Chapter 10: rumours
The days bled into a strange, liquid time. The sterile apartment that was meant to be her sanctuary became a waiting room. Shilpa moved through it in a daze, her body no longer wholly her own. It was a site of preparation, of constant, low-grade anticipation. The doctor’s appointments, arranged by Prema with chilling efficiency, confirmed she was “optimal.” The word made her feel like livestock. A prize broodmare.
Yet, when Prem summoned her—a text reading simply Now, or Come upstairs—a familiar, shameful heat would pool in her belly, overriding the confusion. The conflict was a knot she couldn’t untangle. A child? With her sister’s husband? The idea was monstrous. But then she would remember the weight of him, the absolute, world-shrinking focus in his eyes when he was inside her, and the monster would wear his face, and she would ache for it.
The confusion crested one evening in the penthouse library. The children were asleep. Prema was overseeing some redecorating in the west wing. Prem had found Shilpa staring blankly at a bookshelf, her hand unconsciously resting on her lower abdomen.
“You’re thinking too much,” his voice came from the doorway. He held two glasses of whisky.
“What am I doing, Jiju?” Her question was a whisper, fragile in the dusty, learned air. “This is… insane.”
“It’s natural.” He walked in, handed her a glass. She took it, her fingers shaking. “A woman needs a child. A man needs to spread his line. Your body is screaming for it. You’re just trying to listen to your head instead.” He took a sip, his eyes dark and unblinking over the rim. “Your head is full of other people’s noise. Scruples. Nonsense.”
“And Prema Didi?” The question was a desperate lunge for an anchor.
“Is happier than she’s been in years.” He set his glass down on the marble mantle. “She has a project. A purpose. She’s building something. We all are.” He stepped closer, his scent enveloping her. “You want this. I feel it every time you clench around my cock. That’s not confusion, Shilpa. That’s a yes your body is shouting.”
He cupped her face, his thumb stroking her cheek. The gesture was almost tender, which made the words more devastating. “Stop fighting yourself. Let me give you what you need. A full belly. A full life. My name on your child’s birth certificate. Everything else is just… details.”
He kissed her then, not with brutal force, but with a deep, convincing certainty. The whisky tasted like smoke and resolve on his tongue. And in that moment, under the weight of his absolute conviction, the knot inside her loosened. The confusion didn’t vanish, but it was gently, firmly pushed aside, buried under the physical reality of his mouth, his hands sliding down to her hips, pulling her against the hard proof of his desire. He was the decision. She just had to surrender.
And surrender she did.
The tentative, scheduled “missions” evaporated. Prem’s focus became a typhoon. Business meetings were postponed. Golf games cancelled. He spent days, and often nights, at the apartment. It was as if, having broken the final seal of her resistance, he was determined to claim every inch of the territory.
He fucked her in the grey light of dawn, his body a heavy, welcome blanket, moving in a slow, deep rhythm that felt less like passion and more like a deep, biological urging. “Take it all,” he’d grunt, burying his face in her neck, his hips rolling with piston-like precision. “This is what you’re for now. Just this. Keeping my cock warm and my seed safe.”
In the afternoons, he’d push her against the cold stainless steel of the refrigerator, hike up her sundress, and take her from behind with a frantic, hungry urgency, as if needing a quick, potent hit of her. The sounds were obscene—the slap of skin, the rattle of condiment bottles inside the door, his gritty promises in her ear. “Gonna drip out of you all day, saali,” he’d rasp, biting her shoulder as he came. “Let it swim. Let it find its way.”
One night, he arrived past midnight, smelling of cigar smoke and brandy from a dinner. He didn’t speak. He simply pulled her from the bed, laid her on the thick rug in the living room, and devoured her. He used his mouth on her with a brutal, relentless expertise that had her sobbing, her hands fisted in his hair, before he finally pushed his thick length into her soaked cunt. He rode her hard, one hand pinning her wrists above her head, the other groping her breast roughly. “This cunt is mine,” he chanted, his voice slurred with alcohol and possession. “My personal fuck-pussy. Mine to fill. Say it.”
“Yours,” she gasped, the profanity thrilling and brutalizing her at once. “Only yours, Jiju.”
“Damn right.”
Prema’s role shifted into a strange, watchful stage management. She would arrive at the apartment with grocery bags full of organic produce and prenatal supplements, her eyes sharp, missing nothing. The air would grow taut when Prem, still in his robe from a morning spent in Shilpa’s bed, would casually grip Shilpa’s backside as she poured coffee.
“Someone’s eager,” Prema would say, her smile not quite reaching her eyes.
“Just appreciating the asset,” Prem would reply, his hand lingering, a overt display for his wife’s benefit. He was less shy now. The boundaries had dissolved. He would pull Shilpa onto his lap during a discussion about ultrasound clinics, his hand sneaking under her shirt to thumb her nipple as Prema talked about follicle counts.
Shilpa, emboldened by his constant attention and the raw, primal language that had become their norm, began to play along. A performance for him, a provocation for Prema. “This jiju of yours is too demanding, Didi,” she’d sigh dramatically, stretching her neck to show a fresh love bite. “He doesn’t let a woman sleep.”
Prema would laugh, a thin, high sound. “He’s a stallion. What did you expect? You wanted a child, you get the whole… farm.” The jealousy was there, a green, vibrating wire under the skin of her words, but so was a perverse excitement. She was orchestrating her own replacement, and the horror of it seemed to intoxicate her.
The rumors began as a faint whisper at the club, over luncheon tables, at charity galas. It was the servants, of course. The driver who took Prem to the apartment building at odd hours. The housekeeper who changed the linens in the penthouse guest room less and less frequently.
“Do you think it’s true?” women asked behind their menus. “Prem Malik, practically living with his wife’s cousin? And Prema seems so… unbothered.”
“Unbothered or complicit?” The speculation was a delicious, spicy sauce.
The whispers grew bolder, morphing into legends of virility. “I heard he’s trying for a son. At his age! And they say he’s… relentless. The girl is practically glowing, have you seen her?”
“It’s that primal power,” an older socialite sighed, not without admiration. “When a man like that decides to propagate, he doesn’t mess about. He plants his flag.”
Prem heard the rumors. He heard them at the board table, disguised as joking congratulations from envious rivals. He heard them in the gym locker room, veiled as admiration. He absorbed them like sunlight. It fed the core of him, that hungry, ancient part that cared only for dominance and legacy. He began to lean into it. At a rooftop party, surrounded by the city’s glittering elite, a foolish young heir made a tipsy comment about older men needing to “conserve energy.”
Prem simply took a long drag of his cigar, blew the smoke out slowly, and smiled, a wolfish, knowing thing. “Energy isn’t the issue, boy. Focus is. When you know exactly what you want, and exactly where to put it, efficiency is everything.” The group around him roared with uncomfortable, impressed laughter. The story of his retort, and the undeniable, satisfied aura he wore, spread faster than the original gossip.
He’d come to Shilpa that night incandescent with pride, still in his tuxedo pants. He didn’t even undress her fully, just pushed her silk trousers and panties down, bent her over the back of the sofa, and took her with a victorious, celebratory fury.
“They’re all talking,” he grunted, pounding into her, his hands vise-like on her hips. “They know. They know this cunt is mine. They know I’m filling it with a king.”
She moaned, pushing back against him, equally drunk on the notoriety, on the sheer animal power of him. “Yes, Jiju. Let them talk.”
“They say I can’t keep it up,” he sneered, his pace becoming punishing. “They have no fucking idea. I’ll keep this up until you’re screaming with my baby in your arms.” He climaxed with a roar that felt like it shook the foundations of the building, pouring himself into her with a possessiveness that was now public knowledge.
Afterward, smoking by the window, he looked out at the city, a conqueror surveying his domain. Shilpa, spent and leaking him onto the sheets, watched the powerful line of his back. The confusion was a distant memory, drowned in a flood of sweat and seed and scandal. She was his creature now, a vessel for his legend. And in the silent penthouse across town, Prema stared at her own reflection, one hand resting on her flat, barren stomach, feeling the thrilling, corrosive burn of the gossip like acid and champagne. She had built this. She owned a piece of it. And it was eating her alive.
Prema did not sleep. She paced the penthouse’s cool marble floors, the silence a physical weight. The gossip was a toxin, yes, but it was also a perverse validation of her own engineered reality. She had built the stage, and now her husband and her cousin were performing a brutally convincing play upon it. The emptiness in her womb, once a quiet sorrow, now felt like a screaming void in the face of their fertile spectacle. She needed to reclaim her position in the narrative, not just as the architect, but as the cornerstone.
A week later, during one of her meticulously orchestrated “family” lunches where Shilpa now sat with a subtle, glowing assurance that made Prema’s teeth ache, she made her move. “The doctor called with my results today,” she announced, spearing a piece of grilled asparagus.
Prem glanced up from his phone, a flicker of bare attention. Shilpa froze, her fork hovering.
“Oh?” Prem’s voice was neutral.
“It seems,” Prema said, letting a slow, victorious smile spread across her lips, “all that… focused attention wasn’t just for Shilpa’s benefit. I’m eight weeks along.”
The silence was absolute. Prem’s phone hit the tablecloth with a soft thud. His eyes, dark and unreadable, locked onto hers. Then, a profound, animal satisfaction bloomed on his face. It was the look of a king whose empire had just unexpectedly doubled. “Is that so?”
Shilpa’s glow seemed to dim momentarily, her own secret—the missed period, the nausea she’d blamed on stress—suddenly feeling less singular, less powerful. She managed a shaky smile. “Congratulations, Didi.”
“Thank you, choti,” Prema said, her voice syrup-sweet. “It seems your Jiju’s legendary… efficiency… is even more impressive than the rumors suggest.” She looked directly at Prem, a challenge and an invitation. “Two heirs. Practically at once. The city will have a hard time topping that story.”
Prem leaned back in his chair, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest. The dynamic in the room shifted irrevocably in that instant. The singular project was now a tandem operation. His gaze swept from his wife’s triumphant face to his mistress’s cautiously hopeful one. A raw, unadulterated king-of-the-hill elation surged through him. He had them both, literally full of him, and they knew it.
“Come here,” he said to Prema, his voice a command. She rose, elegant and slow, and moved to him. He pulled her onto his lap, right there at the lunch table, his large hand spreading possessively over her still-flat stomach. He kissed her, deeply, in front of Shilpa. It was a reclaiming kiss, a branding. “My clever, clever girl,” he murmured against her mouth.
Then, without releasing Prema, his eyes found Shilpa’s. “You have something to tell me too, don’t you, saali?”
Shilpa’s breath hitched. She nodded, once, her eyes wide. “The test was positive this morning.”
Prem’s laugh was louder now, a boom of genuine, unfettered hubris that echoed in the high-ceilinged room. “Fuck me.” He squeezed Prema, then released her, pointing to the chair beside him. “You. Sit.” Shilpa obeyed, scooting her chair closer. He now had them flanking him, both carrying his child. He grabbed the neck of a wine bottle, disregarding the glasses, and took a long, celebratory swig. “Look at this. Look at what we did.”
The following months were a masterpiece of orchestrated tension and pleasure. Prem played them like a skilled musician, each woman a string tuned to a different note of desire and insecurity. He’d come home, kiss Prema with a lingering heat, his hand cupping the small, firm swell of her belly, while his eyes watched Shilpa across the room. “How’s my other one?” he’d ask, his voice carrying.
“Your other one is tired,” Shilpa would retort, her hand resting on her own more pronounced bump, her tone now laced with a casual ownership that mirrored Prema’s. “Your son kicked all night. He’s greedy, like his father.”
“Good,” Prem would say, releasing Prema to walk over and kneel before Shilpa’s chair. He’d push her shirt up and press his lips to her brown skin, speaking directly to her abdomen. “Be strong. Take everything you need.” The sight of it—her husband worshipping her cousin’s pregnant belly—would send a sharp, thrilling bolt of jealousy through Prema, which she’d channel into a cool, witty remark.
“Don’t get him too excited, Shilpa. We both know where that leads.”
The sex evolved, charged with this new, triangular electricity. One evening, Prema, irritable and hormonal, snapped at Shilpa over some triviality in the kitchen. Prem watched, sipping his whiskey, before standing.
“Enough.” The single word cut the air. He walked to Prema, his gaze intense. “You’re pent up. I can fix that.” He didn’t lead her to their bedroom. Instead, he turned her to face the kitchen island, unzipped his trousers, and pushed her silk trousers down. He took her from behind, right there, his hands gripping her hips, his pace fast and punishing. Prema cried out, a mix of anger and raw relief, her fingers scrambling against the cold granite.
Shilpa watched from the doorway, hypnotized, her own body thrumming in response. Prem locked eyes with her over his wife’s heaving shoulder. “See what you cause?” he grunted, driving into Prema. “See how much this one still needs?” He came with a shudder, spilling inside Prema, then gently helped her stand, kissing her sweaty temple with a tenderness that was its own reward.
Later that same night, he slipped into the guest wing, into Shilpa’s bed. She was awake, waiting. “She needed it rough,” he said simply, sliding his hands under her nightgown, finding her wet and ready. “You need something else.” He made love to her then with a slow, deep, almost worshipful attention, his mouth on her swollen breasts, his hands cradling her belly. It was possessive, but gentle, a stark contrast. “My beautiful saali,” he whispered, moving inside her with a measured, profound rhythm. “Carrying my child so perfectly. Such a good girl for me.” For Shilpa, this tenderness was the ultimate victory, a jewel to clutch when she saw Prema’s polished coolness the next day.
The rumors didn’t just increase; they exploded into myth. It was confirmed through servants, through doctors’ office staff, through the sheer, visible evidence of two women in the same social orbit blooming with pregnancy at the exact same time. Prem Malik’s virility became legendary, discussed with a mix of scorn, envy, and awe.
At a board meeting, a younger competitor, emboldened by single malt, slapped Prem’s back. “Two? At once? Malik, you magnificent bastard, what’s your secret? Steroids? Bull’s testicles?”
Prem merely took a long, deliberate drag of his cigar, blowing the smoke toward the ceiling. “Discipline,” he said, his voice cutting through the laughter. “And a complete lack of patience for wasted potential.” The message was clear: his life, like his business, was about maximum yield, supreme efficiency. He was a force of nature, beyond judgement, operating on a different plane.
The chapter of mere pursuit was closed. He now presided over a kingdom of his own making, a perfect, dysfunctional trinity of mutual need. His wife, proud and viciously happy, carried his legitimate heir. His mistress, pliant and adoring, carried his wildcard. And he, Prem, stood in the center, the undisputed source of all their chaos and joy, his power etched not just in contracts, but in the very flesh of the two women who watched each other across every room, bound to him and to each other in a web of scandal, seed, and burgeoning life.
And he, Prem, stood in the center, the undisputed source of all their chaos and joy, his power etched not just in contracts, but in the very flesh of the two women who watched each other across every room, bound to him and to each other in a web of scandal, seed, and burgeoning life.
Prema delivered first. Her son arrived in a storm of controlled screams and gleaming surgical steel, a seven-pound successor with a grip that mirrored his father’s. Prem held the boy, his chest swelling with a primal pride that momentarily stilled every other hunger. He named him Viraj. “Splendor,” he said, his voice thick in the sterile room, the word a command to the universe.
A week later, in a private suite at a different hospital, Shilpa’s body tore itself open to gift him a second son. Her labor was longer, messier, a raw animal struggle that left her trembling and emptied. He named this one Aryan. “Noble.” Holding this darker, quieter child, he felt completion, a vast and silent fullness. Two cradles now sat in separate wings of his world, each containing a squalling testament to his potency.
The family was, by his definition, happy. Prema glowed with a sharp, maternal supremacy, her body snapping back with terrifying speed, her authority over the household now absolute and biological. Shilpa bloomed with a softer warmth, cocooned in her apartment with the baby, her entire being radiating a satisfied, sleepy devotion. For a few months, Prem basked. He hosted a colossal, blatant dual-naming ceremony that was the talk of the city, a man flanked by two mothers holding his sons, a modern patriarch sans apology. The pictures ran in society magazines, sparking outrage and envy in equal measure. He framed one on his office wall.
But the fullness faded. The domestic rhythm, even one as unconventional as his, became a familiar song. The cries of infants, while proof of his triumph, were just noise. Prema’s conversations revolved around pediatricians and portfolios. Shilpa’s eyes held a gentle, permanent glaze of maternal absorption. The conquest was complete. The territory was mapped. A profound restlessness, familiar and cold, began to itch beneath his skin.
His gaze turned outward. The office, once a place of strategic conquest, became a hunting ground again. His new secretary, Roma, was a thirty-two-year-old divorcee with a spine of steel and a mouth that hinted at unfamiliar curves. She was efficient, unimpressed, and carried the subtle, wounded aura of a woman recently freed from a lesser man. He watched her. The way her pencil skirt tightened when she leaned over the filing cabinet. The precise click of her heels that spoke of discipline, not submission.
“The Chakraborty merger files, Roma,” he’d say, lingering by her desk, the scent of his cologne a deliberate fog.
“On your desk, sir. Since ten this morning.” She wouldn’t look up, but a faint pinkness would touch her throat. He recognized the signs. She’d heard the tales. The legends of his virility were office folklore now, whispered in the pantry with a mix of revulsion and fascination.
He started the seduction with the casual brutality of a man ordering lunch. A compliment on her analyst’s mind, delivered with his palm resting on her shoulder, his thumb staining a slow circle on her blouse. A shared nightcap after a late meeting, his stories veering into personal territory—hunting trips, the wild stamina of youth, the exhausting demands of his “expanding family.” He watched her pupils dilate, not with shock, but with a thrilling horror. She was captivated by the monster in the tales, and he knew it.
One Thursday, under the pretext of finalizing a hostile takeover bid, he told her to cancel her evening. “This can’t wait,” he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. The floor emptied, the silence thickening to a hum. He worked, radiating a focused tension. She brought in coffee, her movements stiff.
“Sit,” he commanded, gesturing to the leather chair opposite his desk. He discussed equity stakes and poison pills, his words crisp, while his eyes undressed her. Her breathing shallowed. Finally, he stood, walked to the door, and turned the lock. The click was monumental.
“Sir—” she started, standing, a script of reluctance already on her lips.
“Don’t.” He approached her, a predator done with games. He took her wrist, his grip firm, and placed her hand on the pronounced bulge in his trousers. The heat, the rigid thickness beneath the fine wool, burned her palm. She gasped, a quick, sharp intake, but didn’t pull away. Her fingers trembled.
“You’ve been thinking about this,” he stated, his other hand circling her waist, pulling her against him. “Hearing the stories. Wondering if it’s true.”
“Prem, this is—” she whispered, turning her face away, the pretense of protest weak.
“It is,” he growled, and crushed her mouth with his. He kissed her with a consuming hunger, his tongue forcing entry, his hands dropping to squeeze her ass, grinding her against his erection. She melted, a small whimper escaping her, her own hands finally moving to clutch at his shoulders. The reluctance was a veneer, and he stripped it away with efficient roughness. He walked her backwards until her legs hit the edge of his massive teak desk, sweeping a ledger and a brass lamp to the floor with a crash.
He spun her around, bent her over the polished wood, and pushed her skirt up around her hips. Her tights were a frustrating barrier. He ripped them, the sound tearing through the room. His fingers found her damp panties, pushed them aside, and dove into her. She was soaking wet, her pretended resistance a laughable facade. He freed himself, the broad, flushed head of his cock pressing against her. “Tell me you want it,” he demanded, notching himself at her entrance.
“I…” she panted, her cheek pressed to the cool wood.
He smacked her thigh, a sharp, stinging blow. “Say it.”
“I want it,” she gasped.
He drove into her with one deep, splitting thrust, burying himself to the hilt. She cried out, her body arching, taking all of him. He didn’t wait for adjustment. He set a brutal, immediately driving pace, his hips hammering into her, the desk creaking in protest. Every wet slap of their union was a punctuation mark in the silent office. He gripped her hair, pulling her head back. “This what you fantasized about, Roma? Getting railed on the boss’s desk like a cheap slut?”
“Yes!” she moaned, the word shattered. “God, yes.”
He fucked her with a focused, mechanical intensity, a man proving a point to himself. This was need. Simple, uncomplicated, raw. Her climax hit her suddenly, a violent shudder that clenched around him like a fist, milking him, pulling a guttural roar from his lungs as he emptied himself deep inside her, pulse after hot, claiming pulse. He stayed buried, breathing heavily, watching their mingled slickness drip onto the corporate reports below. Then he pulled out, tucked himself away, and tossed her the box of tissues from his desk.
She cleaned up in silence, her hands shaking, avoiding his eyes. He lit a cigarette, the flame a brief, Hellish glow. “Seven a.m. meeting tomorrow. The Chakraborty papers will be ready.”
She simply nodded, a well-fucked secret now tethered to him. It was Prema who discovered it three weeks later, finding a receipt for a forgotten bracelet from a jeweller near his office, a trinket he’d bought in a moment of post-coital indifference. She confronted him in his study, the paper trembling in her hand. “Who is she?”
He didn’t look up from his ledger. “Who is who?”
“Don’t. This.” She shoved the receipt at him. “Another secretary? Is that the pattern now? We give you sons, and you reward us by sticking your cock in the help?”
Finally, he leaned back, regarded her coolly. The warmth from the births was gone, replaced by the old, impermeable marble of his face. “It’s a man’s need, Prema,” he said, his voice flat, final. “You of all people should understand the economics of supply and demand. You helped design them.”
The statement hung in the air, a cold blade forged from her own compliance. She stared at him, the architect of her own displacement, realizing the machine she’d helped build had developed its own hunger, and she was now just another piece of its infrastructure. He returned to his figures, the conversation unequivocally closed.