They went to the Lutyens bungalow at eight in the morning — earlier than Malhotra usually received people, which Priya intended as a signal about the seriousness of the visit.
Malhotra received them in the same library-study. He looked at the two of them when they came in with the expression of a man who had been expecting something but not yet knowing its precise shape.
Priya sat down. She put the folder on the coffee table. She looked at her father — and Arjun saw, in the look, all the complexity of that relationship: the love that was real and deep, the frustration at being protected from the truth, the respect for the man alongside the accounting of his failure, and beneath all of it the awareness that what she was about to do was going to hurt him. She had thought about all of this. She had decided what she had decided.
"Baba," she said. "I need to show you something."
She went through it — not with cold technicality but with the careful honesty of someone who understood that the human dimension had to be acknowledged alongside the evidentiary dimension. Rohit Kapoor. The financial structure. What she had found in the pre-nuptial review. The fake documentation. The contract influence. The traces of political money. The threats that followed her discovery.
