He passed behind her again.
The prayer failed spectacularly.
On his next round he stopped near the window, answering a question on timelines. His eyes found her.
She was biting her lower lip, gripping her pen too tightly, staring at the page as if it could anchor her.
His expressions turned dark, knowing, and satisfied. All at once.
He turned back to the call, voice unchanged.
Meera pressed harder on the paper, writing words she barely registered.
He kept moving. Kept passing. Kept doing whatever he was doing to the oxygen in this room.
When the call ended, the silence felt thick.
He closed the laptop and faced her.
Meera stared at her notes. Tried to make sense of them. Failed.
“Did you get everything?”
Abhinav’s voice was too casual. Too normal. As if he hadn’t spent the last hour deliberately circling her like prey.
“Yes.” Meera did not look up.
“Good.”
She closed the notepad and stood. Then she made the mistake of meeting his eyes.
His gaze met hers, intent, sharp, as if he had watched every shift in her, understood it, and approved of it.
“Thank you, Boss.” The words came softer than she intended.
His eyes darkened.
She turned and left before it could get worse.
In the corridor, she pressed her back to the cool stone wall and closed her eyes, drawing in breath after breath, as if she had been under water too long.
Inside, Abhinav sat back down, running a hand through his hair.
He knew circling her during a business call had been unprofessional.
He should have stopped.
He did not want to.
What he felt was satisfaction and a quiet, dangerous curiosity about how far this could go before one of them stopped pretending.
He recognized it as a problem.
He chose not to care.
Chapter 13
That night, Meera pushed her food across the plate without tasting it. The dal she loved felt flat on her tongue.