✧ Introduction ✧

This isn't a story about a perfect man.
This is the story of a broken boy who became something sharp enough to survive.

This isn't a love story.
This is story of a war dressed in silk, and the man at the center of it was never meant to love—only destroy.

This is not a fairytale.
This is the story of a boy who was shattered...

Rivan Malhotra was raised in a palace of poison.
He was born into wealth, but not love.
He grew up in a house full of silence, shadows, and scars.

To the world, he was the privileged son of a powerful man.
Behind the gates of his family estate, beneath the expensive suits and ruthless name, lies a childhood scarred by silence and cruelty.
Behind locked doors, he was just a boy begging for kindness that never came.

His father didn't teach him how to be strong—he taught him how to fear.
With fists instead of words.
With punishments instead of guidance.
To the world, Mr. Malhotra was a powerful businessman.
To Rivan, he was a monster.

But the deepest wound didn't come from his father.
It came from his mother—the one person who could have saved him.
She didn't.
Because she couldn't look at him without remembering the son she lost.

Rivan had an older brother once.
Brave. Kind.
Everything a parent could be proud of.
And one summer afternoon, while Rivan watched in wide-eyed panic, that brother drowned in their backyard pool.
No one heard his screams.
Not in time.

And though Rivan was just a child, the weight of that death settled like chains on his shoulders.
His mother never touched him again.
Never held him.
Never forgave him.
From that day on, she looked at him and saw only death.

So he learned to live without love.
Without comfort.
Without softness.

He became steel.
Ice.
A man carved from vengeance and necessity.

Years later, Rivan is no longer the boy who trembled in the dark.
He's power.
Precision.
A calculated storm dressed in tailored suits and cold smirks.

And when the past comes calling—wrapped in the name of the man who ruined him—Rivan answers with a plan.
A wedding.
A lie.
A girl with innocent eyes and his enemy's blood.

He doesn't believe in love.
He doesn't believe in redemption.
He only believes in control—and revenge.

But what he doesn't see coming... is her.

Because some ghosts wear silk and speak in soft voices.

And some weapons... have hearts.

🖤

She believed love could save her.

Until she found out it was the blade pressed to her throat.

Ishita Mehra was raised in a house with chandeliers, pearls, and silence.

Her father gave her everything—except the truth.
He called her his princess.
Told her her mother died peacefully in her sleep.
Told her it was fate.
A tragic accident.

He lied.

She never saw the bruises.
Never heard the late-night screams behind closed doors.
She was too young.
Too sheltered.
And by the time she started asking questions, the world had already sewn her silence into obedience.

What Ishita didn't know ??

Ishita grew up gentle, soft-hearted... yet constantly suffocated by expectations she never chose.

And when Rivan Malhotra entered her life—sharp suit, unreadable eyes, a storm in stillness—he felt like an escape.

She had no idea he was the beginning of her unraveling.

Rivan married her for revenge.
He held her with lies in his mouth and ashes in his heart.
But something shifted.
In his touch.
In his gaze.
In the way he began to burn for the very thing he meant to break.

And Ishita?
She fell.
Hard.
Not knowing that her husband wasn't her salvation...
He was the reckoning her bloodline had earned.

Now, she sleeps beside the man who wants to destroy her father.
And wakes up craving the monster who may one day destroy her.

This is not a story of fate.

This is a story of legacy, betrayal, and a girl who will learn too late that love is not always the cure—it's the curse.