Arjun Rathore had a rule about taking assignments that involved politicians' families: he didn't.
It was not a rule he had written anywhere or told anyone. It was the way certain soldiers had rules about certain kinds of operations — not from fear, but from the specific knowledge that comes from having been inside those operations once and understanding exactly what they cost. Politicians' families were complicated. The threats to them were sometimes real and usually political, and the politics bled into the protection work in ways that made it impossible to do the job cleanly. You ended up protecting people from the wrong enemies while the right ones walked through the front door with invitations.
He was thinking about this rule on a Tuesday morning in his office in Saket — second floor, above a dry cleaning business, below a dentist — which had been the base of Rathore Security Solutions for four years. Small, functional, without the attempt at impressiveness that other private security firms went in for. One desk. Two chairs. A board with the current assignments. And now, on his desk, a file his partner Dev had placed there twenty minutes ago.
