The war had stripped me of everything. My pride, my status, and now, even my basic humanity.
I had reached a level of desperation that blinded my judgment. I started destroying her things with a reckless fury—tearing the limbs off her dolls, snapping her trinkets, and throwing them into the shadows. I lied through my teeth, blaming stray animals, blaming the wind, blaming anyone but myself. But the "Saint" mask had already cracked too much.
My mother caught me. The look in her eyes wasn't just anger—it was cold, clinical disgust.
She didn't scream this time. She just acted. She marched into my room and gathered every single thing I owned—my clothes, my remaining books, my memories. She threw them out like trash. "If you can't respect what others have, you deserve nothing of your own," she whispered.
The "King" was now a beggar.
My punishment was a slow, agonizing isolation. I was locked in my room for days. The delicious aromas of the food they cooked for Meera wafted under my door—spices, sweets, and warmth—but my tray only held boiled grass and dry bread. "It's what you deserve, Viraaj. Maybe the 'Rat' in you will starve to death now," my father said through the locked wood.
I sat on the cold floor, chewing on the tasteless greens, my stomach cramping with a mix of hunger and hatred. I could hear them laughing in the living room. I heard the clinking of silverware and the sound of Meera's voice, sweet and triumphant, telling them about her day.
They were a family. And I was the monster under their floorboards.
The ego I had fought so hard to protect was gone. In its place was something much more dangerous: Pure, unadulterated malice. They thought they were breaking me. They thought that by starving me and taking my toys, I would learn to be "good." They didn't understand that when you take everything from a man, you also take away his fear. I had no throne left to lose. I had no reputation left to save.
I looked at the bare walls of my cell and realized that I didn't want to dominate her anymore. I wanted to erase her.
As the hunger gnawed at my insides, my mind became terrifyingly sharp. I stopped crying. I stopped punching the floor. I sat in the silence and began to calculate. If my parents wanted to treat me like a wild animal, I would show them exactly how a predator hunts when it's starving.
Meera had won this battle. She had taken my food, my room, and my parents' mercy. But she had made one fatal mistake.
She had left me with nothing but my thoughts. And my thoughts were now the most lethal weapons in this house I had hit the absolute bottom. The walls of my room were no longer a shelter; they were the boundaries of my failure. Every plan I made had backfired. Every trap I set had snapped shut on my own neck. Meera hadn't just defeated me; she had erased me from my own family's heart.
But as I sat in the darkness, chewing on the bitter greens of my punishment, a final, desperate realization took hold.
If they couldn't see my value while I was standing right in front of them, I would make them feel the weight of my shadow once I was gone. You only realize the importance of oxygen when you start to suffocate. I was going to give them the one thing they thought they wanted: My total absence.
I was done fighting for scraps of affection. I was done being the villain in her story. I was going to become a ghost—not just in spirit, but in reality.
I began to look for an exit, a way to disappear so completely that the silence in this house would become deafening. I needed them to wake up to a home that was quiet, empty, and haunted by the memory of the son they had discarded.
And then, the heavy front door groaned open.
My Grandparents had arrived.
Their arrival wasn't just a family visit; to me, it was a divine intervention. As I heard their voices—the only voices that still carried a hint of the old warmth—I felt a cold, sharp clarity settle over me. They were my golden ticket. They were the bridge that would take me away from this battlefield.
I looked at the locked door of my room and then at the small bag I had hidden under the bed. My plan was no longer about breaking her toys or planting money. It was about a total exit.
"Let them have their 'Angel'," I whispered to the empty room. "Let them have their perfect life. But they will soon realize that a kingdom without its King isn't a palace anymore—it's just a graveyard."
I wasn't running away because I was scared. I was leaving to start a war that they couldn't fight. A war of regret.
The 'Ladla' was leaving, and he was taking the soul of this house with him