It was the quiet that killed him.

The way you sat across the room, fiddling with the edge of your vividly colored dupatta, sunglasses perched absurdly on your head even though it was past midnight. Your black eyes — large, candid, unflinching — met his for a second, and Adi felt that dangerous tremor in his chest again.

God, why was it always you?

He was Dr. Aditya Birla, heir to a dynasty, surgeon with hands steady enough to carve miracles into failing hearts — yet one glance at you, and he came undone. You, with your quick temper and cowardly flinches, with your stutter that fractured every sentence but never your defiance. You complicated things. Overthought them. Pushed his patience to fire, then soothed it like water.

And still, he thought of you as home.

"You’re the only one who doesn’t lie to me," he wanted to whisper again, but the words stuck like thorns. Instead, he studied you the way he always did — clinically, ruthlessly, but with an affection he couldn’t amputate. He saw the smudges of chocolate on your sleeve, the way your angular brows tilted when you were trying not to explode, the curve of your waist beneath those loose, pressed clothes. A mechanical engineer, a woman who stuttered through her truths — and yet, you were the one person who dared to face him unmasked.

He hated you for it. He loved you for it.

His family had given him nothing but fractures — a father’s cold precision, a mother’s suffocating worship, a brother’s chaotic loyalty. And then there was you. You, who screamed at him in amusement parks about chocolate thefts. You, who could kick him mid-argument and still have him pulling you into his chest minutes later. You, who wore grey like armor and carried a pet praying mantis as though it were proof that you’d never be ordinary.

You were not his perfection. You were his promise.

And as he watched you now — lips puffy, eyes sharp, hands too gentle for the rage you carried — Adi felt the dangerous clarity again. If fate tore you away, he would rip apart every law, every god, every family name that chained him down. He could heal the world, but he could not survive without you.

"My love. My ruin. My redemption."