Rudra had always suspected there was something missing inside him.
People around him spoke of love as if it were air—vital, invisible, inevitable. They wrote poems about heartbreak, sang songs about longing, cried over sunsets and confessions. Rudra only watched and listened, a silent spectator behind a sheet of glass. Feelings, for him, were like a foreign language: he could memorize the words but never taste the meaning.
Books became his only bridge.
Where others read to escape, Rudra read to understand.
He studied paper-bound romances the way scholars studied ancient codes. Page after page, he traced the patterns of attachment—how a character's pulse quickened, how jealousy burned, how grief hollowed a chest until breathing hurt. He took mental notes: this is how people show they care; this is how they break when love is lost.
He never broke. He only learned.
His family—old money and sharp prestige—found his quietness unnerving. His mother tried gentle conversations, his father offered stern advice, but Rudra remained the same. Polite. Brilliant. Distant.
Emotions did not move him, but once he liked something, he pursued it with relentless precision. A rare book, a difficult skill, a business deal—if it caught his interest, it became his until he was satisfied. People often mistook this hunger for passion. It wasn't. It was simply focus, pure and cold.
A week ago, he had picked up a popular romance novel on a whim.
The story was predictable yet oddly gripping.
The male lead, also named Rudra, was a cold aristocrat destined to fall for a gentle heroine named Aditi. There was also the villainess, Aadya—the male lead's fiancée, bound to him by a family arrangement that was more business than love.
In the novel, Rudra made it clear he intended to break the engagement. Aadya, blinded by obsession, refused to let go. She clung to him until desperation drove her to cruel schemes against Aditi, which led to her downfall: friends abandoned her, family disowned her, and she died alone.
It was the kind of ending readers accepted without question. The villainess was punished. The pure heroine triumphed. The cold hero finally learned to love.
Rudra had closed the book with a faint, indifferent sigh. Predictable. Inevitable. Yet Aadya lingered in his thoughts like a stubborn aftertaste. There was something familiar in her reckless devotion, a kind of ruthless single-mindedness he recognized in himself. He understood hunger, not softness. He understood obsession, not kindness.
Then came the accident.
It happened on an ordinary night.
Rain slicked the road, headlights smeared across the windshield. A flash of metal, the shriek of tires, the sudden weightless silence before impact—then nothing.
When Rudra opened his eyes again, a crystal chandelier glimmered above him.
Velvet curtains framed tall windows. The faint scent of sandalwood clung to the air, rich and unfamiliar. He lay on a bed carved from dark mahogany, its canopy draped with silver silk.
Slowly, he sat up.
The body felt different—stronger, broader, wrapped in an elegant black shirt trimmed with gold.
A gilded mirror across the room reflected a face he recognized only from illustrations: sharper cheekbones, colder eyes, regal posture. The Rudra from the novel stared back at him.
Memory and fiction tangled like threads tightening around his throat.
He pressed a hand to his chest, half expecting the illusion to shatter. But the heartbeat beneath his palm was steady, real.
Transmigration.
It sounded ridiculous, a plot device he had read a hundred times. And yet here he was, breathing in a world that should have existed only on paper. The timing, he realized, was precise. This was the point in the story before the male lead met Aditi, before the gentle heroine softened his heart, before Aadya sealed her ruin.
Rudra exhaled slowly, his mind clear despite the absurdity.
The world expected him to follow the script: to reject Aadya's obsession, to discover love in Aditi's warmth, to prove that kindness conquers coldness.
But he understood something the book never said aloud.
Aadya was not merely a villainess.
She was a reflection.
Someone who loved with a violence he could comprehend.
Someone who wanted until she destroyed.
And he, who rarely felt anything, felt this much:
Softness like Aditi's did not interest him.
Obsession did.
He rose from the bed, the unfamiliar weight of a signet ring pressing against his finger. Outside the tall windows, the moon spilled silver light over manicured gardens and marble fountains. Somewhere in this estate, Aadya existed—alive, breathing, still untouched by the story's cruel ending.
The thought stirred a flicker of something in his chest. Not love. Not excitement.
Curiosity.
For the first time in years, Rudra felt the faint pull of desire—not for a person, not even for Aadya herself, but for the challenge of rewriting fate. If this world truly followed the novel, he already knew every event waiting to unfold. He could dismantle it piece by piece, or twist it until the ending belonged to him alone.
The rules of his old life had never mattered to him.
The rules of this story would matter even less.
He turned from the window and allowed a small, almost imperceptible smile to touch his lips.
If the world wanted him to play the cold hero who learned to love the gentle heroine, it would be disappointed.
Rudra had no intention of playing a role someone else had written.
_ _ _
"One crash ended a life—one story began a fate."