Maya
Please… Please, Papa… stay here. Please don’t go. Ansh, you too… Didi is here."
My voice trembled with a fragile reassurance I didn’t believe myself. I was just a child—eight years old—and yet I was clutching my father’s hand like it was the last anchor to a world I understood. My little brother Ansh, barely four, hid behind the backseat, whimpering in fear. Outside the locked car, chaos reigned.
"Kill them! KILL THEM!"
The mob’s roar clawed at my ears. Their rage wasn’t human—it was animal, untamed, bloodthirsty. Then—
CRACK!
A stone slammed against the windshield, shattering the glass and finding its mark.
“Ahhh!”
My father groaned—deep, guttural, and raw—as blood spurted from the gash on his forehead. His body slumped, and the world stilled for a second. My tiny fingers clutched his lifeless arm tighter, frozen in shock. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream.
Sweat beaded at my temples. My palms were slick. I was spiraling—again. A full-blown panic attack.
I saw the bricks first. Then the hockey sticks.
A swarm of angry faces.
Glass cracking.
Metal bending.
My childhood ending.
---
“Papa!” I screamed aloud, and my body jolted upward.
My vision was hazy. My skin felt clammy. The room spun slightly, and I pressed a trembling hand to my forehead, trying to piece together where I was.
Soft sheets. A faint cologne. Dim lighting.
My breathing slowed as the familiarity of my surroundings kicked in. Mehrotra Mansion. My room. I was alive.
But not safe.
I looked down. I was wearing Utsav’s black T-shirt—too big for me, the fabric loose and crumpled, like a borrowed identity hanging off my body. My thighs were bare, and the shirt draped long enough to hide my modesty, but it still made me feel like a beggar draped in royalty’s scraps. Shame curled at my spine.
Then I saw it—a shadowy figure across the room, sitting silently on the couch. My pulse spiked.
I couldn’t make out his face yet. My vision hadn’t fully cleared from the abrupt awakening, but instinct screamed danger.
Without thinking, I reached beneath my pillow. My fingers closed around the familiar coolness of steel—the knife I always kept hidden. For protection. For survival.
I lunged.
The figure didn’t flinch. In one swift, calculated move, he caught my wrist mid-air, twisting it with enough force to send a searing pain up my arm. I gasped, the knife clattering to the floor.
Before I could react further, I was slammed against the wall, hard.
“Ahh—!” The air rushed out of my lungs.
My hands were pinned above my head. Firm. Unrelenting. My body pressed against the cold wall, and towering over me, face etched in chilling calmness—was Utsav Mehrotra.
He didn’t say a word.
His eyes, dark as an abyss, bore into mine. He reached down, picked up the knife, and in the same motion, brought it to my throat. The blade touched my skin—not deep enough to cut, but close enough to remind me who held power in this room.
Right against the pulse.
Right against the part of me that screamed alive.
I stopped breathing.
My eyes locked onto his—wild, wide, and drenched in fear. I wasn’t looking at the man I longed for. I was looking at the monster I had always known he could become.
Still, I didn’t scream.
Still, I didn’t fight.
Because deep inside, a part of me whispered: You brought this on yourself, Maya. You walked into the fire knowing it could burn.
"Want to kill me, Miss Shekhawat?"
His voice was dangerously calm, even amused, as if this entire scene—the knife, my panic, the room—was a game to him.
I froze.
"Or…" he leaned in, eyes darkening with menace, "do you want to kill those who hurt you and your family... because of your mistakes?"
His words struck like a whip.
"M-My mistakes?" I whispered, barely able to form the words. My throat was tight, fear pressing like a boulder on my chest.
He smirked—slow, cold, merciless. That same smirk he wore when he was in full control. “I heard your mutterings, Miss Shekhawat… in the car. You confessed quite a lot during your little panic attack. Remember?”
As he spoke, he pressed the blade of the knife just a little deeper into the skin of my throat. Not enough to cut, but enough to make me feel how fragile life truly was. My eyes shut tightly, and a tear escaped.
"Mr. Mehrotra… please…"
I begged, my voice cracking with vulnerability I hated to show. When I opened my eyes again, they met his. Cold. Calculating. But there was something else too—an unspoken curiosity, like he enjoyed watching people unravel.
He leaned even closer. Our breaths mingled, thick with tension, as though the air between us had turned to glass—fragile and sharp.
"Please what, Miss Shekhawat? Too tired now?"
His lips twisted upward cruelly. One hand left my pinned wrist and gently, almost mockingly, caressed my cheek. Then his thumb trailed down, tracing the outline of my lower lip. A motion so gentle it felt obscene.
I shuddered.
“You’re nothing but a foolish little squirrel with emerald eyes who dared to wander into the lion’s den,” he murmured, voice low and slow like a lullaby laced with venom.
His fingers moved down my jawline, tracing it deliberately, like a predator savoring his catch. “But now,” he continued, “I’m having fun with you—and your past. A girl who committed the biggest mistake that—”
"Stop it!"
The words burst from me—raw, cracked, desperate.
He pulled back, not out of guilt or mercy, but as if granting a brief pause in his torment just to watch the aftershock unfold. He released me with ease and stepped back, watching me crumble like a sandcastle meeting the tide.
I slid down the wall, legs trembling, strength lost. My arms wrapped around myself as if they could shield me from the memories he’d just unearthed.
"I can't… I can't…" I whispered, barely audible.
Tears streamed freely down my cheeks now, and my voice cracked as the panic clawed its way up my throat.
"Please, Mr. Mehrotra… don't… Don't say anything else. Don't talk about my past. I can’t hear it… I can’t…”
I dropped to the floor, hands flying up to cover my ears, pressing hard, trying to build a wall against his words—against his truths. But it was too late. The storm had already broken inside me. Memories came crashing in—louder than his voice, louder than reason.
The crowd.
The stone.
My father's blood.
Ansh crying.
My mistake.
"Don’t say anything… Please don’t talk about my past…"
I repeated the words like a broken mantra, as if they could somehow glue the pieces of me back together.
I wasn’t Maya Shekhawat in that moment. Not the glamorous singer, not the fierce woman. I was just a trembling girl on the floor, haunted by a night no one knew about. A night I buried so deep that even I stopped believing it happened. Until he came.
Utsav Mehrotra—he wasn’t a man. He was a scalpel, and today he sliced right through my soul.
“Get out of my room,” I said, my voice trembling but firm. I was still kneeling, too weak to rise, but the words came out with whatever pride I had left. I had to take back something—anything.
He crouched down to my level, meeting my eyes, and took my chin in his hand again—not gently. Forcing me to look at him.
“I will go, Miss Shekhawat,” he said quietly, his tone laced with a dark amusement. “But how will you run from your past?”
His thumb swept across my cheek mockingly, not to comfort, but to remind me of his power.
“The past where you are the villain. The past where you were crueller than even me.”
His words were deliberate. Measured. A knife not against my throat this time, but against my soul.
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My eyes were still wide, tears spilling freely, and for the first time, I realized something deeply horrifying—he wasn’t just dangerous. He enjoyed this. He took pleasure in my pain, like it proved some point about the weakness of humanity.
"You can’t even handle your past, Miss Shekhawat,” he murmured, standing upright and adjusting his brown shirt, his sculpted chest disappearing beneath the fabric like nothing had just happened. “How could you possibly think you can date a devil like me?”
Then, with calculated elegance, he turned and walked out.
No smirk.
No laughter.
But the echo of his words remained, haunting the room long after he was gone.
“I can’t date him. I can’t…”
The words spilled from my lips like spilled wine—bitter, staining, irreversible.
“Forget him, Maya,” I whispered to myself, rocking slightly, holding my knees close. “He is dangerous.”
My entire body trembled. My breath caught in my throat. And all I could feel was the enormous weight of what had just transpired. The confrontation. The exposure. The psychological whiplash.
The aftermath was not just chaos—it was devastation.
Utsav Mehrotra wasn’t a man you could tame. He wasn’t fire you could warm your hands against.
He was a beast—and I had walked willingly into his lair.
And now, I was the one bleeding.
“Why should I follow him?”
The question echoed inside my mind as I sat on the edge of the bed, my fingers curling around the hem of his black T-shirt that hung loosely on my body. I hadn’t changed out of it. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have the strength. My muscles felt like jelly, my throat raw from the earlier screaming, and my chest—God, my chest—still ached as if the panic attack had left shards of glass inside it.
I looked like a ghost.
Red, swollen eyes.
Dark circles painting shadows beneath them.
A soul that had been dragged through the fire and now sat amongst the ashes, wondering how to rise.
The room was silent. The kind of silence that doesn’t soothe—it suffocates. And somewhere deep in the quiet, I could still hear the echo of his words, like ghostly fingers clawing at the edges of my thoughts.
My therapist had warned me—take it slow, Maya.
Don’t push too hard. Be gentle with yourself.
But what did I do? I charged into the lion’s den with the arrogance of a reckless heart, trying to play games with a man who doesn’t lose.
And Utsav Mehrotra?
He didn’t just win.
He dismantled.
He pierced straight through the carefully guarded walls I’d built over the years—twisting open old wounds with surgical precision, not just finding the truth I buried but dragging it out into the light and making me bleed from it again.
And yet, despite all that…
Despite the knife.
Despite the psychological torment.
Despite the fear that still sat at the pit of my stomach like molten lead…
…I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Why?
Why did I still want to look into those eyes that carried fire beneath the surface of frost?
Why did my chest clench when I thought of his silence more than his words?
Why did I still want to love the very man who broke me open like glass?
People thought Utsav was cold. Uncaring. Detached.
But they didn’t know the truth.
He wasn’t emotionless. He was overrun with it.
He cared—so deeply, so obsessively—that it burned him from the inside out.
Every move he made was calculated, methodical. He thought things through not once, but thousands of times. Every breath, every look, every silence from him was a decision. And that kind of mental weight didn’t make a man strong—it made him suffocate.
He detached not because he didn’t feel—but because he felt too much.
And that... was exactly why I couldn’t look away from him.
I was drawn to that darkness. Not out of naïve infatuation, but because I understood it. Because I had been there—I was there.
We both wore masks.
We both held onto our past like battle scars we refused to heal.
We were both broken, just in different shapes.
And no matter what he did today—no matter how he tried to terrify me, humiliate me, emotionally strip me—I knew one thing with more certainty than I had ever known anything in my life:
I loved him.
Not the version he showed the world.
Not the brutal, commanding devil he pretended to be.
But the haunted man beneath—the one who held back because he didn’t know what to do with the depth of his own emotions.
He thought he could break me today and scare me away.
That I’d walk out, take my fragile past with me, and never look back.
That he had ended the game before it even began.
He was wrong.
Dead wrong.
He thought he was the puppeteer? Pulling strings now that he had dirt on me?
Well, he clearly didn’t know Maya Shekhawat.
I wasn’t the type to retreat.
If anything, he just added fuel to the fire.
He wanted a reaction? He got it.
He wanted control? He had it—for now.
But I was about to flip the board. No more games of dates and teases.
If he thought I was going to wait for his approval to step into his life—he was about to be very, very surprised.
“I’m not giving up on you, Mr. Mehrotra,” I whispered aloud into the empty room, my voice soft but resolute.
My gaze fell to my phone, lying on the nightstand.
Ideas began forming. Plans. Execution. Timing.
My heart still ached, but somewhere beneath that ache, something new began to rise. Not vengeance. Not madness.
Determination.
He thought he broke me?
He only taught me how high the stakes really were.
“You think you’re pulling the strings, Utsav?”
A slow smile curved my lips, and I wiped the final tear off my cheek.
“Well, let’s just say… you don’t know me yet.”
By the end of next week, I would flip this entire narrative.
There would be no date.
There would be no seduction.
There would be a ring on my finger and his name beside mine.
Engagement.
Public.
Unavoidable.
Let’s see how he handles the one thing he can’t control—me.
You’re mine, Utsav Mehrotra.
Even if the world stands between us.
Even if you try to stand between us.
You are mine.
And I will make you realize that—even if I have to walk through fire to prove it.
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"Do let me know your thoughts about this chapter in the comments section. If you liked it, please don't forget to vote. Your single vote is enough to give me the courage to keep writing more.
And please, don't judge the characters solely based on the starting chapters. There's so much yet to unfold. Especially Utsav - I know his personality might seem negative at times, but trust me, he's about to go through a powerful journey of transformation.
Let the story breathe a little before forming opinions. Big twists are coming."
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