"There's a second angle," Dev said. "Priya's consultancy holds a licence to advise on municipal planning contracts. These contracts go through the same ministry — different department, but the same internal approval chain — that handles infrastructure spending oversight. Kapoor Industries' logistics subsidiary has three pending infrastructure contracts that have been stalled for fourteen months. A Malhotra-Kapoor marriage would accelerate the personal relationships that could move those approvals."
"So the marriage helps him in two directions," Arjun said. "Political protection from the finance investigation, and contract acceleration."
"Yes." Dev was quiet for a moment. "Arjun. Priya's consultancy. If she reviewed the Kapoor Industries subsidiaries as part of a marital due diligence — a woman who is mapping water distribution inequity by correlating infrastructure data is not going to look at a logistics company with no trucks and call it normal."
The room was very quiet.
"She reviewed the companies," Arjun said. It was not a question.
"I don't know. But if she did, and she understood what she was looking at—"
"The threats started six weeks ago," Arjun said. "What was six weeks and two days ago?"
Dev checked the calendar. "Six weeks and two days ago, Rohit Kapoor and Priya Malhotra had dinner at the family's lawyers' offices. The diary describes it as 'pre-nuptial financial review.'"
Arjun sat very still for a long moment. The arithmetic was assembling itself into a shape he had suspected and had hoped, for Priya's sake, he was wrong about.
He wasn't wrong.
"She saw the accounts," he said. "She understood them. And she's—" He thought about five days of watching her. The efficiency of her mind. The ferocity of her independence. "She's not the kind of person who stays quiet about something like this. She would have confronted him. Or she would have started preparing something."
"Which would have told him—"
"That she was a problem," Arjun said. "Before the wedding. Before the alliance was formalised. Before the legal connections were in place that would make her — difficult." He paused. "After the wedding, if she found something, the legal complexity makes the problem manageable. Before the wedding, with seven months still to go—"
"She's more useful eliminated than married," Dev said. Very quietly. Neither of them liked saying it. It required saying.
"Three incidents. Escalating." He looked at Dev. "He's trying to scare her off first. Make her pull back from whatever she found. If she pulls back — problem solved without collateral damage. If she doesn't—"
