Free The Promise by Nikita Singh Page A

what the world saw him as, after so many years. From the moment he first saw her, he had been trying to stop himself from falling in love for the second time. The lessons life had taught him were not forgotten. The death of his family taught him to not get attached to people and so he had built a wall around his heart and had not let anyone in since. He had also learnt that being rich mattered more than anything else in life, and that was how money had become his life, his obsession. He had begun to learn it, and Prehal had been the last nail in the coffin.
    After he had failed to keep Prehal out of the defences he had built and allowed her to come close, he learnt not to get attached to people ... ever again. And the meaning of money had changed in his life once again. He had always been driven to make it-especially so after his family's death-but after Prehal's painful betrayal, he had started hating money as much as he loved making it.

    He was devastated by what Prehal had done to him. His heart had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and scattered on the floor. To deal with the ache it caused him, he had used anger. He had refused to let pain be the most prominent feeling, to let it drown him in helplessness and sadness. Fury superseded every other emotion.
    He had a lot of baggage to carry, for one person. The only way he had been able to survive was by blocking everything out and concentrating only on work. That is how his business had grown.
    People said his way of working was unconventional. He had no reply to that. He just worked in the only way he knew how to work. He had seen his father build furniture and he had adapted his style and way of working. He worked endlessly for days on end and if the final product was up to the standard he had set for himself, he sent the piece over for replication and production on a large scale.
    For each of his designs, they would make exactly two hundred replicas, when their factory grew to allow such a scale. In due course of time, it became a pattern. Even after his business grew several times over the years, the pattern had not changed. They still produced a mere two hundred facsimiles for every one of his designs, each of which Arjun approved himself after inspecting. The craze for his work grew to such an extent that pre-orders were made for his next product even before he designed it. All two hundred copies of each new product sold out before he completed building the first of them.

    Over time, the demand for his original work spiked beyond imagination, which resulted in his company becoming extremely exclusive and the products extremely expensive. DE was known to be artistic, not huge. The supply always fell short of the demand. He refused having too many showrooms across the country, but even if he did, he wondered what he would showcase; all his work was instantly sold out, as soon as it was built. They never had anything in stock.
    He had heard that after every new design was launched by their company, the market flooded with cheap imitations of the same. He had become some sort of a trendsetter, someone everyone followed. He hardly cared about such things; without caring about what others were doing, he only cared about doing well in what he was doing.
    Carving wood brought peace to him. He liked to work alone, in silence, not caring about whatever was happening in the world around him. His line of business made it obligatory for him to meet people sometimes, but he shunned it as much as he could. Just like Mrs Ahluwalia. She was not someone he had enjoyed meeting, but he needed to, in order to get through with the furnishing of her mansion, to be turned into a bedand-breakfast. So he had.
    And after getting back to the office, he realized that the meeting had not ended well. Not with respect to Mrs Ahluwalia, but with Ms Sen, the woman who insisted he called her by her first name. Shambhavi.
    He regretted taking her to lunch. It was the first time in years that he