Prologue
The vidai was over. Ananya Sharma, now Ananya Singh Rathore, had left in a cloud of marigold petals and whispered promises. Her younger sister, Kavya, stood at the balcony of their ancestral Jaipur haveli, watching the last taillight of the convoy disappear into the monsoon mist.
She wasn’t sad. She was hollow.
For three years, Kavya had secretly admired Dev Rathore—not her jiju, but the man behind the title. The sharp jaw, the rare half-smile, the way his presence commanded every room in his billion-dollar empire. She’d written his name in invisible ink on her diary pages, then burned them. He was her sister’s destiny. Not hers.
But tonight, as she clutched the railing, a strange premonition slithered down her spine. Ananya had looked… relieved. Not like a bride leaving her home. Like a prisoner escaping a sentence.
Kavya shook her head. Stop being foolish.
She didn’t yet know that tomorrow, Dev Rathore would wake up alone. That a note and divorce papers would shatter two families. That her own mangalsutra was already being weighed on a jeweler’s scale, three kilometers away.
This is not a love story that begins with a wedding.
It begins with a wreckage.
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