For a few minutes, the silence inside the darkened executive suite felt manageable. It was a fragile, artificial sort of peace, constructed entirely out of rigid posture and held breath. Mitali lay perfectly still on the far left edge of the mattress, her back turned to Arjun, her eyes fixed blindly on the pale city lights leaking through the heavy velvet curtains.

She listened intently to the sound of his breathing. At first, it hummed in a slow, deep rhythm that suggested the heavy onset of sleep. She tried to sync her own fractured breathing to it, desperately seeking a rhythm that might lull her own racing mind into compliance.