like a vow.