The report arrived on General Guo Feng's desk before the tea in his cup had cooled. It was not from Huilan. It was from the discreet security detail assigned to the guesthouse wing. A transcript, pieced together from long-range directional microphones, of the entire conversation in Huilan's room.
He read it once. Then again, slower. His initial reaction was a surge of contemptuous fury. A month in some Indian provincial town? Cooking and praying? It was a farce. An insult to the gravity of statecraft.
He crushed the transcript in his fist, ready to summon Huilan and put an end to this sentimental nonsense. But as he stood, the cold, analytical part of his mind—the part that had outmaneuvered rivals for five decades—whispered a different possibility.
He smoothed the paper on his desk, reading the key line again. "…see the sky under which my son became who he is."
He leaned back, steepling his fingers. The old woman was not just being obstinate. She was engaging in a form of deep cultural reconnaissance. She was seeking to understand the source code of Rajendra Shakuniya's ambition. And she was offering Huilan the chance to learn it too.
What if this wasn't a obstacle, but an opportunity?
If Huilan could pass this test… if she could endure a month in that household, earn the mother's trust, and secure a genuine marriage… her value would transform. She would no longer be an external liaison, a daughter to be traded. She would be an insider. The daughter-in-law. A permanent, intimate channel into the very heart of the Shakuniya confederation—its family rituals, its unguarded conversations, its emotional vulnerabilities. The intelligence potential was staggering.
The marriage would cease to be a blunt instrument of control. It would become a sophisticated, long-term penetration asset. The Consortium would be signed, yes, but China would have an agent embedded at the highest, most personal level of the rival power structure.
The contempt faded, replaced by a grim, calculating respect for the old woman's move. She had raised the stakes from the political to the personal. Very well. He would meet her there.
He summoned Huilan. She entered, standing rigidly at attention before his desk, her face a pale mask.
"Sit," he said, his voice devoid of its earlier anger. She obeyed, wary.
He pushed the smoothed transcript toward her. "Your assessment of the situation."
She glanced at it, then back at him. "It is… unconventional, Father."
"It is a test. One you will pass."
Huilan's eyes widened slightly. "You… wish me to go?"
"I order you to go," he corrected, his tone precise. "But understand the mission parameters have changed. This is no longer about securing a signature on a contract. It is about securing position. You are to integrate into that household. You are to win the mother's affection. You are to become, in every way that matters, a member of that family."
He leaned forward, his gaze locking onto hers. "You will observe everything. Not just business. The man's habits, his moods, his unguarded opinions. The mother's influence. The network of loyalists who visit the home. You will be our window into a world closed to diplomats and spies. This is your most important duty to the People, Huilan. You are to become the perfect daughter-in-law. And you are to report everything."
Huilan felt the walls of the new trap close around her, more subtle and inescapable than the last. She was being asked to weaponize domesticity. To turn intimacy into intelligence. The month of "freedom" was now a deep-cover assignment.
"And if I cannot? If she sees through it?" Huilan asked, her voice tight.
"Then you will have failed," the General said, the words final. "But you will not. You are a soldier. This is your battlefield. The kitchen, the temple, the family room—these are now your trenches. Win this campaign."
Dismissed, Huilan walked back to her room in a daze. The fragile spark of choice Laxmi had offered was gone, extinguished by her father's colder, more ambitious vision. She was not being freed. She was being deployed.
Meanwhile, in his own suite, Rajendra was receiving a different kind of briefing.
Ganesh's voice crackled over the secure line from Moscow. "Bhai, the Silencers intercepted a coded burst from the Chinese delegation's comms to Beijing. It references 'Operation Hearthstone.' They're spinning down the immediate pressure on the Consortium. But there's heightened interest in… domestic profiling."
"Domestic profiling?" Rajendra's mind connected the dots instantly. His mother's condition had not derailed the General's plans; it had refined them. "They're turning Huilan's visit into an intelligence-gathering operation."
"It looks that way, bhai."
Rajendra was quiet for a moment. He thought of Huilan's strained face during the tea, the fleeting glimpse of a person beneath the officer. "We'll feed them what we want them to see. Prepare a sanitized, useful profile of the Pune household. The loyal staff, the daily routines—a harmless picture. Let them have their 'intel.' It will make them feel in control."
After hanging up, he looked at his mother, who was calmly sewing a loose button on her shawl. "Maa, Huilan's father has just turned her visit into a spy mission."
Laxmi didn't look up from her needlework. "Of course he has. He is a man who only understands conquest. But a home is not a fortress to be stormed, beta. It is a garden. You cannot spy on a garden's growth; you can only tend it, or poison it."
She pulled the thread taut, biting it off neatly. "We will tend our garden. And we will see what seed takes root—the one her father planted, or one of its own." She looked up, her eyes sharp. "And you will be careful. In my house, you will not be the merchant or the king. You will be my son. And you will see her as a woman in your mother's home, not as an asset or a threat. Can you do that?"
It was perhaps the hardest directive he had ever received. To stand down his merchant's mind. To simply be.
He nodded, unsure if he could. "I'll try, Maa."
The stage was set. The General saw a new battlefield. Rajendra saw a counter-intelligence operation. Laxmi saw a garden. And Huilan, packed and poised for departure, felt like a seed shot from a cannon, unsure what soil she would land in, or what she was meant to become.