Chapter 13: My Virgin Eyes!

Nidhi

Being in a relationship — an actual, acknowledged, mango-kissed relationship — with Arjun changed precisely two things and nothing at all.

The two things that changed: first, the sleeping arrangements. Not in the way Sahil's eyebrows suggested when he heard about the kiss — Nidhi was months away from that kind of intimacy, and Arjun understood this with the same instinctive precision he applied to everything about her. What changed was the door. Instead of sitting outside it at three in the morning when the nightmares came, he now sat inside, in the chair beside her bed, close enough to reach but far enough to breathe. And on the bad nights — the nights when the dream was so vivid that she woke thrashing and screaming and her Divya Shakti turned the headboard to charcoal — she reached for his hand, and he held it, and the warmth of his palm against hers was enough to pull her back from the dungeon faster than any grounding technique.

The second thing: Aarav started calling him "Angel."

Not Arjun. Not uncle. Angel. The nickname Nidhi had given him, adopted by a three-year-old with the decisive authority of a child who had evaluated this man's credentials and found them sufficient. Aarav used the name sparingly — he was still a boy of few words — but when he did, it was with a matter-of-fact ownership that suggested Arjun was now filed in his mental directory not under "stranger" or "Nini's friend" but under "mine."

The thing that did not change: Nidhi's defences. They were still there — lower than a month ago, but present, the invisible perimeter of wariness that trauma had built and that trust was slowly, painstakingly dismantling one brick at a time. She could kiss him. She could hold his hand. She could lean into his warmth on the rooftop and feel the mate bond hum between them like a shared heartbeat. But she could not — not yet — allow the full weight of what she felt to land, because feelings that landed had consequences, and consequences could be catastrophic, and catastrophe was not a theoretical concept for someone who had lived through ten years of it.

Arjun was patient. Impossibly, infuriatingly patient. He matched her pace with the precision of a man who understood that healing was not linear and that the distance between "I want you" and "I'm ready" could be measured in months rather than minutes.

The rest of the household adapted with varying degrees of grace.

Sahil made them a scrapbook. An actual, physical scrapbook, with hand-drawn illustrations and captions and a title page that read "The Epic Romance of Sunshine and Angel: A Love Story in Thirty-Seven Acts (And Counting)." He presented it at breakfast with the gravity of a man submitting a doctoral thesis.

"Page one: 'The Forest.' Note my artistic rendering of Arjun carrying you through the Nilgiri hills. I've given him a heroic jawline, which I think you'll agree is accurate."

"Sahil, this is—" Nidhi flipped through the pages. The drawings were terrible — stick figures with exaggerated features, speech bubbles containing approximate dialogue, hearts drawn in red pen around key scenes. It was the worst thing she had ever seen. It was also the most thoughtful gift anyone had given her since she was sixteen years old.

"Terrible?" Sahil supplied.

"Perfect."

His grin went soft. "There are empty pages at the back. For future chapters."

The training escalated. Hiral, now satisfied that Nidhi's close-quarters combat had progressed beyond "dungeon brawling," moved to advanced weapons work. The siren's arsenal was eclectic — throwing knives, chain weapons, a curved blade called an urumi that moved like liquid metal and required a combination of wrist control and divine timing that made it one of the most dangerous weapons in the supernatural world.

"The urumi is not a weapon," Hiral said, uncoiling the flexible blade from around her waist where it served as a belt when not in use. "It's a conversation. You don't wield it — you negotiate with it. Every swing is a proposition, every arc is an argument, and if you lose the argument, you lose a limb."

"That's very poetic for a woman who once described knife combat as 'stab the thing before it stabs you.'"

"Different weapon, different philosophy. The knife is direct. The urumi is political." Hiral demonstrated — a fluid, sinuous motion that sent the blade whipping through the air in a figure-eight pattern that hummed with kinetic energy. The sound was distinctive: a metallic singing, high and sharp, like a wire vibrating at impossible speed. "Your turn."

Nidhi took the practice urumi — blunted, thankfully — and attempted the figure-eight. The blade responded to her wrist movement with the enthusiastic unpredictability of a snake that had opinions about its own trajectory. It clipped the training dummy's shoulder, whipped past Nidhi's own ear with a whistle that made her flinch, and wrapped itself around a weapons rack with the decisive finality of a python claiming a branch.

"That was—"

"Terrifying. Yes. The urumi is always terrifying the first time. And the second time. And most of the third time. By the fourth time, you begin to understand it." Hiral untangled the blade from the weapons rack with the casual competence of someone who had been doing this since childhood. "Again."

Again. Always again. The word that defined her recovery — physical, emotional, strategic. Again meant you hadn't finished. Again meant there was more. Again meant the thing that had knocked you down was not the thing that would keep you down.

They trained until the afternoon heat drove them indoors, where Nidhi found Arjun in the strategy room with Riku, analysing intelligence reports on the Chandramukhi Coven. The coven's internal civil war — the one Nidhi had ignited by killing their intelligence officer during her escape — was escalating. Two factions had formed: one loyal to Queen Vasundhara, the original matriarch, and another coalescing around a younger warlock named Tanveer who was leveraging the power vacuum to bid for leadership.

"The split is good for us," Nidhi said, settling into the chair beside Arjun and pulling the intelligence reports toward her. Riku's eyes widened — he was not accustomed to people casually commandeering his work — but Arjun's nod of approval settled him. "Internal conflict means reduced external capacity. They can't hunt us and fight each other simultaneously."

"Agreed," Riku said cautiously. "But Tanveer is accelerating the corruption experiments. He's trying to produce results quickly to consolidate support."

"Corruption experiments." The words landed in Nidhi's body like stones — heavy, cold, settling in the place where a decade of experimentation had left marks that Gauri's healing could not reach. "I can tell you everything about those experiments. The subjects. The methods. The schedules. The success rates." She looked at Riku steadily. "I was the primary test subject for seven years."

The room went quiet. Riku's typing stopped. Arjun's hand found hers under the table — not restraining, not comforting, just present.

"If you're willing to debrief," Riku said carefully, "the intelligence value would be—"

"Enormous. I know. That's why I'm offering." She squeezed Arjun's hand. "Not today. But soon. Set up the debrief. I'll tell you everything."

"You don't have to," Arjun said quietly.

"I know. I want to. It's the only way this—" she gestured at the reports, the maps, the strategic planning that represented the household's preparation for the coven's inevitable retaliation "—works. My memory is a weapon. It's time I used it."

Yes, her Shakti agreed. Weapon.