Aisha Siddiqui sat in her cramped, peeling office at 4:45 PM. The air was hot and still.
She told herself she was a fool. She had wasted an entire afternoon, skipping a potential (though likely non-paying) client, all because a 12-year-old boy had psychoanalyzed her poverty.
She was angry at him, but she was more angry at herself. She was an S-Rank legal mind, a righteous idealist, and she had been manipulated by a child.
4:50 PM. Nothing. She began to pack her worn briefcase.
4:55 PM. She stood up, her heart a leaden mix of disappointment and self-loathing. It was a prank. A cruel, elaborate prank.
Just as she was about to switch off the light, she heard running footsteps in the hallway.
Her door burst open. It wasn't a knock. A young man in a courier uniform, sweating profusely, stumbled in.
"Advocate Aisha Siddiqui?" he panted.
Aisha's heart stopped. She could only nod.
"Sign here!" he thrust a clipboard at her, simultaneously dropping a bound document—an inch thick—onto her desk. It was heavy, professional, and had the logo of one of Bangalore's most expensive corporate law firms embossed on the cover.
She signed, her hand trembling. The courier bolted.
She was left alone in the silence, staring at the document. It was real.
[AGREEMENT FOR EQUITY TRANSFER]
[BETWEEN: BHARAT-TECH SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD.]
[AND: RADHA VARMA (TRUSTEE)]
The kid wasn't lying.
A switch flipped in Aisha's mind. The weary, defeated idealist vanished. The S-Rank talent, the hungry lioness, awoke. Her exhaustion evaporated, replaced by a surge of pure, cold adrenaline.
She didn't just read the contract. She attacked it.
She spread the pages across her desk, her eyes scanning the dense legal text at a speed that would have cost a normal lawyer hours. She saw it instantly.
"Clever bastards," she hissed.
Arjun had been right. Page one was the prize: "Bharat-Tech... hereby transfers 30% (thirty percent) of its equity to a trust held by Radha Varma..."
But the "Krishna" was in the details.
Page 8: A "Performance Clause," stating the equity would be revoked if the trust's "consultant" (Arjun, though unnamed) failed to meet undefined "development milestones."
Page 12: A "Right of First Refusal" clause, written so densely it was almost incomprehensible. It meant if Radha ever wanted to sell, she had to sell back to Prakash for a fixed price—the company's current, worthless valuation.
Page 15: A "Liability Clause," making the new 30% shareholder (Radha!) personally liable for 30% of the company's existing, crippling debt.
It wasn't a contract. It was a trap. It gave them 30% of the risk and 0% of the future reward.
Aisha's lips pulled back in a snarl. They were trying to pass this off on a teacher. They were trying to use her, Aisha Siddiqui, as a rubber stamp.
"Oh, you have no idea who you're dealing with," she whispered.
She pulled out a fresh legal pad, her pen scratching furiously across the page. She didn't just make notes. She rewrote clauses. She eviscerated their trap and laid one of her own.
By midnight, the floor of her office was littered with torn-up pages. Her desk was a war room. And the original contract was bleeding from a dozen cuts, each one marked with her precise, angry, red ink.
She was no longer fighting for her rent. She was fighting for the law. She was fighting for the two lambs—the strange, god-like boy and his terrified mother.
She was, for the first time in her career, having the time of her life.