Sleep should be mercy, but not for the haunted.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling for hours, listening to the palace breathe around me—old wood shifting, pipes whispering, the faint machinery keeping the Maharaj alive. None of it steals my rest. What steals it is her. Her face, scorched into me like staring too long at the sun. The child’s laugh, bright and innocent, echoing where I swore I’d bricked the walls shut.
Four years I convinced myself she was dead to me, and one glimpse tore it all apart.
The way she stood in that chamber—chin high, spine rigid—everything in her declaring survival. No longer the girl I left soft and waiting, but forged steel, sharpened by my absence. And the child… the child with my eyes, looking at me with unknowing curiosity, unaware her life was built from the grave I dug in her mother’s chest.
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