She gripped the mangalsutra around her neck, a gold chain threaded with black beads, a pendant of diamonds hanging from it. In the part in her hair was red powder. On the finger they used to tether women to the men who owned them was a band of gold studded with diamonds so brilliant she blinked when she looked at it. On her toes were toe rings. Four symbols marking her body to make sure no one ever mistook her for not being taken, owned. Four signs. And Bram wore none. Not one.

Omar and she had talked about their wedding as something they would celebrate by themselves, just the two of them. They had always known they’d elope. They were going to sign a piece of paper for the law, he would write her the most beautiful vows (she’d made him promise this), and then they’d take a boat to Sindhudurg and he’d recite them to her as they sat on the historic fort wall in the middle of the ocean.

She came back into the flower-infested room. A shield crossed with swords from some war the Raje ancestors had fought hung on the wall in front of her. There was an entire armory in the north tower, but it was all useless. Most of the guns and weapons were behind glass cases and as antique as the patriarchy that was holding her inside these walls.

She could find one of those guns, or throw herself off the balcony. There were a million ways to humiliate them by presenting them with her corpse on her wedding day. What would that get her? It would be the same as accepting Bram, accepting this new life. It would be accepting defeat.

Her father had done this so he could forge a relationship with the Rajes, to attach himself to the place in society they afforded. Bram had done this to prove that he could. The reason why Bram did everything. How had she thought him harmless? Men like him were never harmless. Men like him, those gods of apathy, were worse in some ways than men like her father, the keepers of control, the true believers, who knew their way of life would be lost if their daughters rose to stand beside their sons.

No.

Shoban was going to stay Shoban.

One by one she started to remove the metal chains, the gemstone balls. She unhooked the nose ring, a cluster of pearls formed into a paisley around a ruby that her mother had worn at her wedding. Uncut diamonds formed into layered jhumkas hung from her ears all the way to her shoulders—earrings Bram’s mother had worn to her wedding. More chains wound around her ears and hooked into her hair to hold it all in place. Everything tied up and tangled and secured.