✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
[ 𝐒𝐄𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐋 1 ]
Because this is where love fades and hate resides and intensifies, broken hearts produce the most tragic stories.
Their treachery is told through their bleeding hearts: their unrequited love was never reciprocated. The...
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The news had broken like a shockwave just three hours ago. Vidyut Agarwal, the man pronounced dead three weeks prior after a spectacular, staged vehicular crash, was alive.
The information, carefully leaked through channels only he controlled, bypassed the major networks and went straight to the digital nerve center of the world: a single, verified, high-resolution photograph of him standing beside Ada, looking perfectly healthy, uninjured, and utterly indifferent to the chaos he was about to unleash.
Vidyut watched the monitors in the car—an armored, discreet sedan, vastly more subtle. The internet was melting. Financial markets were fluttering. The major media houses were running panicked, rolling coverage, their talking heads sputtering incoherently over the confirmation.
His own heart was a tight, cold knot in his chest.
He felt the familiar, heavy presence of Ada beside him. She was silent, her gaze fixed on the passing urban sprawl, the faint swelling of her lips from their furious confrontation and their more furious kiss a subtle mark of their private war. Her hands, resting in her lap, were pristine, but he knew the violence they had just wreaked. She was a whirlwind of rage and skill, a terrifying force he had unleashed, and he loved her for every razor-sharp edge.
But as they approached the familiar, well-loved neighborhood of the Sharma house, the guilt hit him like a physical blow. The violence of the last few months—the war, the betrayal—had been contained in his hidden world. Now, he was about to drag the residue of that darkness into the light of his family's peace.
He had orchestrated his death to force his enemies into the open and dismantle the Knight's organization from the ground up, protecting the people he loved by giving them grief. It was the ultimate sacrifice of self for safety. But seeing the reruns of the news anchors detailing the shock and grief his mother and sisters must have felt, the cold, calculated strategy felt monstrous.
"They're going to hate me, Ada," he murmured, the admission forced out of him by the suffocating anxiety.
Ada finally turned her head, her dark eyes meeting his. They held none of the fury from the docks, only a devastating, clear-eyed understanding.
