Chapter 4: One Look and I'm a Caveman

Arjun

He was ruined.

Standing in the medical wing of the Chaturbhuj Sanctuary, watching the healers work on the woman he had carried eighteen kilometres through the Nilgiri hills, Arjun — Horseman Conquer, commander of the house of Vijay, divine warrior whose bloodline stretched back to the original four, whose Shakti could reshape battlefields and whose tactical mind had won wars that lesser strategists would have surrendered — was absolutely, comprehensively, irreversibly ruined.

She was unconscious. The healers — Gauri and her apprentice — had sedated her within seconds of arrival because the list of injuries was so extensive that treating them while she was awake would have been cruel. Compound fracture of the left patella. Three cracked ribs — fourth, fifth, and seventh. Infected laceration across the lower abdomen, depth suggesting a bladed weapon wielded with deliberate cruelty. Malnutrition severe enough to cause muscle wasting. Dehydration. Anaemia. Scarring — old and new, layered, systematic, the kind that spoke not of combat but of sustained, methodical torture.

Ten years. She had been in that dungeon for ten years.

Arjun's hands, which had carried her with the tenderness of someone handling spun glass, curled into fists at his sides. The Shakti in his blood — the divine power of conquest, the force that had levelled citadels and broken armies — surged with a fury so intense that the overhead lights flickered and Gauri shot him a warning look.

"Control it or leave," Gauri said. She was elbow-deep in healing energy, her hands glowing with the amber warmth of divine restoration, and she did not have the bandwidth for his emotional responses. "Your Shakti is interfering with my work."

He controlled it. Barely. The Shakti retreated to a low simmer that still made the air around him shimmer like heat haze, but at least the lights stopped flickering.

The boy — Aarav, the woman had called him, though she mostly used "monkey" — was in Sahil's care in the adjacent room. Sahil had carried him the entire eighteen kilometres without complaint, maintaining his characteristic stream of nonsense conversation that had somehow, impossibly, coaxed a three-year-old trauma survivor into voluntary physical contact. The boy had fallen asleep on Sahil's shoulder and had not woken during the transfer to the soft bed in the children's recovery room.

Sahil appeared in the doorway now, his grin absent for once, his eyes on the woman on the medical table.

"How bad?" he asked.

"Bad enough that the healers needed sedation to treat her. Bad enough that ten years of accumulated damage will take weeks to repair, even with divine healing."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"You've been standing in that exact spot for forty minutes. Your fists are clenched hard enough to draw blood. And your Shakti is making the room approximately eight degrees warmer than medical protocol allows." Sahil leaned against the doorframe. "So. How bad?"

Arjun looked at his hands. Unclenched them. Blood had indeed pooled in the crescents where his nails had cut into his palms. He watched it bead and fall and did not feel the sting.

"She's my mate, Sahil."

"I know."

"She's been tortured for ten years."

"I know."

"When she's healed, I'm going back to that coven and I'm going to burn it to the ground."

"I know that too." Sahil's voice was quiet — the real Sahil, the one beneath the jokes, the strategist who had stood beside Arjun through three wars and two assassination attempts. "But first, she needs to wake up. And when she wakes up, she's going to be terrified, and she's going to need someone who isn't terrifying. So maybe work on the murderous energy before she opens her eyes."

Arjun exhaled. Sahil was right. Sahil was always right about the human things — the emotional logistics that Arjun, for all his tactical brilliance, sometimes missed because he thought in strategies rather than feelings.

"The boy?" he asked.

"Sleeping. Deep. Hasn't moved since I put him down, which either means he trusts the bed or he's so exhausted that a marching band couldn't wake him. I'm betting on exhaustion, but the trust would be nice."

"He hasn't spoken."

"He said two words to her. 'Out' and 'Nini.' Beyond that, nothing. Selective mutism consistent with severe early childhood trauma, which—" Sahil stopped. "Which you already know because you've been doing the same threat assessment I have."

"She called herself Nidhi. She didn't give us a family name."

"Because she either doesn't have one or doesn't want us to know it. Both options tell us something." Sahil paused. "She mentioned her Divya Shakti. She called you 'mate' out loud. That's not standard vocabulary for a random prisoner."

"No." Arjun had been thinking about this during the eighteen-kilometre walk. The woman — Nidhi — was not a random prisoner. Her Divya Shakti, even in its weakened state, had a resonance signature that his own power had recognised from kilometres away. That level of Shakti didn't belong to an ordinary supernatural. It belonged to someone of divine lineage.

"You think she's—"

"I think she might be one of us. Or descended from one of us." Arjun's jaw tightened. "I think the Chandramukhi Coven didn't capture a random woman. I think they captured someone powerful and spent ten years trying to break her. And I think the fact that they failed — that she walked out of that dungeon carrying a child and armed with a rusted dagger — tells us everything we need to know about who she is."

Gauri straightened from the medical table. Her hands were still glowing, but dimmer now — the intensive phase of healing complete, the body's own systems taking over. "She'll sleep for six to eight hours. The knee will take another session tomorrow. The infection is controlled. The malnutrition will require sustained treatment — nutrition plan, supplements, monitoring."

"What about the scarring?" Arjun asked.

Gauri hesitated. She was a healer who prided herself on clinical objectivity, but her eyes held something that looked like anger. "The scars are extensive. Many are old enough that divine healing can reduce them but not eliminate them entirely. Some—" she paused. "Some were inflicted with corrupted magic. Dark Shakti. Those scars are embedded at the energetic level, not just the physical. They'll need specialised treatment that I'm not qualified to provide."

Dark Shakti. Corrupted magic. The coven had used their prisoners as test subjects for corruption experiments.

The room temperature rose three degrees before Arjun caught himself.

"Thank you, Gauri. I'll stay with her."

"You'll stay in the chair. Not on the bed. Not touching her. She's a trauma survivor who spent ten years in captivity; she will not react well to waking up with a strange man in physical contact."

"I know."

"I'm telling you because your Shakti is currently broadcasting 'protect mate' at a volume that I can feel from across the room, and your instincts are going to tell you to hold her. Don't."

She left. Sahil followed, pausing at the door to say, "I'll stay with the boy. If he wakes up and panics—"

"Come get her. She's the only person he trusts."

Sahil nodded and disappeared.

Arjun pulled the chair to the bedside. The medical room smelled of healing herbs — tulsi, ashwagandha, the sharp camphor tang of purification compounds. The woman on the bed looked smaller in sleep — fragile in a way she had not been when conscious, when defiance had made her seem larger than her malnourished frame. Her hair, hacked short by her own hand during the escape, stuck out in uneven tufts. Her skin was pale — not naturally, but from a decade without sunlight. Her hands, resting on the white sheet, were mapped with scars that told a story of violence so sustained and systematic that Arjun had to look away.

He looked back. If she could endure it, he could witness it.

"I found you," he said to her sleeping form. Not dramatically, not performatively — just stating a fact to the room and to whatever forces had led his Shakti to this forest on this morning. "I found you, and I'm not losing you. Whatever they did — whatever the darkness was — it's over. You're here now."

She did not stir. The monitors beeped. The healers' residual energy hummed in the air like a sympathetic chord.

Arjun sat in the chair and did not sleep and did not move and waited for his mate to wake up.