Reyansh Kapoor learned the taste of betrayal before he learned to ride a bicycle. He was seven years old, barefoot on the cold marble floor of his father’s office, watching Arvind Kapoor sign papers that would destroy their family. Not because Arvind was a fool. Not because he trusted the wrong people. But because Vikram Singh had smiled at him across a mahogany desk and promised partnership while slipping a knife between his ribs.

The Kapoor name had meant something once. Arvind had built Kapoor Textiles from a single loom in a Kolkata slum to a factory that supplied fabric to half the boutiques in Mumbai. He employed four hundred workers. He paid their children’s school fees. He believed in loyalty the way priests believed in God, absolutely and without reservation. When Vikram Singh of Surya Fashions approached him with an offer to merge resources, Arvind had seen it as divine blessing. The mighty Singh dynasty, three generations of dressing India’s elite, wanted to partner with a self-made man from the gutters of West Bengal.