Rudra Yadav

Chapter 3 – Rudra Yadav

The office was silent except for the hum of the air-conditioner and the slow click of Rudra Yadav’s lighter. Smoke curled into the dim light, hanging heavy in the air, as his eyes scanned the files spread across his desk.

Debt files. Names. Numbers. Promises broken.

Rudra liked to look through them personally, at least once a month. Not because he needed to — his men could handle collections — but because every name in those files reminded him of his empire’s reach. Behind every file was a man who owed him, a family tangled in his web, a reminder that his power ran deeper than the law dared to touch.

He flipped another page.

Arjun Desai.

Amount due: ₹3,75,000.

Interest compounding. Repayment delayed.

Rudra leaned back, narrowing his eyes. Unlike most cases, there was something different here. Arjun wasn’t a gambler, wasn’t a drunk who wasted his salary at shady bars. His profile screamed ordinary. A steady job, modest family, no criminal record. A man who had stumbled, not a man who schemed.

“Strange,” Rudra muttered, his voice low, gravel-edged. “Why does a man like him borrow from me?”

He snapped his fingers, and one of his men stepped forward. “Dig deeper. Family. Background. I want every detail.”

Hours later, the file returned — thicker, heavier, heavier than before. Rudra flipped through it with a predator’s patience.

Father: Ramesh Desai.

Mother: Sumita.

Brother: Arjun (debtor).

Sister: Riya Desai. Age: 22. College student.

Rudra’s thumb paused. There it was. A photograph.

Not taken by a professional lens, not dressed in glamour. Just a simple passport-sized photo. The kind people attach to college forms or job applications. Her hair tied back, no jewelry except a tiny bindi, her expression calm… almost too innocent for this city.

And yet — the moment his eyes landed on her, something twisted inside him.

Rudra Yadav did not feel. He commanded. He owned. He destroyed. His heart was not a place for softness. But staring at that small photograph, he felt an unfamiliar weight press against his chest. Not desire — not yet — but a gnawing pull. A curiosity that unsettled him.

He leaned forward, his jaw tightening. “This girl…” he whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. “Riya Desai.”

For the first time in years, he read a file twice. He searched her name again and again, committing the details to memory. Age. College. Address. A middle-class world so far from his, yet suddenly it felt dangerously close.

A darkness flickered in his mind. She shouldn’t matter. She’s just another name. Just another face. But his eyes betrayed him — returning to the photograph like a moth to flame.

He closed the file with a sharp snap, as though the sound could silence the storm inside him.

But it couldn’t.

Rudra Yadav — the man who ruled through fear, who believed love was weakness — now found himself staring into the eyes of a girl who didn’t even know his name. And in that ignorance, that untouched simplicity, lay a power that scared him more than guns or knives ever had.

He shouldn’t want to know more.

Yet he did.

And that was dangerous.

⚡

The hour was late, the world outside his glass office drowned in silence, but Rudra Yadav’s mind refused rest. The file lay open before him — thin, almost laughably plain compared to the dossiers of ministers, businessmen, and gangsters he usually toyed with. Yet, for some reason, this one felt heavier than all of them.

“Tell me,” Rudra said, voice flat, as smoke drifted from the cigarette between his fingers.

His man cleared his throat, adjusting the stack of notes in his hand. “Riya Desai. Twenty-two. Smart, brilliant, but… simple. She has a smartphone, sir, but no social media. No Facebook, no Instagram, no public accounts. Not even WhatsApp profile pictures saved anywhere. It’s almost like she exists only in her physical world, not in the digital one.”

Rudra’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Untraceable.”

“Yes,” the man nodded quickly. “Her friends say she doesn’t like wasting time online. Uses her phone for calls, messages, study material. Nothing more.”

Rudra let the silence linger. In a city where even beggars chased likes and selfies, here was a girl who had chosen to remain invisible. It wasn’t ignorance. It was a choice. And choices always revealed more than mistakes.

“Go on,” Rudra muttered.

“She is in her third year of college. Journalism major. Consistently one of the top scorers. Known among professors as disciplined, hardworking, respectful. She doesn’t involve herself in college politics, no clubs, no unnecessary attention. She attends classes, then leaves.”

The man flipped a page. “Outside of college, she spends time tutoring neighborhood children. English and mathematics mostly. She charges a very small amount, sometimes nothing at all if the family can’t afford it. Parents in the colony say she’s patient, very kind with children. Sometimes she even buys notebooks or pencils for them out of her own pocket.”

Rudra’s gaze fell to her photograph again. Plain. Unstaged. Just her looking at the camera as if the world had demanded it of her, not because she wanted to be seen. And yet, the longer he stared, the less plain it became.

The man hesitated before continuing. “On weekends, she volunteers at a veterinary clinic near her college. Small place, not fancy. She cleans cages, feeds strays, helps doctors with routine checkups. They say she has a soft spot for injured animals. Sometimes, instead of taking her allowance for herself, she spends it on medicines for them.”

For a moment, the picture in Rudra’s head shifted: a girl with rolled-up sleeves, cradling a wounded stray, her face bent in quiet concentration. A softness that felt almost alien to him. He clenched his jaw, pushing the image away.

“She doesn’t go out much. No malls, no movies with friends. She does the household chores instead — buying vegetables, milk, groceries, fruits. She cooks sometimes when her mother’s tired. Neighbors say she’s polite, but keeps to herself. She doesn’t linger to gossip. She greets, smiles faintly, then moves on.”

Rudra’s expression hardened. “Routine. Predictable. Ordinary.”

And yet, the word sounded wrong even as he said it.

Because ordinary was not what he saw. Ordinary did not hold his eyes for this long. Ordinary did not make his chest tighten in a way he despised.

His man added carefully, “There isn’t much else, boss. Her record is clean. Very clean. Some might even say… boring.”

Rudra let out a humorless chuckle, low and sharp. “Boring? No.” He tapped her picture with the tip of his finger, almost absently. “Ordinary is the hardest mask to wear. Everyone leaves a trace. Everyone bleeds. Even those who pretend they won’t.”

The room fell into silence, broken only by the faint tick of the wall clock.

Rudra shut the file, then opened it again, unable to stop himself. He studied the grainy photo once more — the plain girl with no painted smile, no artifice, no disguise.

And that was what unsettled him the most.

In his world, purity did not exist. Innocence was either a trap or a weakness waiting to be destroyed. But this girl… this Riya Desai… she looked like she had walked through the filth of the same city untouched.

That made her dangerous.

“Keep eyes on her,” he ordered finally, his voice low, edged like steel. “Her routine, her movements. Everything. If she feeds a stray dog, I want to know. If she buys tomatoes from the market, I want to know the price. If she smiles…” His jaw clenched. “I want to know who made her.”

The man nodded quickly, retreating.

Alone again, Rudra dragged the file closer, his eyes lingering on the photo for one final time before snapping it shut.

But even as the file closed, her face remained with him. A simple girl, in a simple life. The kind of girl who should have meant nothing to him.

And yet, she was already becoming the one detail Rudra Yadav could not ignore.

✨

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