CHAPTER ONE
A Companion Story to Beneath a Jasmine Sky
A Mughal Era Historical Romance
Leila Daryan
Copyright 2055
The door is open
Don’t turn away
Rumi
Pain had become a language Prithviraj understood fluently.
The iron cuffs around his wrists spoke it in grinding consonants. The gash below his ribs whispered it in burning vowels. His body was a text written in agony, and he’d learned to read every word without flinching.
Thirteen steps down. He’d counted them when they dragged him to this cell three days ago—or was it four? Time moved strangely in darkness. The Red Fort’s prison breathed decay like a living thing, and he breathed with it, matching his rhythm to its rot because what else was there to do?
The door groaned open.
He didn’t bother lifting his head. Another interrogation, probably. Another session of questions he wouldn’t answer and pain he would endure. The mathematics of resistance were simple: survive the next moment, then the next, then the next. String enough moments together and you’d lived another day. Do that enough days and maybe—
Footsteps. Light. Different from the guards’ heavy tread.
Torchlight flickered to life. He looked up.
The physician was younger than he’d expected—perhaps nineteen—with dark eyes that assessed him with clinical precision even as something else flickered in their depths. Something that looked like shock, quickly suppressed. She wore simple cotton, her dupatta draped to cover her hair, already damp with perspiration in the morning heat.
Beautiful. The word arrived unbidden and unwelcome. He was dying—possibly today, probably at midday—and his traitor mind chose this moment to notice that the woman sent to keep him alive long enough for execution had a face like poetry made flesh.
Behind her, the guard captain’s voice scraped like rust on iron. “You have one hour, Begum. He hangs at midday if the fever doesn’t take him first.”
The door slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid.
She set down her leather bag. Knelt on the damp stone floor, and Prithviraj watched her movements with predatory focus—the way she opened her bag, pulled out clean linen, a clay jar, turmeric paste wrapped in neem leaves. Her hands moved through familiar ritual, the gestures of someone who’d done this a thousand times before.
He’d seen physicians before. Court hakims who treated nobles with elaborate courtesy and prisoners with cold efficiency. Men, mostly, who viewed the body as mechanism to be repaired without regard for the soul inhabiting it. This woman moved differently—with reverence, almost, as if healing were prayer and every patient sacred.
His mother had moved like that. Before the fever took her. Before she’d pressed half a jade lotus into his palm and whispered prophecies he’d thought were delirium.
“I need to clean the wound.” Her voice came steadier than he would have expected. “This will hurt.”
“Everything hurts, Hakim Begum.” He kept his Hindi soft, letting the Rajasthani vowels round and flow. “What’s one more pain?”
She dampened linen with rose water—the scent incongruous in this place of blood and suffering. Leaned closer. The torchlight caught the planes of her face: high cheekbones, strong features, lips pressed together in concentration. Intelligence lived in those eyes. And something else. Sadness, perhaps. Or the weight of duties that pressed down like iron.
She pressed the cloth to the gash below his ribs.
He flinched. Clenched his jaw hard enough that the muscle jumped beneath his skin, but made no sound. Under her fingertips, his flesh blazed with fever. Her touch was careful, methodical—cleaning away dried blood and dirt with strokes that spoke of training and discipline. His breathing came shallow, controlled. The discipline of a warrior who’d learned to manage pain.
But beneath that control, something else stirred. An awareness that prickled along his skin wherever she touched. Disturbing. Unwelcome.
Undeniable.
He’d been touched plenty in these cells—by interrogators who knew precisely where to strike for maximum agony, by guards who handled him like contaminated goods, by the executioner who’d measured his neck for the rope with hands that smelled of previous deaths. Those touches had been violence or indifference.
This was neither.
Her fingers moved across his skin with a gentleness he’d forgotten existed in the world. As if his pain mattered. As if he were human rather than condemned traitor awaiting his appointed end.
“They say you’re a traitor.” She kept her eyes on her work, focused on the wound. “That you conspired with the Marathas against the Emperor.”
“They say many things in court.” He dropped his voice lower, intimate in the close confines. “Most of them lies wrapped in silk and sealed with the Emperor’s stamp.”
She glanced up. Found him watching her.
For a heartbeat they stared at each other, and Prithviraj felt something shift in his chest that had nothing to do with his wounds. Not the hollow awareness of a condemned man awaiting death. Something else entirely. Something that stole the breath from his lungs and made his pulse quicken in ways that had nothing to do with fever.
Recognition. As if his soul had been waiting for this moment and was surprised to finally arrive at it.
Her eyes widened slightly—dark brown, almost black in the torchlight, framed by thick lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. He could see himself reflected in those eyes. Not the prince he’d been, but the man he’d become: chained, bleeding, reduced to flesh and bone and the stubborn refusal to break.
And in her gaze, he saw something that terrified him more than execution: she saw him too. Not the prisoner or the traitor or the political inconvenience to be eliminated. Him. Prithviraj. The man beneath the titles and accusations.
She looked away quickly. “Hold still.” She reached for the turmeric paste, her movements just slightly less steady than before. “This will sting.”
“Then distract me.” A ghost of a smile touched his mouth—the first hint of humanity he’d allowed himself since the chains. “Do you know the poets, Hakim Begum?”
“Some.”
Her voice had gone softer. Careful. As if she too felt the dangerous current running between them and was trying to navigate around it.
“Mir Taqi Mir wrote—” He sucked in a sharp breath as she applied the paste to raw flesh, the yellow powder mixing with blood. His body went rigid with tension. He forced the words out, his voice rumbling from deep in his chest: “‘In the prison of grief, even the walls weep. But I remain dry-eyed, for tears are a mercy I no longer deserve.’”
The words hung between them, more honest than he’d intended. He’d quoted poetry to noblewomen in mehfils, recited verses at court gatherings where words were performance and meaning mattered less than delivery. This was different. Raw. A confession disguised as distraction.
“That’s bleak,” she murmured.
“It’s honest.”
Her knuckle brushed against an old scar—white and raised like twisted silk beneath his skin. A sword cut from long ago. His brother’s blade from a sparring match that had gotten too real, when Vikram had been showing off for visiting dignitaries and Prithviraj had refused to yield.
You always have to prove something, his brother had hissed afterward, pressing cloth to the wound. Can’t just let me win once.
Where’s the honor in false victory? Prithviraj had replied through gritted teeth.
His breath hitched at the memory. At her touch on that old wound, as if she could read his history written in scar tissue and damaged flesh.
Her eyes flew to his.
The torchlight painted shadows across her face, made her eyes darker than midnight, made the moment stretch and pull. It was as if the door to another universe had opened. His gaze locked onto hers with sudden, startling focus—not the look of a broken prisoner accepting his fate, but the look of a man fully alive, intensely and undeniably aware of the woman touching him.
He could see her pulse fluttering like a caged bird at her throat. Could see awareness dawning in her expression—the same recognition that was roaring through him.
She felt it too. This impossible, dangerous thing between them.
“Who gave you that scar?” The words slipped past her defenses, soft and intimate.
He shouldn’t tell her. Shouldn’t give her anything personal, anything that made him more human than prisoner. But the words came anyway: “My brother. Sparring match when I was sixteen. He always aimed to win.”
“And you?”
“I aimed higher.”
Something sparked between them—raw and electric and dangerous as lightning before monsoon. The air in the cell seemed to thicken, pressing down with the weight of unsaid things, of possibilities that should never exist between a court physician and a condemned prisoner. He could see the pulse beating at the base of her throat—fast, urgent, alive.
His own heart beat an answering rhythm.
She forced herself to look away, reaching for the honey salve with fingers that trembled ever so faintly. He watched her fight for discipline, for the proper distance between physician and patient. Watched her lose that fight in the slight hitch of her breath, in the way her hand paused before touching him again.
He understood. God help him, he understood completely.
He wanted to touch her. Wanted it with a ferocity that should have terrified him but instead felt like the first honest thing he’d experienced since they chained him in this pit. Wanted to cup her face in his hands and ask her name—her real name, not the title—wanted to discover if she was as hungry for this as he was.
Madness. He was going mad. Fever or infection or simply the reality that men facing death often became fools for beauty and kindness in equal measure.
But it didn’t feel like madness. It felt like waking up.
When her fingers returned to his skin, spreading honey salve across the wound, he had to close his eyes against the sensation. Not pain. Something else entirely. Something that made his hands curl into fists against the stone floor because if he didn’t anchor himself, he might do something catastrophically stupid.
Like reaching for her despite the chains. Like pulling her close and discovering if her lips were as soft as they looked, if her body would fit against his the way his soul seemed to recognize hers.
He opened his eyes. Found her watching him with an expression that mirrored his own hunger.
The moment crystallized. Became something neither of them could pretend away.
