His forbidden queen

Chapter 5

Two days after the gala, Priya found Raya still awake at 2 a.m., not working on the Rajwansh Horizon blueprints, but sitting cross-legged on her studio floor surrounded by a box of old family papers she rarely let anyone see.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Raya said, not looking up. In her hands was a brittle, yellowed newspaper clipping, the ink faded almost to nothing. “Kabir showing up tonight — it dragged up more than just him.”

Priya knelt beside her, careful, quiet. The clipping was from a business daily, twenty-six years old. The headline read: ARCHITECT ARJUN SINGHANIYA STRIPPED OF LICENCE AMID FRAUD ALLEGATIONS.

“My father never talked about this,” Raya said softly. “Not once. Ma told me he lost his firm to bad investments. I was fourteen when he died — his heart simply gave out one evening at his drafting table. I always assumed the stress of failure did it. I never asked for details. I think some part of me didn’t want to know.”

“Do you want to know now?” Priya asked.

Raya was quiet for a long moment, turning the fragile clipping over in her hands. Below the headline, barely legible, was a second name — a business partner, mentioned once and never again in any paper she could find, as though he had simply vanished from the story.

“Kapoor,” Raya read aloud, frowning at the smudged print. “Rajesh Kapoor. I don’t recognize the name. Ma has never once mentioned him.”

She set the clipping carefully back in the box, her expression troubled in a way Priya had rarely seen — not the sharp, defended wariness she wore around clients, but something older and more unguarded.

“Probably nothing,” Raya murmured, closing the lid. “An old ghost. I have a live one to deal with tomorrow — Trinay Rajwansh wants a decision on the eastern facade by nine.”

But she didn’t sleep again that night. Long after Priya had gone home, Raya sat by her window, the city lights blurring in front of her, wondering why a stranger’s name from twenty-six years ago had settled so heavily and so strangely against her chest.

To be continued......