CHAPTER ONE

Meera Sharma was going to die on this road.

Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic, existential way her students at Fergusson College would appreciate. She was going to die because a Himachal Pradesh State Transport bus was barrelling around a blind hairpin bend on NH3, horn blaring three times in the universal mountain language for I am enormous and I do not stop, and her rented Maruti Swift was approximately the width of a chai glass on a road built for exactly one and a half vehicles.

"This was such a bad idea." She yanked the steering wheel left, her tyres scraping gravel at the edge of a drop that went down three hundred metres into the Beas river valley. The bus thundered past, so close she could smell diesel exhaust and the ghost of someone's rajma-chawal lunch through her cracked window.

"Going to Himachal to look for your missing boyfriend?" Priya asked over the speakerphone, her voice tinny against the sound of Meera's pounding heart. "Or deciding to drive?"

"The driving part!" A truck appeared around the next curve, prayer flags strung across its bumper, Horn OK Please hand-painted in cheerful red letters across its rear. Meera braked hard enough to feel the seatbelt cut into her collarbone.

She could hear Priya's husband Jai in the background — something about cricket scores — and the domestic normalcy of it made her want to cry.

"I don't think we should be talking to her while she's trying to navigate mountain roads." Her best friend Noor was also on the call, her Punjabi accent thickening the way it did when she was worried. "Mostly I'm feeling guilty that neither of us went with you."

"Don't be ridiculous." The road after the bend widened into a brief stretch of actual two-lane highway, and Meera's heartbeat slowed to a rate that probably wouldn't interest a cardiologist. "Both of you have lives and jobs and aren't insane. I am a mentally unbalanced mythology professor whose boyfriend disappeared."

"You're not mentally unbalanced." Priya's voice softened. "And you've been a lot better in the past few months."

Ever since she'd met Arjun. Which was why she had to figure out what the hell was going on.

She'd taken a leave of absence from Fergusson when the depression had dragged her down — not the Instagram kind where you posted a sunset and wrote healing journey in the caption, but the real kind where you stopped showering and your father's colleague from the Marathi department found you sitting in your car in the college parking lot at eleven PM because you'd forgotten how to make yourself go home. She'd been slowly crawling back from it. Therapy with Dr. Kulkarni every Tuesday at four. The little white pills she still kept in the drawer beside her bed, not because she needed them every day anymore but because knowing they were there kept her breathing even.

And then.

And then Arjun Rathore had walked into Pagdandi bookstore on a Thursday afternoon, picked up a dog-eared copy of the Katha Sarit Sagara, and asked her if she believed in fairy tales.

"I'm doing the right thing, right?"

"Yes." Both her friends spoke at once.

"We know Arjun," Noor said. "Something very weird is going on. He would not just leave you without a word. He didn't call. Didn't text."

"He didn't even take his guitar," Priya added, and there was genuine bewilderment in her engineer's voice, because Priya understood that some things were load-bearing and you didn't remove them without the structure coming down. "Something is obviously wrong."

"Right." Meera nodded. Right. She knew that.

Even though the police in Pune had looked at her with the specific brand of male pity reserved for women whose boyfriends left — Madam, ye toh common hai, four months is not very long — she knew something terrible had happened, and she wasn't going to sit in her Kothrud flat and rot.

"Did you ever get Arjun's brother on the phone?" Noor asked. "Maybe if he saw an unknown number from up north, he'd pick up."

"I still have my Pune number," Meera said. "And his brother is avoiding my calls. I got through once, asked for Arjun, and the man hung up on me. I called back seventeen times. Nothing."

No matter how many times she told the Kothrud police that something strange had happened to Arjun, they said there was nothing to investigate. Some of his clothes were missing. They'd only been together four months. That was proof enough that her boyfriend had simply gotten bored and left.

Madam, has he taken money from you? No? Then file a missing person report if you want, but these things happen.

These things don't happen, she'd wanted to scream. Not to Arjun.

"He might be as worried as you are," Priya said gently. "The brother."

"I don't think they're very close." Meera squinted through the windshield at the landscape unfolding around her — terraced fields climbing the mountainside like green staircases, wooden houses with slate roofs, prayer flags snapping in the wind between deodar trees. "But I mean... yeah. He'd have to be worried, right?"

She swerved to avoid a goat that had wandered onto the road and was staring at her with the supreme indifference of a creature that had never once questioned its life choices.

"These roads are insanely narrow."

Along with his guitar, Arjun had left his passport, his wallet, the university ID he'd been using while auditing her Comparative Mythology seminar. He'd left an unfinished copy of Devdutt Pattanaik's Jaya on her bedside table with a bus ticket from Nigdi to Shivajinagar tucked between the pages as a bookmark, and a massive hole in her life shaped exactly like a man who made her believe she could survive her own brain.

Meera was going to find out what happened.

Even if it did look like she was the pagal ex-girlfriend.

"Rathore Metalworks is on this road somewhere." She scanned the mountainside for signs, but the only markers were faded Hindi boards advertising homestays and apple orchting. "How are you supposed to find anything in these mountains?"

"Arjun's brother is a blacksmith?" Noor's voice carried her delighted incredulity. "I didn't know they still had those."

"It's some kind of family business that Arjun used to work at. Ancient metalwork, restoration, that sort of thing. I have a feeling that's part of why he left home."

I'm a disgustingly wealthy prince who's run away from home for a bit to enjoy being unemployed. It was what he'd told her the first time they met, grinning over the Katha Sarit Sagara like a man who'd never worried about rent in his life.

He'd struck up a conversation about ocean mythology and the Samudra Manthan while she was browsing the folklore section at Pagdandi. He was charming and absurdly handsome — the kind of face that made you look twice and then feel angry at yourself for looking twice — and she'd fallen for all of it. There were hints of family money, but he didn't mention it beyond the joke about being a prince. He was sharp and curious and kind, and he listened like listening was an art form he'd been practising his whole life.

He was almost too good to be true except that he wasn't. Arjun had become Meera's lifeline during her slow swim back to the surface. He was warm and steady, and he loved her friends the way she loved them — fiercely, with the kind of loyalty that didn't need to announce itself.

"Arjun is a musician," Priya said firmly. "Not a blacksmith. They should respect that."

"They should respect putting up road signs," Meera muttered.

"What do you see?" Noor asked.

Meera kept her speed low and looked around. The valley opened up ahead of her, the Beas river glinting silver between the mountains, apple orchards climbing the slopes in neat rows, the occasional wooden temple with its pagoda-style roof rising between the trees. The air that came through the cracked window tasted of pine resin and cold water and something else — something green and ancient, like the smell of a forest that had been breathing for a thousand years.

"Mountains," she said. "Deodar trees. And a LOT of curves."

"Apple orchards?" Noor asked, her voice brightening. "Bring me apples!"

"Oh my God, Noor, enough with the apples."

"Himachali apples are the best though."

"Wait." Meera spotted a faded signboard in the distance, hand-painted in blue and white, half-hidden behind a rhododendron bush. "I see something that says Rathore on it."

She pulled closer and saw that it wasn't Rathore Metalworks but Rathore Nursery & Garden Centre. "Maybe it belongs to a cousin or something. It's a plant nursery, but the name is the same. I think I'm on the right track."

"Okay, do you want to keep us on the call?"

"I think I'm okay now."

"Remember," Priya said, her voice carrying the specific weight of a woman who had held Meera's hand through two panic attacks and one three-AM phone call where Meera couldn't stop crying long enough to say what was wrong, "you're not insane. You know Arjun, and something happened to him. He would not have left without talking to you."

The road curved again, a sinuous S that climbed over a ridge and dropped down into a valley that made Meera's breath catch in her chest.

It was the kind of valley that existed in her mother's paintings.

Nandini Sharma had spent twenty years painting watercolours of places that didn't exist — or that Meera had always assumed didn't exist. Mountains with snow that glowed faintly blue. Forests where the trees grew so tall their canopies dissolved into mist. Stone forts perched on ridges that no human engineering could explain, flags she didn't recognise snapping from their towers.

Her mother had called them sapne ke drishya — dreamscapes. Scenes from dreams she couldn't stop having.

This valley, with its deodar forests climbing toward a snow-dusted ridge and the faint outline of what looked like ancient stone ruins on the hilltop above, looked like it had been painted by her mother's hand.

Meera wished more than anything that she was visiting these mountains for the first time with Arjun beside her. They could take their time, explore his childhood home, and she could see in person the landscapes from the mythology she'd spent her life studying in lecture halls and library carrels.

And Arjun could do the bloody driving.

A truck horn dragged her attention from the ruins in the distance and back to the road, where a Tata 407 was pulling out from a side road directly into her lane.

She swerved left and raised a hand in apology, but as soon as she passed the truck, she saw where it had come from.

Rathore Metalworks.

The sign was painted on a massive stone wall — old, faded letters in Hindi and English on what looked like the boundary of an estate that had been standing for centuries. Behind the wall, she could see the roof of a large stone building with smoke rising from a chimney that was built wide enough to belong to a forge.

Meera found a place to turn around — a shrine to a local Nag Devta at the roadside, marigolds fresh on the stone, a bell hanging from a chain — and drove back to the entrance. She turned in through a stone gateway, past a carved wooden arch that bore the Rathore family crest, and guided her rental car into a cobbled yard surrounded by old stone buildings.

She parked and took a deep breath.

The air here was different. Thinner, obviously — they were at nearly two thousand metres — but also sharper somehow, charged with something she couldn't name. The smell of burning coal and hot metal drifted from the largest building, mixed with pine resin and the faint sweetness of apple blossoms from an orchard she could see on the slope behind the forge.

She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text to the group chat.

Found it. Wish me luck.

Priya: Good luck. Remember you are brave and competent and he is just a man.

Noor: Don't let him brush you off. Also bring apples.

Meera opened her car door and stepped out into the cold Himachali morning. The sky was the colour of old steel, clouds pressed low against the peaks, and the temperature was a sharp eight degrees that bit at her nose and the tips of her ears. She pulled her jacket tighter — the puffer jacket she'd bought in a rush at Westside before catching the Volvo bus from Pune, not nearly warm enough for this altitude.

She walked to a wooden door with a brass plate that read Office in both Hindi and English. She knocked, then cracked it open. "Hello? Namaste?"

"Ek minute, ji!" A friendly voice called from the back. "Just a moment, please."

A moment later, a round woman with curly hair pulled back by a cloth band and a woollen shawl wrapped twice around her shoulders walked in from the hallway. "These boys." She sighed with the world-weariness of a woman who had been managing men since before they could grow beards. "Can't fill out a sales order to save their life." She settled at a desk with an ancient computer and two phones — one landline, one mobile propped against a brass Ganesha. "How can I help you, beta? If you're looking for the garden centre, it's just down the road — all the decorative metalwork is there. We don't sell directly from the forge. This is for restoration work, heritage projects, temple commissions."

Meera raised a hand. "Oh, I'm not here for... metalwork. I'm looking for Vikram Rathore."

The woman cocked her head. "From the plains? And you're looking for Vikram Sahab?"

"Yes. Vikram Rathore. He's the owner here, right?"

"He surely is, but he doesn't receive visitors at the forge most days." She smiled — warm, the kind of smile that came from a woman whose kitchen was always open — and then her smile faltered. "You're not a journalist or anything like that?"

"No." Meera found herself reluctant to explain more. "Just a friend of a friend."

"Of course, beta." The woman's smile returned, though her eyes stayed watchful. "And your name?"

She had to give the woman something. "Meera."

"Lovely name." The woman beamed. "Accha, I'll see if I can find him. Please sit — there's chai in the flask if you want."

Moments after the woman disappeared into the hallway that led toward the sound of hammering metal, a man came storming down the corridor.

He froze when he saw her.

So did she.

"Arjun?"

He wasn't Arjun. She knew he wasn't — the knowledge landed in her body before it reached her brain, a wrongness in the shape of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. This man was her boyfriend's mirror image, but rougher, as if someone had taken the same face and carved it from harder stone. His hair was shorter, nearly shorn at the sides, and he had a beard that hadn't been trimmed in weeks. His eyes were the same deep brown as Arjun's, but where Arjun's held light, this man's held something like a banked forge — heat contained, controlled, dangerous if you got too close.

His shoulders were thick with the kind of muscle you didn't get from a gym — the kind that came from years of lifting hammers and bending metal. His forearms were corded, scarred in places, and his hands were the hands of a man who worked with fire.

Vikram Rathore wasn't only Arjun's brother. He was his identical twin.

"You." His voice was low and rough, like gravel dragged across stone. "How —"

"I'm Meera Sharma." She stuck out her hand, chin up, refusing to be intimidated by the sheer wall of hostile muscle in front of her. "I'm Arjun's girlfriend from Pune, and I need you to tell me where the hell your brother is."

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