The room felt suffocatingly small as Virat loomed over Ishani on the narrow hostel bed, his powerful frame pinning her down with unrelenting weight. His obsidian eyes were still stormy, fractured by the trauma she had viciously dragged into the open—his mother’s death, the blood, the screams, the only attachment he had ever allowed himself. The pain she had written had cracked his devilish composure, and now he was pouring every shard of it back into her.

But he didn’t take her fully. Not tonight.