Ayesha Mallik was six the first time the fire followed her into sleep.
She remembered the exact second it began: the night after the cremation, curled on the back seat of the Ambassador, her mother’s Kashmiri shawl damp with tears and rain.
The flames from the burning ghat had leapt the boundary between waking and dreaming, licking up her small body, searing her lungs.
She had woken screaming, and Taiji had pinched her arm hard enough to bruise.
“Bad girls cry,” she’d hissed. “Good girls forget.”
Ayesha never forgot.
The fire simply learned to wait.
For fourteen years it waited.
It waited in the shape of funeral pyres that grew taller every birthday.
It waited in the shape of hands (first her uncle’s, then strangers’, then a faceless groom’s) dragging her toward a mandap built of bones.
It waited in the shape of three tall shadows that lengthened across wet marble, reaching, always reaching.
Tonight, on the seventeenth night after she watched a man die in the basement, the fire came again.
But tonight was different.
She stood once more on the cremation ground, rain hissing on the pyres.
Her parents burned side by side, silent, accusing.
The shadows stepped out of the smoke.
Reyansh.
Advik.
Vedant.
They did not speak.
They simply walked into the flames.
Reyansh opened his arms and the fire poured into his chest like water into a jar, leaving only smoke.
Advik punched the pyres until they crumbled into harmless ash.
Vedant knelt in the mud, pressed his palms to the ground, and the rain reversed, rising in silver threads to the sky until the earth was dry and warm beneath her bare feet.
When the last ember died, the three of them turned to her.
No words.
Only open hands.
Ayesha looked down and realised she was no longer six.
She was twenty, barefoot in Vedant’s cream kurta, sindoor faint but still there in her parting.
She took one step.
Then another.
The ground did not burn.
The shadows did not chase.
They waited.
She reached them.
Reyansh brushed a thumb across her cheek, wiping away rain that was no longer falling.
Advik tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with the same fingers that had broken a man’s jaw.
Vedant simply looked at her, eyes soft, and the last knot in her chest loosened.
The cremation ground dissolved.
The haveli bedroom took its place, moonlight slicing through the jaali screens.
She woke with a gasp that was not a scream.
For a long moment she lay still, waiting for the familiar panic, the taste of smoke, the echo of her mother’s burning saree.
Nothing came.
Only the quiet sound of three men breathing on the other side of her door.
She rose.
The marble was cool under her feet.
She opened the door without knocking.
They were there, as always.
Reyansh sitting forward, elbows on knees, gun loose in his hand.
Advik sprawled against the wall, head tilted back, throat exposed.
Vedant cross-legged, a half-finished sketch of her sleeping face balanced on his thigh.
All three looked up at once.
She did not speak.
She simply walked forward, stepped over Advik’s outstretched legs, and sat in the small space they made between them.
The corridor was cold.
Their bodies were warm.
Reyansh moved first.
He slid an arm around her shoulders, slow enough that she could pull away.
She didn’t.
She leaned into him instead, cheek against the steady thump of his heart.
Advik shifted, stretched out one leg so she could rest her back against his thigh.
His hand settled on her ankle, thumb tracing the delicate bone like he was learning it by heart.
Vedant laid his head gently on her knee, fingers threading through hers.
No one asked questions.
No one demanded answers.
They simply held the pieces of her together until the last shard of the nightmare fell away.
When dawn crept through the arches, pale gold on marble, Ayesha lifted her head.
“I didn’t scream tonight,” she said, voice wondering.
Reyansh’s arm tightened fractionally.
“We heard.”
Advik’s hand stilled on her ankle.
Vedant pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist, soft as breath.
She looked at each of them in turn.
“The fire’s gone,” she whispered.
Three pairs of eyes (black, burning, gentle) met hers.
“Then let us keep it gone,” Reyansh said.
She nodded once.
And for the first time since she was six years old, Ayesha Mallik closed her eyes without fear.
Outside, the Ganges flowed on, quiet and ancient, carrying away fourteen years of ashes.
Inside, three monsters held her close enough that no flame could ever touch her again.
The nightmares are dead.
She is healing in their arms.
The slow burn is now a steady flame.
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