Bangles from her wrists halfway up to her elbow, cuffs of gold interspersed with green and red glass. The breakable and the unbreakable clinking against one another. Amulets and anklets that had rubbed her skin raw. She cast it all off. One heavy weight after another.

An ungodly calm settled into her bones.

Next came the flowers in her hair. Enough of them that an entire garden had to have been massacred. Tuberoses and roses and five varieties of jasmine. The only other time she would be this covered in flowers would be when she lay on her pyre.

The two times they covered women in flowers—their wedding day and the day they died. Who could have imagined those two would feel so remarkably alike?

Omar’s favorite song had been filmed on the wedding bed. One much like this with curtains of flowers turning it into a cage . . .

Kabhie Kabhie mere dil mein khayal aata hai

ke jaise tujhko banaaya gaya hai mere liye.

Sometimes a thought whispers in my heart

that your very existence was formed for me and me alone.

During the scene, the groom—also undesired—undresses his bride as she sings the poetry composed by the lover she had hoped would be her husband.

When Shoban had watched the song on the screen, her skin had crawled at the groom touching the bride. He has no right to her body, something inside her had always screamed.

That voice inside her was screaming now. The idea of anyone but Omar touching her made her sick.

“Give this a chance,” her father had said after the wedding ceremony was over. “It’s for your own good.”

“No, it’s for your good, actually,” she had said to him with the same self-congratulatory smirk he and Bram had pasted on their faces through the ceremony. “You are not welcome in this house anymore.”

Like the rest of the guests—not too many, because the wedding had taken place fast once Bram and her father had realized that giving her time might help her escape—her father had rushed to congratulate her. But she had stepped away. “You made sure this was my home, and I am asking you to leave it. Get out.”

He had leaned in to her. “Don’t do all this tamasha right now and humiliate your family.”

“You are no longer my family. I asked you to get out of my house, and if you don’t, there will be a tamasha like you’ve never seen. You will drop the charges against Omar and send me proof that he is safe. If I find out that you harmed Omar or his family in any way, I will make sure I use all the power the Rajes wield to do to you what you threatened to do to Omar.”