Rags To Royals (Royal #1: Book 1) | ✔

70

-• until we meet again •-

The Rajawat Estate is settled in the west of Rajgarh, where the sun sets, and the night falls. The darkness comes home here, scary, menacing, slithering past the shiny chandeliers, crawling over the smooth carpeted corridors, thrumming like the beat of your heart within those empty walls, eating up the shadows, concealing the faces and watching from the corners, grinning creepily at everyone that intends to bring the light in there. You can't trust lights to survive in places where even the magnanimous sun sinks.

The winds have always howled the loudest around the centuries old palace of Rajgarh, an alarm of a warning or a veil to hide the chaos going on within, people wouldn't know, they never tried to find out.

Unlike the bustling city of Jaigarh, Rajgarh always sleeps early. After seven, children are ushered home, at eight thirty, shutters of local shops rattle close, and around ten, the last local bus runs across the city, picking and dropping off the inhabitants their home.

The political influence of the Rajawats over their city's goverment have always been the strongest. On the throne where money wears the crown, knowledge serves. And that has been the case for Rajgarh even after monarchy ended.

The sixty two year old Abhimanyu Singh Rajwat, infamously called the Chairman, have ruled Rajgarh from the moment he was coronated, and the independence of the country only served him with a stronger inner control around the city. He has turned this dust settled town into a thriving, money making, affluent, metropolitan city, using methods both moral and immoral to wipe off the remainings of poverty. But his greed doesn't end there. He has a purpose. A purpose he's breathing, existing, and waiting for since the last twenty five years. He's going to bring a revolution and change the world's outlook of India when it comes to medicine and health. And he'll make it possible.

On the other hand, his son, Virendra Pratap Singh Rajawat, doesn't give a damn. If the Chairman rules the money, money rules his son.

Oh, and temper.

So when I'm hit on the cheek so hard that my brain turns fuzzy, and body crashes to the floor, it is nothing I didn't expect from him before. In his eyes, I made a mistake, and violence is his way of reminding me who's in control. Brainy moves aren't his strongest pursuit, so he relies on his physical strength, royal status, and daddy's money to assert his dominance.

I stop myself from spitting out the blood in my mouth.

I resist a wince when he bends down to fist my hair in his hand, jerking my head to meet his eyes. The light brown eyes stare down at me in disgust and abhorrence, as if he can't believe he's making efforts to talk to a low life like me, oh, and did I mention, he's the one keeping me alive?

"If you're fond of that bastard girl, fuck her and get her out of your system. But if I see you risking your life again for that Jaigarh princess, I'll chop you to pieces and feed you to my dogs. You see them right!?" He yanks my face to the side, and my body trembles at the sight of his two German Shepherds growling at me, snapping their sharp canines, as if they would be digging into my flesh and ripping it apart if not for the chains holding them back. "Do you want them to chomp on your body, my boy!?" He shakes my head like I'm a rag doll.

"N-no." I whisper.

"That's right." He taps my cheek and releases my hair, standing straight as he removes his handkerchief from the pocket and wipes off his hand to it. It makes me feel like a dirt, one that I grew in, one that clings to my body, and reeks from my soul.

"Give him a shot," he says to the nurse standing at the doorstep.

She nods and walks in, crouching to my level, setting the metal tray on the floor before tearing open the wrapper and plucking the syringe out of it. She fills it with that pale yellow liquid, one that puts me to the kind of sleep that feels like death, but isn't. It's worse. Because you're alive and vulnerable, and when you wake up, you remember nothing, the fresh scars on your body are more like a puzzle than a memory.