PROLOUGE: Before The Ashes Settled
The first time Myra Malhotra met Armaan Raichand, he was looking at her sister as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
It was, frankly, a little ridiculous.
Maahira had been talking for the better part of fifteen minutes, telling him a story involving a disastrous shopping trip, a very expensive pair of shoes, and a sales assistant who had apparently committed a crime against fashion.
Armaan listened to every word.
Every single word.
He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t glance around the room for someone more interesting to talk to.
He simply stood beside Maahira, one hand tucked into his trouser pocket, the faintest smile playing on his lips as though listening to her was the most important thing he would do all evening.
Myra watched them from the doorway.
Interesting.
She had heard about Armaan Raichand, of course. Everyone had. The Raichands were the sort of family whose name opened doors before anyone had the chance to knock, and Armaan was the eldest son who seemed determined to carry the weight of the entire family on his shoulders.
He had a reputation for being difficult to approach, impossible to impress, and exceptionally unpleasant when someone wasted his time.
Yet there he was, listening to Maahira explain why a pair of shoes had personally offended her.
“You’re staring,” Maahira announced, without taking her eyes off Armaan.
Myra blinked.
“I am observing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m a paramedic graduate. Observation is a professional skill.”
“You studied paramedics , not people.”
“People are considerably more complicated than paramedics .”
Armaan laughed.
It was quiet, almost involuntary, but Myra caught it.
And then his eyes moved to her.
For one brief moment, she understood why her sister had fallen in love with him.
Not because he was handsome, although he was. Not because of the expensive suit or the effortless confidence he carried, although those certainly didn’t hurt.
It was the way his expression changed when he looked back at Maahira.
As if, in a crowded room full of people who wanted something from him, she was the one person who asked for nothing he wasn’t willing to give.
“Myra,” Maahira said, reaching for her hand. “Finally. Come meet the man I’ve been telling you about.”
“The man you’ve been telling me about,” Myra repeated. “Or the man you’ve been talking about so incessantly that I could probably write his biography?”
“Don’t embarrass me.”
“You invited me here. That was your first mistake.”
Maahira squeezed her fingers before turning to Armaan.
“Armaan, this is my twin sister, Myra.”
His gaze settled on her.
Up close, he was more intimidating than he had appeared from the doorway. There was something guarded about him, something that suggested he had learned long ago not to give people more of himself than they had earned.
“Your sister,” he said.
“Unfortunately,” Myra replied.
Maahira gasped.
Armaan’s mouth twitched.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Myra tilted her head. “Should I be concerned?”
“That depends on what your sister has told me.”
“Then I am absolutely concerned.”
This time, he smiled.
It wasn’t the smile he had given Maahira. That one had been warm and unguarded, as though it belonged to a private world the two of them had built together.
This one was brief. Polite. Curious.
But it was enough to make Myra wonder what he looked like when he forgot to be careful.
She wondered about that for the rest of the evening.
She wondered what made him laugh, what made him angry, and whether the weight he carried was something he had chosen or something his family had placed on his shoulders before he was old enough to refuse it.
She wondered what kind of man could look at Maahira as though she was the only person in the room.
And she kept every question to herself.
Because Armaan Raichand was her sister’s great love.
Whatever quiet curiosity he had stirred in Myra was hers alone to understand.
It was harmless.
It was private.
And it meant nothing.
At least, that was what she believed.
The fire began at 11:43 p.m.
Later, Myra would remember the exact time because she had checked her phone after receiving a message from Maahira.
Don’t wait up. I’m coming to steal your face masks when I get home.
Myra had replied with three angry emojis and a reminder that the expensive ones were not for public consumption.
Maahira had sent back a heart.
That was the last ordinary conversation they ever had.
At 11:43 p.m., Myra smelled smoke.
At 11:44 p.m., the first alarm sounded.
At 11:45 p.m., someone screamed.
The Malhotra mansion had been built to impress. Marble floors, sweeping staircases, enormous windows, and chandeliers that scattered light across rooms filled with things money could buy but affection rarely could.
Now smoke curled beneath the ceiling.
People rushed toward the exits. Staff shouted instructions. Somewhere downstairs, glass shattered.
Myra stumbled into the corridor, coughing.
“Maahira?”
No answer.
She tried her phone.
The call rang once.
Twice.
Then it went dead.
“No, no, no.”
She ran.
Smoke swallowed the staircase, turning familiar hallways into a maze. Her eyes watered. Her throat burned. She caught the banister with one hand and forced herself upward, toward the wing where she had last seen her sister’s things.
She could hear people shouting behind her.
Someone grabbed her arm.
“Miss Malhotra! You need to get out!”
“My sister is upstairs!”
“The fire is spreading!”
“Then help me find her!”
The staff member tried to pull her toward the stairs. Myra wrenched free.
She was terrified.
She was not brave in the way people would later describe her. She did not think about sacrifice or heroism. She did not imagine herself running into a burning building and emerging as someone extraordinary.
She thought about Maahira.
Her twin.
Her other half.
The girl who stole her clothes, finished her sentences, and knew when Myra was lying simply because she breathed differently.
Myra could not leave her there.
She found Maahira near the corridor outside the study.
A fallen beam had blocked part of the passage, and smoke rolled through the space above it. Maahira was on the floor, struggling to move, one hand pressed against the wall.
“Myra!”
The sound of her sister’s voice nearly broke her.
“I’m here!”
Myra dropped beside her, coughing so hard that her chest hurt.
“Can you stand?”
Maahira tried. A sharp cry escaped her, and she collapsed against Myra.
“Okay. Okay, don’t move.”
“Myra, you have to go.”
“Absolutely not.”
“The stairs—”
“I said absolutely not.”
For once, Maahira didn’t argue.
Myra pulled her sister’s arm across her shoulders and tried to lift her. Pain shot through her own side as she dragged them both forward, inch by agonizing inch.
The heat was unbearable.
Something cracked overhead.
Maahira screamed.
Myra threw herself over her sister as part of the ceiling collapsed behind them. The impact knocked her against the wall. A searing pain tore across her arm, and for several seconds, the world became nothing but white noise.
When she opened her eyes, she could barely breathe.
“Maahira?”
“I’m here,” her sister whispered.
Myra reached for her hand.
She could not see the way out clearly anymore. The smoke had thickened until the corridor was little more than shadows and flickering orange light.
She tried to stand.
Her legs failed her.
“Come on,” she gasped. “Please. Please, Maahira.”
Her sister’s fingers tightened around hers.
And then another crash shook the mansion.
Myra remembered the heat.
The smoke.
The desperate, terrible knowledge that she could not save someone simply because she loved them enough to try.
After that, everything fractured.
A door slammed somewhere.
Someone shouted her name.
Hands caught her beneath the arms and dragged her backward. She fought them, reaching for Maahira, screaming until her voice gave out.
She did not know who carried her outside.
She did not know how long she lay on the ground.
She knew only that she had been separated from her sister.
And that she had failed to bring her home.
Armaan arrived to find the world on fire.
He had been across the city when the call came. He remembered the words, although afterward they would return to him in fragments.
The mansion.
The fire.
Maahira.
He drove through red lights. He ignored the calls coming through his phone. He abandoned the car before it had fully stopped and ran toward the chaos gathering outside the gates.
The building was burning from within.
Flames climbed the curtains and licked at the windows. Smoke poured into the night sky. Firefighters shouted over the noise, forcing people back as sections of the structure groaned beneath the heat.
Armaan searched every face.
Not hers.
Not hers.
Not hers.
Then he saw Myra.
She was sitting on the ground near an ambulance, her clothes blackened with soot, one arm wrapped in a blanket. Her hair was tangled. Blood marked her temple, and her face was so pale that for a moment he did not recognize her.
But he knew who she was.
Maahira’s sister.
The woman who had been inside the mansion.
He dropped to his knees in front of her.
“Where is she?”
Myra looked up.
Her eyes were unfocused, glassy with shock. She stared at him as though it took effort to understand the question.
“Where is Maahira?”
Her lips parted.
No sound came out.
Armaan gripped her shoulders.
“Where is my Maahira?”
“Armaan—”
“Where is she?”
Myra flinched.
He barely noticed.
Behind him, a firefighter shouted for the paramedics. Another section of the roof collapsed, sending a burst of sparks into the sky.
Armaan looked at the burning mansion, then back at Myra.
He saw the soot on her clothes.
The blood on her skin.
The burns on her arm.
He saw that she had come out alive.
And his mind, desperate for something to blame, began building a story out of the few terrible things he could understand.
She had been inside.
Maahira was still missing.
Myra was alive.
He did not see her crawling through the smoke.
He did not see her shielding Maahira from the falling ceiling.
He did not see her reaching for her sister as strangers dragged her away.
He did not know that Myra had tried to save the woman he loved more than his own life.
He knew only that the mansion was burning and the woman in front of him was the last person he could ask.
“What happened?” he demanded.
Myra stared at him.
“I tried—”
Her voice broke.
She swallowed, struggling to breathe.
“I tried to get her out.”
But grief had already begun closing its hands around him.
Armaan searched her face for an explanation that could make the world right again. For a confession. For something that would tell him why the woman he loved was trapped inside a burning building while her sister sat before him, alive.
Myra reached for his wrist.
“I tried to save her.”
He pulled away.
The movement was small.
The damage was not.
A paramedic knelt beside Myra, telling her to remain still. Someone called Armaan’s name from behind him. He ignored them all.
His gaze stayed fixed on her.
“How could you?”
Myra went very still.
“I didn’t—”
“How could you let this happen?”
She stared at him, her expression changing from confusion to disbelief.
“I didn’t let anything happen.”
He heard defiance.
She had meant the truth.
“Maahira is in there,” he said, his voice shaking. “Your father is in there. Everything—”
He stopped.
For one brief second, the grief broke through the anger, leaving him looking like a man who had been torn open and left bleeding in front of strangers.
Myra wanted to reach for him.
She didn’t understand why.
Perhaps because she had seen him look at Maahira with so much love that the memory hurt. Perhaps because she knew what it meant to lose someone and wanted to tell him that she had tried, that she had fought, that she had not left her sister willingly.
Perhaps because, in that moment, she was too broken to understand why he was looking at her as though she had done something unforgivable.
“I tried,” she whispered again.
Armaan rose to his feet.
He looked at her one last time before turning toward the burning mansion.
“What did you do, Myra?”
The question was barely louder than a whisper.
It was not a question he wanted answered.
It was an accusation.
Myra watched him walk away, unable to follow, unable to explain, unable even to make him look back.
The woman who had run into the fire to save her sister sat beneath the flashing ambulance lights and watched the man who loved that sister decide she was the reason everything had burned.
And somewhere beyond the flames, beyond the smoke, beyond the truth no one had yet uncovered, the person responsible was already safe.
Aaryan Raichand had started the fire to destroy the evidence that would have exposed him.
He had watched the truth disappear behind flames.
He had let the world believe the tragedy was an accident.
And now, as the mansion burned and his brother’s grief turned toward the wrong woman, he had one more secret to protect.
The fire would leave scars on Myra’s skin.
It would leave Armaan with a grief he did not know how to carry.
It would take Maahira from the world and Mohandass Malhotra with her.
But the worst damage would not be done by the flames.
It would be done by what survived them.
A lie.
A hatred.
A marriage neither of them could yet imagine.
And vows made before the ashes had settled.
