Tenzin had not meant to stay so long.
He had sat down beside her bed with his prayer beads and his best intentions, and he had meant to simply be there, the way Jamyang had always said presence itself was a form of prayer — and then after a while he would get up, find Deepa-ji, ask where he was sleeping, and be a sensible and non-intrusive houseguest.
That had been the plan.
The plan had lasted approximately forty minutes, at which point the room was cool and quiet, and the butter lamp smell from his own robes was familiar, and the afternoon light through the curtains was exactly the particular soft gold that always made him sleepy—
He was jolted awake by nothing, suddenly, the way you sometimes were.
He blinked. Looked around. Rathore House. Right. Jaipur. He was in Jaipur.
He looked at Aanya.
And immediately sat forward.
Something had changed while he was asleep. Her face — which had been still before, smoothed out the way unconscious faces sometimes were — was no longer still. Her brow had pulled together, a sharp, unhappy crease between her eyes. Her breathing had changed too, gone slightly uneven, catching at the edges like it was working harder than it should have been.
She looked like someone trapped somewhere very bad and unable to get out.
Tenzin's prayer beads were in his hands before he registered reaching for them. He leaned closer, watching her face with the anxious focus of someone who had no idea what to do but was not going to look away.
She's just dreaming, he told himself. People have bad dreams. It's fine.
Her brow tightened further. A small sound came from somewhere in her throat — not quite a sound, almost a sound, the shape of one.
It's fine, Tenzin thought again, slightly less convincingly.
He reached out — hesitated — and very carefully touched her forehead with the back of his hand the way he'd seen older monks check a novice's fever. She was warm. Not wrong-warm, just — warm. Alive.
Don't panic, he told himself. She is breathing, she is warm, she is—
Her face twisted. Whatever she was trapped in, it had gotten worse.
"Hey," Tenzin said, very quietly. "Hey. It's okay."
Nothing.
He tried slightly louder: "You're okay. It's — whatever it is, it's not real, you're—"
Still nothing. Her fingers had curled into the duvet.
Tenzin decided that he would later, in quieter moments, question the wisdom of. He reached out and patted her cheek. Gently. Once.
Her expression flickered but didn't clear.
He patted again, a little less gently.
The crease between her brows deepened instead, which he chose to interpret as a sign of progress.
Come on, he thought at her. Come back. Wherever you are, come back.
He patted her cheek a third time — genuinely trying, not quite calibrating — and even he winced slightly at the sound of it. The fair skin of her cheek, which had probably never been on the receiving end of anything like this in its entire existence, flushed very faintly pink.
Aanya's brow contracted sharply in what was unmistakably displeasure.
Tenzin's hand froze in the air.
He waited.
She didn't wake up. But — slowly, like a tide going out — the terrible tightness in her face began to ease. Her breathing steadied. The crease between her brows softened. Whatever she had been trapped in seemed to loosen its grip, just enough.
Tenzin sat back, hand still hovering, and let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.
She looked peaceful again. Or — not peaceful exactly. Even in sleep, there was something about Aanya Rathore's face that did not suggest peace. But the desperate trapped quality was gone, and he could breathe again, knowing it was gone.
He realised, distantly, that his hands were shaking slightly.
He pressed them flat against his thighs and breathed. In. Out. The way Rinpoche-ji had taught him — the breath as an anchor, the breath as a return.
She's okay, he told himself. See? She's okay.
She was okay.
He reached out and very carefully, almost without meaning to, touched her hand. Just for a moment. Just to confirm what he already knew — warm, present, real.
Then he sat back in his chair, and his eyes grew heavy again because it had been a very long day and he had been awake since four in the morning for Fajr prayers and flown across the country and met approximately a hundred new things, and the room was still cool and quiet and—
His head tipped forward.
He was asleep.
In his dream, it was raining.
It was always raining in this dream. A June night on the mountain road — the kind of rain that came sideways, that soaked through everything, that turned the packed earth of the path into something treacherous. He was small in the dream, always small, always four years old.
His father smelled like medicine. He always had — the particular clean-sharp smell of the Ayurvedic tablets he took every day for his lungs, which had never been strong. Tenzin had grown up knowing that smell as the smell of safety, the smell of home. His mother had told him, from as far back as he could remember: be good, don't make noise, don't give Papa stress, his health needs quiet.
So he had been quiet. He had been very, very good.
They had come to Leh for a specialist — a doctor his father's regular physician had referred them to after months of the medicine not quite working well enough. His father had seemed better after the appointment. They were going home. Tenzin had fallen asleep in the backseat with his head against his father's arm.
When he woke up, the world was wrong.
The car had gone sideways on the wet road. He didn't understand at first — there was just the rain and the dark and a sound he had never heard before and then stillness, terrible stillness, the kind that was louder than noise.
His parents were there. They were there, but they were—
His father's hand had reached back. Even then. Even in that. Had found him and pushed him toward the door and said, "Jigu, be good. Don't make a sound."
The last thing he ever said.
Tenzin had been very good. He had not made a sound. He had sat in the rain beside them for a very long time, calling for help in a voice that kept getting smaller, and he had moved them together — it had taken a long time, he was so small — because he did not want them to be alone, and then he had sat and held their hands and waited.
He was crying in the dream, the way he had not let himself cry then. In the dream, he was not being good, not being quiet, just crying with his whole body, the way children cried when they finally understood something was permanent.
He was reaching for something. His hands were searching—
He touched something warm. Held on.
The rain didn't stop, but it got quieter. The dream shifted, softened. His father's voice — not the last words, earlier ones, the good ones — telling him about the mountains, pointing out constellations, laughing at something small and ordinary the way people laughed when they were happy and didn't know they were. His mother is singing.
Tenzin held on to the warm thing in his hand and stopped crying.
In the large bed, Aanya Rathore was also dreaming.
She dreamed the way she always dreamed — not forward but backwards, pulled toward the thing she could not stop seeing, no matter how many times it came for her in sleep.
She was twenty-one in the dream, standing in the parking garage of the Rathore corporate headquarters in Delhi, and the call had just come: Grandpapa is asking for you. Come now.
She had gone. She had always gone when the family called. That was what she had always done — gone, and fought, and worked, and bled, all of it quietly, all of it for them.
She had been doing it since she was sixteen, when her elder sister Isha had come to her and said: You're the capable one, Aanya. I need your help. Will you help me?
And Aanya — who had wanted nothing more than to matter to her family, to be wanted, to be needed — had said yes. Had said yes to everything. Had used the Justice Foundation as a front to collect information, had leveraged every connection she'd built, had done every complicated, necessary thing that Isha couldn't do publicly.
She had thought it was love. She had thought: this is what sisters do.
The garage. The call. She had gone up in the elevator and walked into the boardroom and understood, in the first three seconds, that she had walked into something prepared for her.
Isha sat at the head of the table. The family lawyers were there. The board members, the ones Aanya had spent three years carefully winning over — they were all looking at her with the particular careful blankness of people who had already made a decision.
"Aanya," Isha had said. And then, in front of all of them, with the serene expression of someone reading a weather report: "The board has voted to transfer your holdings and position to me, effective immediately. There's evidence of financial misconduct — your signature, your accounts. Very thorough."
She had fabricated it. Of course, she had fabricated it. Every document, every transaction — Isha had spent months building a case with Aanya's own tools, her own network.
"You shouldn't have been so capable," Isha had said when the others stepped out briefly. Her voice was almost kind. "It made you useful. And then it made you dangerous. You understand."
Aanya had stood there and felt the floor of the world drop away.
She had understood, in that moment, other things too — things she hadn't let herself understand before. Why did their grandfather push her toward the Foundation rather than the main company? Why had she been given independence so young, her own income, her own space — not as a gift, as a containment. Keep her busy, keep her useful, keep her away from the real inheritance.
She was not the beloved granddaughter. She was a resource. She had been managed, her whole life, by people who needed what she could do and feared what she might want.
"Don't blame me," Isha had said before leaving. "Blame yourself for being too good at everything. You made this necessary."
In real life, that was the day Aanya had walked out of the building and into the road without looking, and the car had—
In the dream, it played differently. In the dream, she was still standing in the boardroom, and Isha's voice kept coming from everywhere at once, and the north wind that had no business being in a Delhi boardroom was howling, and something was about to happen that she couldn't stop—
Don't die.
The voice was so faint she almost missed it. Not Isha's voice. Something else entirely. Warm and a little rough with sleep and completely, inexplicably sincere.
Wake up. Come on.
A warmth in her hand. Something is holding on.
Aanya felt the boardroom begin to dissolve — the wind, Isha's voice, the fluorescent lights — all of it coming apart like paper in water. Her body becoming hers again, bit by bit. The sensation of a real mattress, real temperature, real air.
She surfaced.
She opened her eyes.
The ceiling of her own room. Morning light. The familiar smell of home.
She turned her head.
There was a young man asleep in the chair beside her bed — slumped forward, head resting on the mattress near her hand, breathing slow and even. Monk's robes. Prayer beads loosely threaded through his fingers where they rested against her duvet.
His other hand was very loosely, very unconsciously, holding hers.
Aanya stared at him.
Her first fully conscious thought, three days into an absence she hadn't chosen, was calm and precise as a blade: who is this, and why are they touching my hand?
Her second thought — because she had been asleep for three days and her chest was still tight with the dream and there was a small damp patch on her duvet that she was choosing not to examine too closely — was something she would never, ever say out loud:
He told me not to die.
She looked at his face. Young. Sharp-featured, softer in sleep. Whatever his face defaulted to when he was awake, asleep, it defaulted to something open and unguarded, the expression of someone who, despite everything the world had done, had somehow not yet learned to keep his face closed.
It annoyed her unreasonably.
She reached out with her free hand and pushed his shoulder. Once. Hard.
Tenzin startled awake — "—mani padme hm?" — sat bolt upright, looked directly at her, and went completely still.
A long silence.
His hand, she noticed, had not let go of hers. She watched him notice this. Watched him look down at their hands with an expression of absolute bafflement, as though he was not sure how this had happened and was not sure how to reverse it.
Slowly, very carefully, he withdrew his hand.
"You're awake," he said. His voice was still sleep-rough. He seemed to be recalibrating rapidly, his expression moving through several things at once.
Aanya looked at him.
At the prayer beads.
At the duvet.
"Who are you," she said. Not a question exactly. The tone of someone conducting an investigation.
"Tenzin," he said. "Tenzin Sonam. I'm — " he reached for his prayer beads, found them, and his thumb moved to the first bead with the automatic relief of someone finding solid ground. "I'm from Thiksey Monastery. In Ladakh. I — Guruji Nandana sent — there was an arrangement, Deepa-ji brought me from the — " He stopped. Looked at her face. Tried again. "It's a long story."
"How long have you been sitting there?"
He glanced at the window. Light levels. Did a calculation. "Since yesterday afternoon, I think."
"You slept in that chair."
"I didn't mean to."
Aanya looked at the small, damp patch on her duvet. Looked back at him.
Something moved through Tenzin's face that was almost certainly the dawning realisation of the damp patch. His ears went pink.
"That," he said, and then stopped, because there was no sentence that improved this situation.
Aanya Rathore, twenty-one years old, reborn, sharp as a surgical instrument and twice as cold, freshly returned from the worst recurring nightmare of her life, looked at this nineteen-year-old monk with his pink ears and his prayer beads and his expression of a person bracing for impact—
And said nothing for long enough that it became its own verdict.
"Get out," she said finally, very calmly. "Send Deepa in. Don't touch anything on your way."
Tenzin stood up immediately. Tucked his prayer beads away. Took one step toward the door and then stopped, because apparently he was constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone.
He turned back.
"I'm glad you woke up," he said. Completely sincerely. No strategy, no calculation — just that, simple and direct, like it was the most obvious thing to say.
Then he left.
Aanya stared at the closed door for a long moment.
What, she thought, is that?