Malhotra listened. He had been in politics for twenty-three years and had received bad news in many forms and had learned a version of stillness. He listened without interrupting, his face doing very little, his hands flat on his knees.
When she finished, the silence lasted nearly a minute. Then he looked at Arjun. "You confirmed all of this."
"Independently, yes. My partner conducted the business investigation. We verified every element."
"The contract influence. The political funding vehicle."
"Is not connected to your name or your office in anything we found," Arjun said. "Your daughter checked thoroughly for that specifically."
"Because she was worried about me," Malhotra said. Not a question. He looked at Priya. Something moved in his face — the political surface giving way, just briefly, to the father underneath it.
"You didn't know," she said. "I know you didn't know. That's not what this conversation is about." She paused. "Someone tried to hurt me, Baba. Possibly kill me. Because I found this. And I am going to take it to the Enforcement Directorate regardless of the political consequences. I am telling you first because you deserve to know and because you need to be prepared, not to ask your permission."
He absorbed this. He looked at the folder. "The arrangement. The Kapoor-Malhotra arrangement. I—" He stopped. He looked at his daughter with the expression of a man reviewing his own actions with a clarity he had been avoiding. "I moved too quickly. I knew you were careful — I know how careful you are — and I reassured myself that your choice was sufficient due diligence."
"Yes," she said, simply. Not cruel. Just honest. "You should have looked harder." She let it sit for one moment. Then: "But you hired someone who looked hard when it mattered. That's not nothing."
Malhotra looked at Arjun. Then at his daughter. He heard that his daughter had been sitting alone with this for six weeks. Something shifted in his face. The specific communication of people who loved each other and had failed each other in the complicated way of love that contains both protection and distance.
"The Enforcement Directorate," Malhotra said. "You'll go through proper channels."
"Yes," Arjun said. "I have a contact who handles financial crime investigations at the appropriate level. The referral will be procedurally clean. There will be political consequences — you'll need to manage the public separation from the Kapoor alliance before the investigation becomes public, which gives you perhaps three to five days."
