A Villianess I Understand
Rudra had never been good with feelings.
While other people cried at movies or laughed until their stomachs hurt, he remained still, as if some vital chord inside him had never learned to vibrate.
Books became his quiet obsession—not because he enjoyed the stories, but because they were manuals to an alien world.
He studied love the way some studied mathematics: page by page, equation by equation, trying to decode what he rarely experienced himself.
The last book he read was a typical romance novel.
A cold-hearted heir named Rudra, distant and brilliant, was fated to melt for the gentle heroine, Aditi.
There was also a villainess, Aadya—his arranged fiancée.
Obsessed and reckless, she clung to him until her desperation led to cruel schemes against the heroine, earning her a tragic, lonely end.
Rudra had closed the book with a faint, indifferent sigh.
Predictable. Inevitable.
Still, something in Aadya’s madness lingered in his mind, a stubborn aftertaste.
Then came the accident.
Metal screeched. Lights exploded into darkness.
When Rudra opened his eyes again, a crystal chandelier glimmered above him.
Velvet curtains framed the tall windows of an unfamiliar room.
His own reflection stared back from a gilded mirror—sharper features, colder eyes, dressed in the regal black of an aristocrat.
He knew this face.
The Rudra from the novel.
Memory and fiction tangled like threads tightening around his throat.
The timing was precise: this was before the male lead met Aditi, before the gentle heroine softened his heart, before the villainess sealed her ruin.
Rudra—both man and character now—sat up slowly, absorbing the strange weight of reality.
The world expected him to follow the script: to spurn 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 Rudra, who rarely felt anything, felt this much:
Softness like Aditi’s did not interest him.
Obsession did.
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> “Love is a story. Obsession is the truth we choose.”
