Page 11 of Scars and Crowns

Every staircase carries footsteps differently.

I know which staff shuffle when they're tired, which guards walk with military precision, which council members clear their throats before speaking. This silence doesn't belong to any of them. It settles beneath my skin before my mind understands why.

Slowly . . . I lift my head.

At first, I only see what my eyes expect to see. A member of the kitchen staff.

Grey uniform.

Silver tray balanced carefully between both hands.

Someone new.

Then something shifts. Inside me. Recognition doesn't arrive all at once.

It unfolds.

Quietly.

Cruelly.

The slight tilt of her head. The way she stands with her weight leaning ever so slightly forward, as though she's bracing herself for whatever comes next. The way her fingers curl beneath the tray—not nervous exactly . . . prepared.

My gaze reaches her face. Everything else disappears.

The hair is different. Time has touched her in ways it touches all of us.

But none of that matters. Because eyes don't forget.

And neither do hearts.

Those eyes . . . I've carried them with me for eight years.

In empty hallways. Across council meetings. In sleepless nights that stretched far longer than they should have. They're the same eyes that used to laugh at me before her mouth did.

The same eyes that looked at me as though I were simply Yuvaan . . . Never Hukum.

Never Maharaja. Just . . . Me.

My heart stumbles. One heavy beat. Then another. Then all at once it feels as though it's forgotten its rhythm entirely. Blood rushes so loudly through my ears that, for a moment, I can't hear anything else.

I don't remember standing. One second I'm sitting behind my desk. The next, the chair scrapes violently across the marble floor as it shoots backwards.

The sound tears through the silence. Neither of us moves. I can't. My body has forgotten how.

Seven years.

Seven years of imagining this moment in a thousand impossible ways.

At airports. At award ceremonies. On crowded Mumbai streets.

Never here. Never like this. Never with a silver tray between us.

"Daisy." The name escapes before I even realise I've spoken.

Soft.

Broken.