Chapter 10: Scorched Silk
The fever was a physical thing, a thick wool blanket soaked in heat and draped over his mind. Amartya lay shivering in his own bed, the ornate ceiling mosaics swimming in and out of focus. The air conditioning hummed, but it did nothing. The chill was inside his bones.
Rukmini was there, a cool, solid presence beside him. She sat against the headboard, his head in her lap, her fingers moving rhythmically through his sweat-damp hair. A damp cloth, fresh from a basin of rosewater, rested on his forehead.
“Just a virus,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “You brought it back from that awful place. Your body is expelling it.”
He tried to nod, but the movement made the room tilt. He’d been so focused on the plan, on crafting the perfect, innocuous invitation for Nadia to attend a “Urban Sustainability Forum” that the physical collapse had blindsided him. The pressure of the last weeks—the performance in Baghdad, the weight of that hug, the frantic plotting since coming home—it had all converged into this helpless, shaking thing on the bed.
The door didn’t open. It exploded inward.
The slam against the wall was a gunshot in the quiet room. Amartya flinched, the sound jolting through his fever. Rukmini’s hands stilled.
Dev stood in the doorway. He wasn’t the brother from the sunlit morning room. This was the King. His face was a mask of pale, controlled fury, but his eyes were wild, fractured. He held a slim tablet in one white-knuckled hand.
“Out,” he said to Rukmini, the word a low crackle of ice.
“Dev, what in god’s name—” Rukmini began, not moving.
“OUT!” The roar was sudden, animal, shaking the delicate crystals of the chandelier. He took two steps into the room, and the energy shifted from anger to something violently unstable.
Amartya tried to push himself up on his elbows, his vision swimming. “Bhaiya, what’s—”
Dev was on him. He didn’t speak. He grabbed the front of Amartya’s silk sleeping tunic and hauled him upright off the bed. Amartya’s legs buckled, weak with fever. The damp cloth fell to the floor with a soft slap.
“You filthy little whore,” Dev hissed, his breath hot and sour in Amartya’s face.
The first slap wasn’t a punishment. It was an eradication. It snapped Amartya’s head to the side with a sound like wet wood splitting. Light exploded behind his eyes, merging with the fever-brightness. He cried out, a garbled, sick sound.
“DEV, STOP!” Rukmini was on her feet, grabbing Dev’s arm.
He shook her off without looking. His eyes were locked on Amartya’s dazed, bleeding face. “All of it? For what? For a taste of their locked-up caged birds? You traded our security, our codes, our border protocols—for a fuck?”
The words made no sense. They were nonsense syllables shouted into the vortex of Amartya’s pain and confusion. Codes? Protocols?
“No…,” he slurred, blood trickling from his split lip. “Bhaiya, no, I didn’t…”
The second blow was a closed fist to the stomach. All the air left Amartya’s body in a whooshing gag. He folded, collapsing onto the priceless Kashmiri rug, gasping like a landed fish. The geometric patterns swam beneath his cheek.
Rukmini threw herself between them, shoving against Dev’s chest. “Have you lost your mind! Look at him! He’s burning up! What are you talking about!”
Dev shoved the tablet at her. His hand was shaking. “Proof. From Baghdad. From Kabul. Direct feeds. Time-stamped. He was in her rooms. He was with the Afghan bitch too. Audio. They’re laughing about how easy it was. What he gave them. For access.”
Amartya forced a breath, pushing himself up. The world was tilting. “Lies… It’s all lies… I never… Nadia just hugged me… that’s all…” The plea sounded pathetic, childish even to his own ears.
Dev looked down at him, and the fury broke for a second, revealing a wound so deep it was bottomless. Betrayal. “I believed in you. I gave you latitude. I was proud of you. And you were just a common slut trading secrets for a cheap thrill.”
He bent down, grabbed Amartya’s arm, and yanked him to his feet. Amartya stumbled, his legs useless. Dev dragged him toward the door.
“Where are you taking him!” Rukmini screamed, following, grabbing at Dev’s shoulder.
“To where traitors belong. He’s done. He’s nothing.”
The journey was a blur of marble corridors and stunned servants’ faces, quickly averted. Amartya’s feet scraped along the floor. The cool air of the hallway did nothing to clear his head; it just sharpened the humiliation, the raw, shocking pain in his face and gut.
They descended a narrow service stairwell, deep into the old foundations of the palace. The air grew cold and damp, smelling of dust and disinfectant. Dev stopped before a heavy, steel-reinforced door. A guard stood there, eyes wide with terror. “Your Majesty—”
“Open it.”
The door swung open on protesting hinges. Inside was a concrete box. Six feet by six. A single, wire-caged bulb in the ceiling cast a weak, jaundiced light. A built-in concrete slab with a thin pad served as a bed. A stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combo gleamed in the corner. The only sound was the drip of water from a tap.
Dev threw Amartya inside. He hit the slab, the impact jarring his spine.
“Your devices. Your access. Your title. Your name. It’s all gone.” Dev’s voice was flat now, exhausted by its own rage. “You will stay here until I decide what to do with you. If the people out there knew what you did, they’d tear you apart themselves.”
Amartya dragged himself up, leaning against the cold wall. He looked at his brother, really looked, searching for the man who had hugged him, who had smiled with pride. He saw only a stranger wearing a crown of shattered trust.
“I didn’t do it,” Amartya whispered, the sound swallowed by the concrete. “They’re lying to you. Baghdawi… and the Afghan. They’re doing this.”
Dev’s expression didn’t change. “The evidence doesn’t lie.” He took a step back into the corridor. “You reek of betrayal. And fever. I don’t know which is more pathetic.”
The heavy door swung shut with a final, resonant thud. The lock engaged with a deafening, metallic clunk.
The light from the single bulb was pitiless. It showed every stain on the concrete, every crack. The drip from the tap was a clock counting down in a void. Amartya slid down the wall to the floor, his body one screaming ache. He touched his throbbing lip, looked at the blood on his fingers.
The shaking wasn’t just from the fever anymore. It was from the aftershock of violence, from the sheer velocity of the fall. One hour ago, he was planning a rescue. Now he was the one in a cage. The irony was a bitter paste in his mouth.
He closed his eyes, but all he could see was Dev’s fractured gaze, and behind it, like puppeteers in the shadows, the smug, reptilian faces of two old kings who had found the perfect weapon. They hadn’t needed armies. They’d just needed a lie, and a brother’s love brittle enough to break.