Chapter 3: Separate Wings

**Separate Wings**

**Chapter 3**  

**Riya**

I didn’t sleep. I ironed the black dress at five in the morning because ironing gave my hands something to do, and I printed my list on the old inkjet so it wouldn’t look like I’d typed it on a phone in the dark.

Dad was awake when I came in to check the machine. He took in my face, the dress, the folder under my arm.

“You were at the Tower yesterday,” he said.

“How—”

“You came home in the good shoes.” A ghost of the old, knowing smile. “I’m dying, beta. I’m not blind.”

“It’s handled. I’ll tell you everything once it’s done.”

He wanted to argue. I watched him want to. But the cancer had taken most of his fight, and he only nodded once, eyes still full of questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

I checked the gauge on my way out. Once.

Same private elevator. Same silent man with the keycard. Same hallway of art I couldn’t afford to look at. This time the woman in the gray suit didn’t speak at all; she just opened the double doors and stepped aside.

Aryan was standing this time, in front of the desk rather than behind it. Black suit again. The frame on the credenza was still turned to the wall.

“You came,” he said.

“You told me to bring a list.”

I held it out. He took it, read it standing, and didn’t sit, so I didn’t either. He read all four items without a flicker. Then he looked up.

“Section 14.3.”

“You call it a settlement,” I said. “If I complete the full thirty-six months, the debt is permanently discharged. If I leave early, the whole seven million comes back. That isn’t a settlement. That’s a leash.”

“It’s insurance.”

“It’s a leash with a bow on it.”

The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was the first thing in that room that looked like it might be alive. “Most people find it after they sign.”

“My father didn’t.”

“Your father never found it at all.”

I let that one sit, because I didn’t know where to put it yet.

“Prorate it,” I said. “Every month I serve reduces what comes back. Only the remaining balance of the original debt. No interest. No penalties.”

“No.”

My stomach dropped.

Then he said, almost casually, “Prorated, yes. Interest off. Penalties off. The remaining balance only.” He paused. “But I’m adding a condition. A breach of the non-disclosure agreement reinstates the full original amount. No discounts for talking.”

So I had won the proration. And in the same breath he had given himself a new weapon. I felt the difference like a hand on the back of my neck. He had walked into this room already knowing which ground he was willing to yield.

“Done,” I said, because I couldn’t afford not to.

“Bedrooms,” he said, glancing at the list. “The east wing has two suites with a shared sitting room. You’ll have one.”

“In writing.”

He picked up a pen, uncapped it, and wrote across the bottom margin of the page in a hand so fast and neat it looked printed: *Separate quarters. No exceptions.* He initialed it A.R. and turned the page around. I initialed it R.K. under his.

“My father,” I said. “Off-limits. You don’t use him. You don’t threaten him. You don’t say his name to me as a weapon.”

“Your father isn’t a lever, Riya. He’s the reason.”

“That isn’t a yes.”

Silence. Outside the glass, a helicopter slid past, small as a toy.

“He’s off-limits,” Aryan said finally. “To me, and to the Group.” He wrote it down and initialed it. I initialed it too.

“And if you ever break that,” I said, “I walk. Contract or no contract. I’ll burn the whole thing down with me inside it.”

He studied me for a long moment. For the first time, something that might have been real surprise flickered across his face. It was gone almost before I saw it.

“We’ll see,” he said quietly.

I should have stopped there. I didn’t.

“What did he do?” The question came out before I could stop it. “My father. What did he do to your family?”

Aryan’s eyes went, just for a second, to the frame on the credenza.

“He made a choice,” he said. “It cost my mother her life and left my father a shell of the man he used to be. Yours walked away clean. Mine didn’t.”

I had braced for betrayal. For business sabotage, something cold and ledger-shaped that I could do math on.

Not a mother.

I looked down and made myself breathe.

“The last item,” I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “No touching. No affection beyond what appearances require.”

“I don’t take what isn’t offered,” Aryan said. “Not from you. Not from anyone.”

“Then we’re agreed.”

“I’m a patient man, Riya. That isn’t the same as agreeing.”

Heat climbed the back of my neck. I hated that it did.

He slid the folder across the desk and held out a heavy black pen.

I signed where the little flags told me to. Once. Twice. Seven times in all, and each signature sounded louder than the last. Aryan signed after me without hesitating, closed the folder, and said, “It’s done.”

The room tilted for half a second. I put a hand on the chair.

“A car will collect you and your father on Friday,” he said. “He goes to a private care suite with full-time nursing. His medical bills move to an account in my name by tonight. The apartment stays in the Kapoor name for as long as he lives. You move into my residence the same day. We marry in three weeks.”

Friday. Three days from now. I nodded because speaking felt dangerous.

“You’re not a prisoner,” he added. “You’re my wife on paper, and that comes with protections. It comes with expectations too. Don’t test the difference until you understand it.”

He walked me to the door himself. He didn’t touch me. He opened it and waited until I stepped through.

The woman in the gray suit was waiting with a thin envelope. “Copies of the signed documents, Miss Kapoor. And a schedule for the next two weeks.”

I took it without opening it. The private elevator was colder on the way down. I crossed the lobby, pushed out through the revolving doors into the Midtown sun, and was halfway to the curb when my phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

*Separate wings. Wise, Mrs. Rajvansh. Suite 412 is waiting for your father. It would be a shame if the oxygen failed before he got there.*

I stopped on the sidewalk, and people parted around me like I was a rock in a stream.

Someone had access to information that should never have reached a stranger. The separate quarters. The suite number I hadn’t even known myself. The fact that my father’s life still hung on a machine that had already been flagged once.

I thought of Dennis with his cold sore. Flagged by corporate. I thought of Aryan’s pen stopping above the pad. *That wasn’t me.*

I looked up at the tower. Forty-eight floors of black glass, ten thousand windows, and any one of them could have been looking down at me.

I took a screenshot. I didn’t delete the message. I didn’t flag the number.

And I didn’t tell Aryan.

Either he had sent it, or someone close enough to him to know every detail of this arrangement was playing a game that included my father’s oxygen. I couldn’t decide which of those frightened me more.

Friday was three days away. I had thought I was walking into his house.

I was starting to suspect I was walking into someone else’s.