The monsoon had soaked the walls of Devrai House for weeks, peeling away its colonial skin, layer by reluctant layer. Anaya Rao arrived not out of longing, but as a function of her work—a legal asset manager sent to audit an ancestral property tangled in probate, the sort of task one executed dispassionately, quickly, and alone.
The house, however, had other plans.
It was massive but not ostentatious—its corridors long, its corners sharp, its windows perpetually rain-streaked. It had the strange geometry of old things: designed to be practical, but built by hands that had secrets. She should have found it dull. Instead, she found it intolerably quiet, like the house had forgotten how to speak.
Then there was the caretaker.
Viren Malhotra was a man constructed of silence. He did not explain himself. He did not greet her when she arrived. He simply unlocked the front gate, handed her a key, and disappeared into his routines. His steps made no sound on the wooden floors. His presence was a constant absence, always just around the corner, always unfinished in her mind.
At first, she found it infuriating. Then, she found it impossible to ignore.
Their encounters were sparse. In the mornings, she would find him in the courtyard, brushing rain off the stone benches, sleeves rolled precisely to his elbows, as though he feared his own skin might leave a mark on the fabric. He never filled the air with unnecessary words.
"You'll want to check the eastern storage," he would say, with no intonation, no curiosity about what she might find.
Somehow, this economy of language had a weight. She found herself responding in kind, short answers, brief nods, both of them operating within an unspoken architecture, as if words were bricks that, if mislaid, might collapse something fragile neither of them acknowledged.
She became aware of him in strange ways. The sound of his breathing when they passed each other on the staircase. The way his hand lingered a moment too long on the brass handle of the library door when he held it open for her. The subtle scrape of his chair when he sat across from her during evening meals—always a controlled distance, never casual.
It was during one such dinner that something shifted.
The storm outside raged harder than usual, forcing them into the smaller study where the fireplace still functioned. The power had surrendered hours ago. Viren lit the fire, his face half-shadowed by the flicker.
She caught him watching her—not boldly, but methodically, as if she were a puzzle he could not disassemble quickly enough. His gaze was not warm. It was sharp, clinical, as though desire itself was an equation he distrusted.
"You dislike people, don't you?" she asked abruptly, the question escaping before she could tailor it into something polite.
His lips twitched, not quite a smile. "I dislike noise."
"And what am I?" She leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Noise?"
"You're…" He paused, searching, as if precision mattered even now. "You're different. You ask questions like you already know the answers."
"And you avoid answers like they might burn you."
Their eyes locked. Neither looked away.
The silence became charged. Not awkward. Not uncomfortable. Loaded.
In another world, they might have crossed that line then—quickly, foolishly, with the impulsiveness of lonely people trapped by storms. But this was not that world. In this world, they remained where they were—two people marooned in the same decaying house, orbiting each other like hesitant satellites, bound not by proximity, but by the maddening slowness of their own restraint.
The days dragged forward, but the space between them tightened.
She began noticing his handwriting in the maintenance logs—neat, deliberate, the kind of script that only people with excellent self-control possessed. She lingered over the teacup he left on the counter, her fingers grazing the rim as if touching it could summon something he wouldn't offer directly.
One evening, she found him in the library again, this time standing too close to the window, rain hammering the glass.
"I should finish the audit by next week," she said, her voice careful, balanced.
"You will leave, then."
It was not a question. It was a sentence he had already accepted.
She wanted to say yes. Wanted to say no. Wanted to say something clever and cutting. But the air between them was too taut for posturing.
"I haven't decided."
"You have." His voice dipped lower. "You just haven't admitted it."
Her throat tightened. "And what is it I haven't admitted?"
"That you don't want to leave."
His precision hit like a blade.
The silence now was no longer structural. It was weaponised, a place where all their unsaid things sat breathing between them.
Slowly, carefully, she crossed the room, stopping just within his reach but not bridging the final inch.
"You don't want me to go either."
"No."
"Why not?"
His answer was late, as if he had rehearsed it and rejected it, over and over.
"Because you are the first sound this house has made in years."
His hand lifted, deliberate and slow, resting against her jaw with the kind of restraint that felt more intimate than surrender. His thumb traced her cheekbone, once, no more. And yet it felt like a fracture.
The kiss did not come that night. Nor the next. Nor the one after.
But the desire remained—unspoken, controlled, agonising in its patience.
Some storms, after all, do not break. They settle. They linger. They demand to be endured.
And sometimes, that is the most dangerous kind of storm there is.