Bekhudi - IPKKND - ArShi

A/N:

Before we begin, allow me to gently draw your attention to this note.

This short, Velvet Rage, begins after the forced marriage track, when Arnav and Khushi are still very much caught in that tormented, combustible phase.

That said, please do not read this as a ‘righting of wrongs’. I know the angst of that arc can be difficult and infuriating, but this is not an attempt to sanitise it, absolve it, or rearrange it into anything morally immaculate.

This is, unapologetically, an attempt to let them surrender to the want that simmers beneath all that anger. There is no grand plot here. It is simply my interpretation of their impulses, their pride, their hunger, and the complicated machinery that makes Arnav and Khushi what they are. I intend to keep those contradictions intact.

Mature chapters will arrive with clear disclaimers, so please proceed only if you are comfortable with that direction.

Thank you for being here, and I hope to see you at the end of this little saga <3

Side note: Junoonis still numero uno priority :) This is just a tiny detour.

The doors closed with a quiet thud, final enough to make Khushi feel the departure in her bones.

She fumbled with the buttons on the armrest until her fingers found the one she wanted. The glass slid down with a soft mechanical whirr, letting in the damp breath of the morning. Before it had descended fully, she thrust her hand out and waved with the practised brightness of a newly married daughter-in-law leaving home with her husband.

Nani waved back, smiling with all the warmth Khushi had not deserved and yet had somehow received. Beside her, Anjali lifted a hand too, careful in her stance, one palm resting over the small swell of her stomach. Khushi kept waving until the iron gates of Shantivan drew together and swallowed them from sight.

Only then did the car gather speed.

The wind came in sharply, tugging at her dupatta, lashing strands of hair across her eyes and mouth. She sputtered, caught one rebellious lock between her lips, and hastily pressed the button again. The glass rose, smooth and obedient, and Delhi became muted behind it.

Mohan drove with admirable devotion to pretence. His spine remained straight, his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes fixed upon the early morning traffic as if the back seat did not contain two people whose silences spoke louder than words. Perhaps men who drove for the Raizadas acquired this talent over time.

Khushi drew in a quiet breath and looked to her right.

Arnav sat beside her, turned towards the window. He wore stillness like another layer of clothing, expensive, exacting, meant to keep the world away. Without letting the movement become obvious, she studied him. Not his face, she told herself. His mood. That had become a necessity of survival lately, reading the weather of Arnav Singh Raizada before it broke over her head.

His brow was drawn, naturally. The austere lines of his face seemed designed for displeasure, the severe nose, the sharply cut cheekbones, the hard mouth that could make contempt sound like common sense. His three-piece suit was dark and perfectly tailored as usal, lying over his shoulders with the insolent ease of a man who had never once wondered whether he belonged in a room. His cuff had shifted enough to reveal his watch, plain in design but gleaming with quiet expense.

Still, it was not the suit, or the watch, or even the stubborn handsomeness of her husband’s profile that held her gaze.

It was his hands.

They rested on his knees, almost carelessly, but the fingers had curled into fists. Fine veins stood out across the backs of them. His shoulders were too taut beneath the fabric. His chest moved too little, as though he had decided that breathing freely was a weakness and must be negotiated with. The open window had left a small disorder inside the car; rain, wind, her hair, the faint jasmine oil she had worked through her braid that morning.

He turned his face a fraction further away.

Khushi looked down at once. Not that she was going to ask what his problem was. A question offered to Arnav Singh Raizada did not return as an answer. It came back as a glare, or a cutting remark, or that cold dismissal which made a person feel foolish for expecting speech from stone.

As the kilometres slipped beneath them, she exhaled low. A few drops struck the window, then more, the overcast sky giving up. She watched the rain gather and slide down the glass, and a small, reluctant calm stole over her.

They were leaving Shantivan. More than that, they were leaving Shyam Manohar Jha behind. Herjeeja-ji.

The word soured before it formed. She hated the relation it forced upon her tongue. Hated the grotesque respectability it gave him, hated how the house placed him beneath the same roof, wrapped in affection and trust, while she carried the truth of him like coal beneath her ribs. His smiles, his insinuations, the way his gaze could crawl over her skin and leave her wanting to scrub herself raw, all of it receded with every turn of the wheels.

The relief was so strong that, for one unsafe moment, it nearly became tears.

She swallowed it down.

Delhi receded by degrees. Familiar flyovers gave way to longer roads, shop shutters and tea stalls to stretches of wet asphalt and blurred signboards. The morning remained grey, the rain following them like a relentless companion.

Nainital.

She had been to Nainital before. Or almost had. With the same man sitting beside her, under entirely different circumstances.

Warmth rose treacherously to her cheeks, the memory arriving in pieces. A journey gone wrong. His temper. Her own ridiculous resolve to mend his relationship with Lavanya Kashyap, as though the heart were a torn sleeve and she had only to sit with needle and thread. To think she was returning now with him, not as a meddlesome employee, not as some inconvenient girl from Lucknow, but as his wife, made the word tremble uneasily within her.

Dharam patni.

What a strange string of words. Full and solemn in other women’s lives. Hollow in hers, like a brass vessel struck too hard.

In the last few weeks, she had done everything humanly possible to annoy him. She had laughed too loudly, intruded without shame, recited Salman-ji’s filmy dialogues, staged absurd household rebellions and turned nuisance-making into an art form. Her petty, theatrical revenge against the man who had upended her life and then denied her even the courtesy of a reason. But under every antic, under every stubborn performance, one question remained untouched:why had he married her?

Because she had imagined it once, with the tender idiocy of a heart that had not yet learned caution. Being married to him. Not like this, not beneath the shadow of coercion and humiliation, but in that brief, impossible interval when something gentle had seemed to gather between them. A wordless ease. A warmth brewing in stolen glances. The accidental brush of hands that lingered in the mind long after it had passed. His eyes, no longer merely cold or condemnatory, softening when they found hers. His smile, hovering somewhere between that arrogant, infuriating smirk of his and a tenderness she had been foolish enough to believe was meant for her. For a while, he had not seemed like the angry, imperious man she had first met. For a while, Arnav Singh Raizada had seemed almost reachable. And then came the rupture, abrupt and merciless, the mortal rage twisting his face so violently that something inside her had died that day.

Why had he looked at her with such hatred on a night that should have belonged to Ji-ji and Akash-ji? Why had he threatened her sister’s marriage with such surgical cruelty, then stood before the world as her husband with a face carved out of stone? Why had he bound her to him for six months like a blade placed too close to the heart, not merciful enough to kill, but cruel enough to make each breath remember the wound?

She had asked, she had begged, she had raged...but he had given her nothing.

Only contempt, only proximity, only that unbearable vigilance with which he seemed to notice everything about her while insisting she meant nothing at all.

It had been maddening. Painful in a way that robbed pain of its melodrama and left only a dull, private wound behind. She had wept until her chest ached, questioned the gods, and in one of her more wounded rebellions, severed relations with Devi Mayya herself. Her oldest companion, her most patient listener. Even that had brought her no answer, only days that began and ended in the same room as him.

Had it been anyone else, perhaps she would have found a way to leave. Had any other man committed such an atrocity, perhaps anger would have stayed clean. She might have planned, resisted, fought, escaped. Something. Anything.

But this was Arnav, and that made the wound impossible to treat.

She shook her head faintly.

The prospect of being away from Shyam outweighed every other fear and confusion she was experiencing. Even this journey, even two days of Arnav Singh Raizada’s temper and savage unpredictability, felt preferable to the predatory unease of Shantivan’s corridors.

For all of Arnav’s cruelties, she had never felt unsafe in his hands. Unsafe in the matters of the heart, yes. Unsafe in her mind, certainly. But not her body. It was a strange consolation, almost humiliating in how much it mattered, but it mattered all the same.

She curled her fingers around the strap of her bag. Perhaps the trip would not be so terrible. Her dabba service was doing well. The vendor had smiled and promised to manage things while she was away. Her earnings were modest, almost laughable by Raizada standards, but they were hers. Every rupee carried the clean sweetness of effort, of selfhood, of having built something no one in that house, especially a certain someone, could confiscate with a glare.

Maybe, while he attended his presentation or conference or whatever grand corporate ritual demanded his presence, she could explore Nainital. She could inspect the shops, compare the peanuts, consider whether the jhumkas there could compete with Sarojini Market. The thought cheered her for all of five seconds before another question returned.

Why had he insisted she come?

He had done it in his usual manner, abrupt, imperious, allergic to explanation. She had refused flatly. Who abandoned a business while it was still new? Two days away in the middle of the week was no small thing. Her customers depended on her. The hardworking employees of AR would go hungry. Did he not understand the national importance of lunch?

But then Anjali had intervened.

Khushi’s face warmed even now. Di had insisted that Khushi needed a break. That Arnav and Khushi had not even had their honeymoon yet.

Honeymoon. As if the word could be placed gently over their arrangement and make it sacred. As if one hotel room in a hill station could transform a contract into a marriage.

Anjali had continued, smiling, that even if it was a business trip, it was still a new place, away from Shantivan, away from family.

Away from family... just the two of them. Together. In a hotel room for the night...

Khushi bit her lip and stared out until the passing shapes dissolved into rain and glass.

She had never been granted the canopy of a wife’s place in his life. Arnav had made that clear in words, in heated silences, in the way he could stand close enough for her to feel his breath and still make her feel like an intruder. He hated her. He had said enough, done enough, withheld enough for her to know that hatred was the only name he was willing to give whatever lived between them.

Then why was she here?

It was not as if he needed her. Arnav Singh Raizada did not need anyone. That was the myth he fed himself, and perhaps the world had been cruel enough to help him believe it. He had servants at Shantivan, staff at AR, drivers, assistants, people who moved when his hand lifted by half an inch. Hari Prakash-ji, Om Prakash-ji, Mohan, Aman, all the invisible machinery of his life ran with obedient precision.

He did not need her to look after him. She was not part of his business either. Her brief, disastrous stint as his secretary belonged to another lifetime, one in which their fights had possessed an almost innocent ferocity. Back then, his anger had seemed simple. Arrogant, yes. Infuriating, certainly. But not this cold, intimate punishment that knew exactly where to cut because he had already crossed the threshold of her heart.

No, she would not get an answer. So she clung to what was certain: no Shyam.

No lecherous gaze waiting at the turn of a corridor. No honeyed voice curdling around her name. No sudden presence behind her making her pulse bolt like a trapped bird. No need to measure every step, every word, every expression, lest the wrong person see the wrong thing and the fragile edifice of Payal’s marriage collapse under the truth.

For two days, perhaps her body could remember what it was to exist without dread. For two days, perhaps her heart would not have to beat as if defending itself.

That alone was enough.

Beside her, Arnav shifted. So little that anyone else might not have noticed. Khushi did. She always did. She did not look at him this time. She watched Delhi fall away and told herself that whatever waited in Nainital could not be worse than what they were leaving behind.