"Yes?" she said.
"Ms. Malhotra. My name is Arjun Rathore. I met with your father this morning."
Her expression changed. Not dramatically — a small tightening. "He said he was going to do something like this," she said. "Come in." Not warm, not hostile. Direct.
The office was small but completely hers — maps on every available surface, one wall entirely whiteboard, dense with diagrams, calculations, and notes in two colours of marker. Arjun looked at it with the automatic attention of someone assessing spaces, and found himself reading the content before he remembered to assess the room's security. The whiteboard contained a detailed analysis of water distribution inequity in three South Delhi wards. It was clear and precise and based on data someone had gathered carefully.
She watched him read it. "Impressive?" she said. Dry, slightly amused.
"Actually, yes," he said. He turned to face her. "The methodology. You're correlating pipe infrastructure age with income levels in the wards. That's going to be awkward for the municipal corporation — it will show exactly why certain colony maintenance requests get delayed."
She looked at him with something new in her expression. Not quite reassessment, but the beginning of it. "My father sent a bodyguard who reads water distribution models," she said.
"Your father sent me to meet you. I haven't agreed to anything yet. Neither have you."
"I already told him I don't want—"
"I know," Arjun said. He sat down in the chair across from her desk without being invited — a choice he made deliberately, because a woman who lived on her own terms would find someone who asked permission for every small thing more annoying, not more respectful. "I'm not here to convince you that you need protecting. I'm here to tell you what's actually happening, because I think you deserve to know, and then you can decide."
She sat down slowly. She set the file and the phone on the desk. She looked at him with her full attention — the complete, undivided kind. "Go on," she said.
He told her. Not everything — not his suspicion about the source. But the actual nature of the incidents, with more detail than her father had probably shared: the car — the cut was surgical, professional, the work of someone who understood vehicles. The letter — the delivery method indicated someone with access to her building in a way the standard security assessment had glossed over. The third incident — a near-miss on a road that her father's file described as a hit-and-run attempt, but that CCTV footage showed was a deliberate following over four kilometres before the approach.
