Riyan had stopped sleeping properly. Nights blurred into dawns, his head pillowed on open notebooks, eyes burning from rereading the same page again and again. Every corner of the campus seemed colder without her. Every lecture hall, emptier.
But he never let Kabir see him break.
"What if the book didn't reach her?" Kabir had asked more than once. "What if she never even saw it?"
"She saw it." Riyan's voice had been steel, even if doubt gnawed at him when the dark closed in. "She had to."
Still, the silence ate at him. Until the afternoon Kabir grabbed his arm on their way past the old banyan tree near the temple.
"Look."
Riyan almost shoved him off, irritation sharp, until his eyes caught it—thin scratches on the bark, faint but unmistakable. A single letter, curved, hesitant, but his all the same.
R.
His chest tightened, the air leaving his lungs in a rush.
"She did this," Kabir whispered, as if afraid to disturb the moment.
Riyan's fingers brushed the grooves in the bark. Small, clumsy, hurried—but alive. Her.
The fire that had dimmed inside him roared back. She was still fighting. Still reaching.
He clenched his jaw to keep his grin from spreading too wide in the open street. If anyone saw him beam like this, they'd know. But his pulse thundered with a dangerous thrill.
She was still with him.
That night, Riyan went to the boundary wall near her house. He hadn't dared to come close in weeks, but now he couldn't resist.
He waited in the shadows, the night humming with crickets and the faint scent of burning incense drifting from inside. Every sound made him tense—the bark of a stray dog, the click of a door shutting—but he stayed rooted.
Then he saw it.
For a moment he thought his eyes were playing tricks, but no—the shutters of her room were cracked open an inch, just enough for the moonlight to glint off the fabric tied to the lattice. A sliver of pale cloth swaying gently in the night air.
His throat closed. His fists curled.
It was deliberate. It had to be.
His reckless heart wanted to scale the wall right then, to pound on the shutters until she came running. But even he knew better. One wrong move and her prison would turn into a fortress with no cracks at all.
So he stayed where he was, hidden, burning the sight of her signal into his memory.
He whispered into the dark, "I see you, Ananya."
By the next day, Kabir noticed the change in him.
"You're smiling," Kabir said flatly as they left the library.
"No, I'm not."
"You are. Like an idiot."
Riyan shoved his friend lightly, but the grin refused to leave his face. He didn't care. Not today.
He replayed the moments again and again—the carved letter, the dupatta at the window. They were small, fragile signals, but to him they were louder than shouts. Proof that she hadn't surrendered.
Proof that she was his, no matter what cage they built around her.
The next weekend, he went back to the temple grounds alone. He paced near the banyan tree, eyes scanning every detail, desperate for more.
And there it was.
A marigold, fresh, tucked into the roots.
It shouldn't have meant anything. Devotees left flowers at the temple all the time. But he knew. The color. The way it rested just off the main path, hidden unless you looked carefully.
The marigold she once wore behind her ear when he teased her.
His chest ached with both pride and fury. Pride that she still found ways to reach him. Fury that she had to risk so much just to whisper her defiance.
When he walked away that day, his jaw was set.
If she could send signals from inside her cage, then he would answer. Not with just whispers. With something bigger.
Something that told her he wasn't only watching. He was fighting.
That night, in the quiet of his dorm room, Riyan spread open a blank notebook. His pen hovered for a long moment, before words poured out of him in furious, careful strokes.
Not love confessions—those were already carved into her heart. Not promises—she knew those too.
But a plan.
A way forward.
He wrote quickly, pausing only when emotion threatened to choke him. His hand cramped, ink smudged his palm, but by the end he had pages filled. A map of defiance.
When he was done, he tore out the sheets and folded them small, binding them with the same ribbon she had sent back through Kabir weeks ago.
This time, it would not just be words.
This would be action.
Riyan leaned back, staring at the folded note, his heartbeat steady for the first time in weeks.
She was fighting. And now, so was he.