The rain had settled into a steady, rhythmic pulse against the mud walls of the cottage, a sound that underscored the heavy, charged silence following their first true collision. The oil lamp had long since guttered out, but the room was far from dark. Every flash of lightning from the 1930s sky illuminated the raw, unfiltered reality of their union: the tangled sheets, the scent of crushed jasmine, and the salt of two bodies that had finally stopped pretending.

Shivom sat up, his silhouette a mountain of shadow against the grey light of the window. He was twenty-nine, a man of hard angles and calloused skin, but as he looked down at Payal, his expression was a complex map of possessive pride and a new, deeper hunger.