Chapter 15: My Mate Is a Greek God

Nidhi

The council of the Four Horsemen convened on a Tuesday.

It was, by any measure, the most significant gathering of divine power on the Indian subcontinent in thirty years, and it happened in the Chaturbhuj Sanctuary's dining room because the formal council chamber was being renovated and because Sahil insisted that important decisions should be made in proximity to food.

Papa arrived first. Vikram — Horseman Mrityu, Death incarnate — walked through the Sanctuary gates with the particular energy of a man who was simultaneously a father visiting his daughter, a divine warrior preparing for war, and a grandfather who had brought a stuffed elephant for a three-year-old he had met once and already loved with the unreasonable intensity that grandparents applied to everything.

Aarav accepted the elephant with grave courtesy, examined it thoroughly, named it "Hathi" with the creative flair of a child who preferred accuracy over imagination, and introduced it to Sahil as a new member of the household requiring its own breakfast setting.

The second Horseman arrived an hour later: Meera — Horseman Akaal, Famine — a woman in her sixties with silver hair cropped close to her skull and eyes that assessed caloric content and resource distribution the way other people assessed weather. Her Shakti was distinctive — a cold, precise energy that made you simultaneously hungry and aware of waste. She brought her son, Jagdish, a quiet warlock whose presence would become significant in ways no one anticipated.

The third: Devraj — Horseman Yuddh, War — a barrel-chested man with a booming laugh and battle scars that he displayed with the casual pride of a veteran who considered disfigurement a form of autobiography. His Shakti was heat and percussion — standing near him felt like standing near a controlled explosion that was politely waiting for permission to detonate.

Four Horsemen. Four divine lineages. Conquer, Death, Famine, War. Seated around a dining table with chai and biscuits, because the supernatural world conducted its most critical business with the same casual domesticity that governed everything else in India.

"The Chandramukhi Coven is building mass corruption capability," Arjun began. No preamble. The Horsemen did not do preamble. "Nidhi — my mate, Vikram's daughter — has provided comprehensive intelligence from ten years of captivity. Riku?"

Riku projected the compiled intelligence onto the wall — facility layouts, personnel assessments, operational schedules, the corruption experiment data, the mass-corruption weapon's theoretical parameters. The information was dense, precise, and devastating. It represented not just the coven's capabilities but the systematic torture of the woman sitting at the table, and every Horseman in the room understood both dimensions simultaneously.

Nidhi presented her testimony with the same clinical detachment she had used during the debrief. She watched the Horsemen's faces as she described the corruption experiments, the Shakti draining, the special projects division. Vikram's jaw tightened with each detail — the muscles working beneath the skin, his Mrityu Shakti pressing against his control with the cold fury of Death denied its function. Meera listened with the analytical focus of a woman who understood systems and immediately began identifying structural vulnerabilities. Devraj's expression darkened progressively until his Yuddh Shakti was radiating heat that made the biscuits on the central plate noticeably warmer.

"The crystal is the key," Nidhi concluded. "Destroy it, and the coven's infrastructure collapses. The barrier falls. The suppression wards fail. The Pishach lose coordinated control. Queen Vasundhara fights on her own reserves, which are formidable but not sufficient against a coordinated divine assault."

"Timeline?" Devraj asked.

"Four weeks. The internal civil war between Vasundhara's loyalists and Tanveer's faction is consuming their operational capacity. If we wait longer, one faction will consolidate and redirect attention externally."

"Force composition?" Meera asked.

Arjun took over. "Combined task force. Elite warriors from all four Houses. Hiral commands the assault team — she's the best close-quarters combat specialist we have. Nidhi provides intelligence and navigates the facility layout. Papa—" he glanced at Vikram "—Vikram handles the queen. His Mrityu Shakti is the only force powerful enough to counter her accumulated dark magic."

"And the prisoners?" Vikram asked. His eyes were on Nidhi. "There are still people in those dungeons."

"Extraction is the primary objective," Nidhi said firmly. "Everything else — destroying the crystal, taking down Vasundhara, eliminating the corruption infrastructure — serves the extraction. We get the people out first."

The room was quiet. Four Horsemen — four embodiments of divine cosmic function — looked at each other across a dining table littered with chai cups and biscuit crumbs, and the decision was made without a vote because some things did not require democratic process. They required consensus, and consensus was achieved in the particular silence that meant every person in the room had reached the same conclusion independently.

"Four weeks," Vikram said. "We go in four weeks."

"I'm leading the ground team," Nidhi said.

Every head in the room turned to her.

"Absolutely not," Vikram said.

"It's my intelligence. My layout. My knowledge of the guard patterns, the weak points, the corridor configurations. No one else can navigate that facility in real-time the way I can."

"You were a prisoner there for ten years. The psychological risk—"

"Is mine to manage. I'm not asking for permission, Papa. I'm telling you my operational role."

The father-daughter standoff lasted four seconds. It was, by accounts of everyone present, one of the most intense four seconds in the history of divine familial disagreements. Vikram's Mrityu Shakti — cold, ancient, the power of entropy itself — pushed against Nidhi's Divya Shakti — hot, young, the inherited power of Death's bloodline rejuvenated by the mate bond's amplification — and neither yielded.

"She's right," Arjun said quietly. "And she's ready."

Vikram looked at Arjun. The look contained twenty-seven years of fatherhood, ten years of grief, three weeks of watching his daughter rebuild herself in the company of a man who had earned her trust by the radically simple strategy of being trustworthy, and the grudging acknowledgment that the Horseman of Conquer's assessment of his daughter's readiness was probably more objective than his own.

"If anything happens to her—"

"Then you won't need to kill me, because I'll already be dead," Arjun said. The words were not dramatic. They were factual, delivered with the flat certainty of a man stating a physical law.

Vikram nodded once. The standoff dissolved.

"Four weeks," Nidhi said. "And I need to train."

The training that followed was unlike anything the Chaturbhuj Sanctuary had seen.

Nidhi trained with Hiral — urumi, knives, close-quarters — every morning. She trained with Arjun — Shakti combat, divine energy manipulation, the mate bond's amplification effects — every afternoon. She trained with Vikram — Mrityu techniques, the death-touch that was her bloodline's unique weapon — every evening.

She ate. She slept. She trained. She held Aarav at bedtime and told him stories about a brave monkey who lived in a garden full of butterflies, and the boy listened with his ancient eyes and did not ask why his mother was training to fight because he understood, with the terrible clarity of a child raised in a dungeon, that some monsters needed to be fought.

And at night, when the training was done and the household was quiet, she sat with Arjun on the roof and looked at the stars and did not talk about the war that was coming. They talked about mangoes. About Sahil's cooking. About the time Hiral accidentally flooded the ground floor. About Aarav's expanding vocabulary, which now included "butterfly," "Sahil uncle is silly," and "more dosa please."

They talked about everything except the thing they were preparing to do, because the thing they were preparing to do was terrifying, and the alternative — letting the coven continue, letting the prisoners suffer, letting the mass corruption weapon be completed — was worse.

"Are you scared?" Arjun asked one night. The stars were bright — the Nilgiri altitude made them sharp and close, as if someone had polished the sky.

"Terrified."

"Good. Scared people plan better."

She leaned into him. His arm came around her. The mate bond hummed between them — warm, steady, the frequency of two divine powers in harmony.

"I'm going to destroy that place," she said. "Every cell. Every chain. Every room where they hurt people. I'm going to burn it so thoroughly that the earth forgets it was ever there."

"I know."

"And then I'm going to come home and eat Sahil's biryani and watch Aarav chase butterflies and never, ever go back to the dark."

"I know that too."

She kissed him. Soft. Deliberate. Tasting like chai and starlight and the fierce, quiet promise that the darkness would not win.