She kept her eyes on Jiggy. Vansh might as well have been invisible. “Not if it means sharing the money I need to do my work.”

Why, thanks a lot, Knightlina!

“You did the work just fine without my money, now you’ll figure out how to do it with a little less of it. Stop being such a grouch. Let’s go get some cake.” Grabbing Naina’s arm, he dragged her away.

The glare she threw at Vansh over her shoulder as she mouthed, Don’t even think about it, should have burned him to ash. It probably did, because suddenly Vansh couldn’t feel his limbs, unless that was the adrenaline that was suddenly pumping through him.

Why would he not think about it? He didn’t even have a project in mind yet and he already had someone interested in funding him. He did have a talent for this, no matter what Ms. Kohli thought.

“That was the best speech I’ve ever heard,” someone said behind Vansh, voice cracking with emotion. “I would follow Yash to the ends of the earth. Is there anyone who wouldn’t?”

Vansh turned and found that it was the data guy from Yash’s campaign team. Vansh looked around to see who he was talking to, but he was sitting by himself and evidently talking to himself.

“Hi, Hari,” Vansh said. Remembering names was one of his talents.

There were five empty flutes of mimosas at the table, and instead of answering Vansh’s greeting, Hari downed the sixth, half-empty glass and dug into a gigantic slice of cake.

“Congratulations,” Vansh said to him. Hari had worked hard on Yash’s campaign. He was a genius with numbers and data, and he’d taken the information on demographics and voting behaviors and figured out exactly where to put campaign dollars and time, right down to neighborhoods and streets.

He’d worked mostly alone in one corner of the office by himself, just the way he was sitting by himself right now at a table tucked away from the crowd.

“Do you know what you’re going to do now?” Vansh asked. He understood only too well the emptiness one felt after a successful project. He made it a point never to linger too long on any project. Satisfaction, but also loss. Because the postvictory flush didn’t take up quite as much time as one would think.

Since the election, Nisha had accepted the position of communications director. She had managed Yash’s political campaigns for the past decade. This was her chosen career, unlike with the rest of the Rajes, for whom Yash’s ambitions were more of a pet pastime.