The slip of paper felt heavier than any jewel, any heirloom, any book she had ever held. It pulsed against her chest beneath her kurta, like a second heartbeat she couldn't part with.
Every time her mother called her name, she stiffened, sure the secret would somehow be visible—scrawled across her face, glowing through the fabric. But no one noticed.
At dinner, while her father's silence pressed like a cage, her fingers brushed the hidden note, grounding her. When her cousin teased her about eating so little, she only smiled faintly, lips curling around a secret too dangerous to share.
And when she lay awake in the dark, the words played over and over, like a forbidden lullaby:They can lock you away, but they can't take you from me.
Her fear hadn't vanished—it still laced her every step—but for the first time in weeks, it was threaded with steel. This secret was hers, and hers alone. She would not let it go.
Across town, Riyan's fury had sharpened into something colder, more deliberate.
The stolen kiss in the shadows, the desperate meetings, the ache of being torn from her—it had left him restless, prowling through nights without sleep. But the note… the note had been a lifeline, a risk worth bleeding for.
And now? He needed more.
Sitting at the edge of Kabir's bed, he mapped out possibilities like a general planning a war. Letters hidden in books were clever, but too fragile. He wanted to see her, to touch her again. To remind her they were still real, flesh and breath, not just ink on paper.
Kabir warned him to slow down, to be careful, but Riyan only shook his head."They think they've won because they've caged her. They haven't seen what I can do when they push me."
He thought of Ananya's eyes—the fire in them the last time they met, the way she had clung to him like he was the only air she trusted. He couldn't let that fire go out.
Ananya pressed the note to her lips in the quiet of night. Riyan clenched his fists against the hunger of distance.
One held a secret that kept her alive. The other built a storm that would soon test the walls around her.
And though they didn't know it yet, the threads of their rebellion were about to tighten, pulling them both into a reckoning neither family nor rumor could silence.