I'm His Second Wife, But He Vowed to Never Touch Me

The marble beneath her feet felt like ice, even through the silk soles of her sandals. Subhadra had expected the palace at Indraprastha to be magnificent—she had heard the stories, the boasts—but nothing had prepared her for this: corridors that stretched like the ribs of some great stone beast, ceilings so high they swallowed sound, and everywhere, the smell of something sharp and metallic, like blood mixed with incense.

Arjun’s hand touched the small of her back, guiding her forward. It was the same hand that had once traced the curve of her waist in the dark, calloused fingers that had learned her body with reverence. Now, it was just pressure—polite, firm, impersonal. He didn’t look at her. His eyes moved ahead, scanning the shadows, the doorways, the faces of passing attendants. His jaw was tight, the way it had been before battle, but this was not war. This was home.

She wanted to say his name, just to hear it aloud, to remind them both that they were still the same people who had laughed together on the road from Dwaraka, who had stopped to fuck beneath a banyan tree while the horses grazed nearby, her back scraped raw by bark, his mouth hot on her neck. But the words caught in her throat. Something had already changed.

They passed a courtyard where water spilled from the mouths of carved lions into a lotus pool. The sound should have been soothing. Instead, it echoed like a warning. She glanced at him. His face was unreadable. She had never seen this expression on him before—not in the tent the night before their wedding, not when they had argued, not even when they had parted at the edge of her brother’s kingdom. This was not the man who had whispered, “You are the only thing I want,” with his lips against her collarbone.

A servant opened a heavy door. Inside, the chamber was vast, draped in fabrics the color of saffron and ash. The bed was raised on a platform, its pillars carved with vines and birds. It looked like a place made for display, not sleep. Not touching. Not sex.

Arjun stepped inside with her, but only just. He lingered near the threshold, as if the room itself might trap him. His eyes flicked to the window, then the door. He didn’t sit. He didn’t touch her again.

“You’ll be safe here,” he said. His voice was low, careful. “They’ve prepared everything.”

She nodded, though she didn’t know who “they” were. She wanted to ask: Do you remember how you used to sneak into my room in Dwaraka? How you’d kiss me until I couldn’t breathe? But she said nothing.

He turned to leave. Just like that.

“Arjun,” she said, finally.

He paused, his hand on the doorframe. For a moment, she thought he might come back. That he might look at her—really look.

But he only nodded once, stiffly, and was gone.

The door closed. The silence was sudden and total.

She stood alone in the center of the room, her hands cold, her stomach hollow.

This was not the beginning she had imagined.

The hall was a forest of silk and gold. Subhadra walked between rows of courtiers whose eyes flicked over her as if she were a new tapestry—interesting for a moment, then forgotten. At the far end, on a low dais, Draupadi waited beneath a canopy of white jasmine. Her sari was the color of dried blood, embroidered with tiny lions that caught the lamp-light like teeth.

Arjun’s stride lengthened; Subhadra felt the pull like a rope around her ribs. He stopped two paces short of the dais and bowed—precise, warrior-like. Subhadra copied him, palms pressed together, the gesture she had practiced on the road. When she straightened, Draupadi was already smiling.

The smile was narrow, symmetrical, finished at the edges. It did not crease the skin beneath her eyes. Those eyes moved over Subhadra’s face, then lower—neck, breasts, waist—inventorying. “Sister,” Draupadi said, the word cool, polished, “Indraprastha is brighter for your arrival.”

Subhadra felt the court listening. She answered in the same formal Sanskrit, voice steady, though her pulse beat between her legs with a sudden, shameful memory: Arjun’s mouth there, the night before they reached the city, her heel digging into the small of his back. She flushed. Draupadi’s smile widened by exactly the width of a jasmine petal.

Ceremony dissolved into music and movement. Subhadra was guided to a seat slightly lower than the queen’s. Arjun took the place beside Draupadi, their shoulders almost touching. Servants brought wine in gold cups; the wine tasted of cedar and something metallic. Subhadra drank because her throat was dry, then drank again because the taste matched the smell of the palace, and matching felt like order.

Hours later, in her chamber, the lamps had been turned low. She stood at the window, untying the heavy earrings that had cut grooves into her lobes. The door opened without a knock; Arjun stepped in, closed it softly, and leaned back against the wood as if barricading something out.

He looked tired. There was sand in the hair at his temples, a small cut at the corner of his mouth she hadn’t noticed in the hall. She wanted to lick it, to taste copper and him, but she stayed at the window.

“We need to speak,” he said.

She nodded. The earrings came free; one dropped, rolled, stopped against his foot. He didn’t pick it up.

“The year is divided,” he began, voice flat, rehearsed. “Each brother spends twelve moons with Draupadi. It is her time now.”

Subhadra felt the words hit her stomach like swallowed stones. She had known—of course she had known—but hearing it aloud was different. “So I am a calendar,” she said.

Arjun’s jaw tightened. “It is dharma. It keeps peace.”

“Peace,” she repeated. Her sari slipped from one shoulder; she left it there, skin bare to the night air. “And where do I sleep while peace is kept?”

He looked at her then—really looked—and she saw the war in his face. One step and he could be at her, mouth on her neck, lifting her against the wall the way he had in a fisher-hut weeks ago, her legs around his waist, both of them too hungry for preliminaries. She saw him calculate it, saw him discard it.

“I will come to you when the turn changes,” he said. “Nine months.”

“Nine,” she echoed. The word felt obscene in her mouth.

He turned to leave. His hand was on the latch when she spoke again, voice low. “Will you think of me at least once each night, or is that also against dharma?”

His shoulders rose, fell. He did not answer. The door closed with the same soft certainty as before.

Subhadra stood in the middle of the room, earrings on the floor, sari sliding lower. The jasmine from Draupadi’s canopy clung to her hair, sweet and suffocating. She breathed through her mouth until the scent thinned, then began to undress for a bed that would not be warmed by anyone else.

The bed was too large. Its expanse of embroidered cotton stretched on every side like a bleached desert, and when she lay down the center dipped so deeply she felt swallowed. She had left one lamp burning; the flame guttered in its glass, throwing long ribs of shadow across the ceiling. Every time the wick flared she saw the carved birds in the rafters, beaks open as if mid-scream.

She had stripped to her underskirt, then removed even that, unable to bear the rasp of silk against her nipples—sensitized, traitorously alert. The night air slid over her bare skin, cool, invasive. She pressed her thighs together and felt the pulse there, a low, insistent throb that had started the moment Arjun closed the door. On the road it had been simple: a look, his hand sliding beneath her antariya while the caravan rested, her own hand stroking him through linen until he shuddered against her palm. Here, the same hunger felt grotesque, unmoored.

A gong sounded somewhere deep in the palace—three measured beats, then silence. She counted her heartbeats to thirty before the next sound came: the scrape of a bronze bolt, faint voices speaking a dialect she did not know, laughter that ended too abruptly. Each noise arrived filtered through stone and corridor, stripped of context, like ghosts rehearsing their deaths. She listened for his step anyway: the quick heel-toe rhythm she had learned beside the Yamuna, the way his boot buckles clicked once if he was tired, twice if he was eager. Nothing.

She rolled onto her stomach, arms beneath her, pelvis grinding involuntarily into the mattress. The friction gave a moment’s relief, then worsened the ache. She imagined him in another bed two wings away, Draupadi’s long hair coiled around his wrist the way hers had been weeks earlier when he took her from behind beneath a date-palm, her knees bruised by fallen fruit. The memory was so precise she could smell the sap, feel the grit of sand against her forearms. Her body clenched around emptiness; a small sound escaped her throat.

To punish herself she slid one hand between legs already slick, gathering wetness with two fingers and spreading it upward, circling the swollen peak until the sensation bordered on pain. She did not allow herself completion. Instead she brought the fingers to her mouth, tasted salt and iron and the faint residue of the oil with which she had anointed herself that morning—jasmine, the same suffocating note that drifted in from the garden below. The taste made her gag; she turned her face into the pillow, breathing through linen until the nausea passed.

Outside, a night bird called once, a falling note that sounded like her name distorted by wind. She lifted her head, hope stupid and bright, but the corridor beyond her door stayed mute. The lamp finally died; darkness sealed the room. In it she felt her own pulse everywhere—wrists, throat, cunt, the hollow behind her knees—each beat reproaching her for wanting what was no longer hers to take. She spread her legs wide, inviting the cool air, inviting anything that might substitute for the weight of him, the particular heat of his chest against her back, the way he always exhaled just once, deeply, the instant before he entered her.

Nothing came. The palace held its breath with her. She lay open, shivering, until the first hint of charcoal gray crept under the door. Only then did her hand return, furtive, efficient, bringing herself off with the same mechanical detachment she had used to check her travel packs the night before. The climax was thin, bitter, left her eyes watering. She wiped her fingers on the sheet that would be changed by unseen servants, rolled onto her side, and waited for the gong that would call her to a breakfast she would not taste, in a city that had already begun to forget she existed.

Morning after morning the palace gong sounded, and Subhadra learned the choreography of being unnecessary. She rose, bathed, let the maids drape her in colors chosen by someone else, then walked the same loop of corridors until the walls felt like an exhibit of themselves. Courtiers bowed, but no one spoke beyond the prescribed greeting; conversation required context, and she had none.

On the sixth day she discovered the kitchen garden tucked behind a trellis of bitter gourd. The air there was warmer, thick with damp earth and the green bite of coriander. She had knelt to examine a row of pepper saplings when a shadow blotted the sun.

“Those like shade,” Bheema said, voice low, amused. “You’re cooking their roots.”

He was broader than she remembered from the wedding procession, his forearms lacquered with flour to the elbow. Without waiting for permission he lifted her by the waist as if she weighed nothing, set her on the path, and wiped his hands on a strip of cotton tucked into his dhoti. The gesture left white prints on the dark cloth, ghostly handprints that made her look away.

“I was told queens don’t wander alone,” he went on, gentler now. “Also that they don’t eat until the conch sounds. Both rules are stupid. Come.”

She followed because the alternative was another lap of marble. The palace kitchens were a vaulted cavern of smoke and shouting, but Bheema carved a quiet corner simply by occupying it. A wooden bowl waited, flour heaped like a snow-covered hill. He nudged it toward her.

“Two fingers of water, not three. Cup your palm, make a well, listen.”

The listening was literal: when the dough began to form it made a soft sucking sound, the planet folding into itself. He guided her knuckles, pressing, turning, his thumb riding the heel of her hand. Flour puffed up and settled on the fine hairs of her wrists, on the inside of her forearm where the skin was thin. She felt each contact as a small, deliberate anchor.

“You’re strong,” he observed. “Good. Bread needs anger.”

“I’m not angry,” she lied.

He smiled without teeth. “Knead anyway.”

They worked in silence broken only by the slap of dough against teak. Sweat gathered at her hairline; she wiped it with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of white. When the mass finally turned smooth and elastic Bheema tore a piece, flattened it between his palms, and slapped it onto a heated stone. The smell was immediate, nutty, intimate.

“Eat while it’s brave,” he ordered, tearing another piece and buttering it with his fingertip. Steam escaped in a sigh.

She took it. The crust cracked, the crumb stretched in thin strands that clung to her lip. Butter ran down her chin; she caught it with the pad of her thumb, licked without thinking. The taste was uncomplicated, alive, the opposite of every perfumed dish served in the hall. Something loosened in her chest so abruptly she feared it might be audible.

Bheema watched her finish, then wrapped the remaining loaf in a square of cotton and pressed it into her hands. “Bring it back tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll try saffron.”

She walked to her chambers carrying the still-warm package against her stomach, flour under her nails, the faint ache in her shoulders proof that she had, for an hour, mattered to the texture of the day.

The next time she saw him was at the evening meal, three days after the bread lesson. She entered behind a train of attendants, the cotton package tucked beneath her sleeve like contraband. Arjun was already seated beside Draupadi on the raised platform, his body angled toward hers in a way that looked practiced: shoulder lowered, elbow grazing her arm, the small tilt of his head that said he was listening. Subhadra took the chair assigned to her—lower, slightly to the left—where the lamplight caught the gold thread of her sari but missed her face.

He lifted his gaze when her movement disturbed the air. The smile arrived on schedule: lips parted, teeth shown, eyes warming for exactly two seconds before sliding back to his first wife. It was the same smile he had once given a merchant who offered horses at an absurd price—courteous, final. She felt it land on her skin and bounce off, leaving no dent.

Servants circulated with trays. Draupadi murmured something; Arjun answered without turning his head, the corner of his mouth tucking in—an old joke, maybe, or a memory. Their hands met above the rice dish, fingers brushing as they reached for the same spoon. Neither pulled away. Subhadra watched the contact lengthen, become deliberate, and understood she was witnessing a conversation conducted through skin: apology, reassurance, desire, all compressed into a one-second glide of knuckles. She looked down at her own plate. The bread she had brought was cooling against her forearm, useless.

Later, in the assembly hall, she tried to read the same language. Draupadi leaned forward to whisper while a herald recited tribute figures; Arjun’s thumb rubbed the rim of his cup, a tiny circle that matched the rhythm of Draupadi’s pulse point visible at her throat. Subhadra felt her own pulse answering, traitorous. When the herald mispronounced the name of a coastal port, she corrected him automatically. Heads turned. Yudhishthira nodded approval; Arjun’s eyebrows lifted in polite surprise, as if she were a clever stranger. Draupadi’s lips curved—acknowledgment or warning, she couldn’t tell.

The session ended. People rose, rearranged themselves into new clusters. Arjun moved away with Draupadi, palm resting on the small of her back, guiding her through the doorway. The gesture was so light it could have been accidental, but Subhadra saw the way Draupadi’s spine relaxed into it, the way his thumb stroked once, twice, before they disappeared into the corridor. She stood alone beside her empty chair, the bread still in her sleeve, flour probably ground into the silk. No one looked back.

The next afternoon a palace runner found her in the garden pavilion she had begun to treat as private, though no one had said it was. The boy bowed so low his forehead brushed the marble.

“His Highness requests your attendance in the ledger room. Now, if it pleases you.”

She followed through passages she had not yet learned to navigate, aware of the bread still in her sleeve from the night before, now stiff and cold. The runner stopped before a low teak door, opened it without knocking, and withdrew.

Inside, the air was sharp with ink and lamp smoke. Yudhishthira sat alone at a table broad enough for eight, scrolls anchored by bronze weights, an abacus clicking softly under his left hand. He did not look up immediately, giving her time to notice the ink on his forefinger, the way the cotton of his antariya had creased beneath his knees from hours of stillness. When he did raise his eyes they were bloodshot but calm.

“Subhadra. Thank you for indulging me.”

He gestured to the chair opposite, not the one beside him; distance enough to keep the meeting formal, close enough to share the same circle of lamplight. A single scroll lay unrolled between them, columns of figures marching down parchment the color of dried skin.

“These are last season’s customs from Dwaraka,” he said. “Your brother’s port masters collected duty on every bale of pepper that left for the western sea. Yet our agents in Prabhasa report the same pepper arrived there stamped with a lower tax seal. Either the cargo grew lighter on the voyage, or someone is selling passage permits twice. I would like to know which you find more likely.”

He pushed the scroll toward her. The parchment smelled of camphor and something metallic, the ink still wet where he had annotated. She read the columns once, then again, the numbers arranging themselves into a pattern she had watched Krishna complain about since childhood: middlemen buying space they never intended to use, selling it again once scarcity drove the price up.

She touched the discrepancy with the same flour-dusted finger that had kneaded dough. “The permits are being traded, not the pepper. Your agents should board at the mouth of the Tapti, not at Prabhasa. The second sale happens there, after the first buyer has already taken his profit.”

Yudhishthira’s gaze rested on her finger, on the faint white line still caught beneath the nail. “You have seen this before.”

“I have seen my brother refuse to double-tax his own merchants. He closes the loophole by making the permit bearer sail. If the berth is empty, the holder loses his coin. The speculation dies within a season.”

He reached for a fresh strip of palm leaf, cut it square with a small curved blade, and handed it to her. “Write the wording you would use. I will issue it tomorrow.”

The knife was sharper than she expected; it sliced the air before it touched the leaf. She wrote in a neat coastal script, the letters smaller than his, tighter, no space wasted. He watched the shapes appear, not her face, as if the script itself were evidence.

When she finished he pressed his own seal beside her lines without hesitation, warm wax dripping onto the green surface like blood from a shallow cut. “Your name will ride with the edict. Let the port masters know the order comes from someone who understands salt water.”

The room was quiet except for the abacus beads settling back into place. She felt the bread again, a hard lump against her forearm, and understood she would not need to carry it tomorrow. She would return here, instead, to a table that asked for her mind and nothing else.

Yudhishthira rolled the corrected scroll, tied it, and set it aside. Then he opened the next ledger, dipped his pen, and looked up at her once more.

“Tell me how your brother values coral against pepper these days. I suspect the exchange is no longer equal.”