The grandeur of Rathore Niwas did not simply fade; it was systematically violated. In the wake of the sirens and the rhythmic, heart-stopping strobe of blue lights, a cold, bureaucratic silence descended upon the mansion. It was the silence of a tomb being prepared for an occupant who wasn't yet dead. Men in windbreakers, their faces as expressionless as the legal codes they enforced, moved through the vaulted halls with the efficiency of grave robbers. They carried rolls of fluorescent red tape that looked like arterial spray against the white marble walls. Every piece of history, every symbol of the brothers' obsessive, suffocating doting, was systematically claimed by the state as the "spoils" of a criminal empire.

Ananya stood in the center of the grand foyer, her seafoam silk gown looking like a mocking costume. She watched, paralyzed, as a red "SEIZED" sticker was slapped across the gilded frame of her unfinished portrait—the one Aryan had commissioned for her eighteenth birthday, intended to be the centerpiece of the house. The adhesive made a sharp, tearing sound that felt like it was happening to her own skin.