“A lie that has kept me alive for five years, Aarohi,” he said, using my name for the first time. It sounded strange on his lips—heavy, dangerous, yet strangely intimate. “Five years ago, it wasn’t an accident. My car was rigged with explosives. The world thinks I survived by a miracle but lost the use of my legs. In reality, the people who want my family’s empire out of the picture stopped looking for a dangerous heir and started ignoring a crippled invalid.“
He took two steps toward me, his footsteps completely silent. “My family’s business in Mexico isn’t just shipping and textiles, Aarohi. We control the primary supply chains across the northern border. Logistical arteries that certain dangerous organizations want to control. By playing the invalid, I became invisible. I built an international intelligence network from a wheelchair while my enemies grew complacent.“
“Then why marry me?” I cried out, keeping my voice down to a harsh whisper. “If your life is a battlefield, why bring a stranger into it? Why did you agree to this?“
A dark, cynical smile touched the corners of his lips. “Because a man in a wheelchair who suddenly demands to marry a middle-class girl from Jaipur looks weak. It looks like a desperate attempt to find a caretaker, an act of submission to his family’s wishes. It lowers my enemies’ guard even further. They think I’ve given up. They think I am retreating into domestic misery.“
He stopped just inches away from me. The scent of expensive cologne, old paper, and gunpowder washed over me. “Your stepmother didn’t just stumble upon this arrangement, Aarohi. Her ‘pragmatism’ was bought and paid for. Someone paid off your father’s debts to ensure you were the one who walked down that aisle.“
My blood ran cold. “What? Who?“
“That is what we are going to find out,” Arnav said, his eyes narrowing. “But until I know exactly whose pawn you are—whether willing or unwilling—you play your part. To the maids, to the bodyguards, to my own family, I am a broken man who needs your help to do the simplest tasks. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, including your parents, the accident from five years ago will repeat itself. Only this time, there won’t be any survivors.“
I nodded dumbly, the sheer weight of my new reality crushing me. I hadn’t just married into wealth to save my family; I had walked straight into a den of international vipers, bound to a man who was fighting a silent war.
“Understood,” I whispered.
“Good,” Arnav replied coldly. He walked back to the wheelchair, sat down, and instantly, his posture changed. His shoulders slumped, his face grew pale and distant, and his legs went completely limp. The transformation was terrifyingly perfect. “Now, lift me onto the bed. We have an audience.“
Before I could ask what he meant, a faint, rhythmic scratching sound came from the hallway outside our bedroom door. Someone was testing the lock.
The mechanical scratching at the lock stopped, followed by the faint, distinctive metallic click of a skeleton key turning inside the mechanism.
Arnav’s eyes didn’t widen, but his entire body went rigid beneath his manufactured state of weakness. His gaze shot to mine, burning with a silent, ferocious intensity. He couldn’t move—not without breaking the illusion for whoever was watching through the wide courtyard windows or listening at the door. If he leaped up to fight, the five-year-old facade would shatter in an instant.
