✦ Chapter 25: The Desperate Chase ✦

The air inside the main drawing hall of the Mehra ancestral estate was thick, heavy, and hot with the stagnant scent of old wealth, heavy carpets, and unread ledger files. There was no grace left inside this house anymore. The late morning light cutting through the high glass windows was dull, casting long, ugly shadows across the expensive leather sofas where Anand and Leela Mehra sat discussing their secondary stock indicators. To them, the world was still a ledger, a sequence of financial numbers that needed to balance, completely indifferent to the human casualties left behind in their race for corporate survival.