[Steel]

After a few minutes of watching TV silently, Kusha unwound a little, but she still had that same air of prickly annoyance all evening, and when Sharath tried to kiss her that night on the way to bed, she turned so that his lips contacted her cheek instead of her lips.

"I need to catch up on some work," she said coolly. "You should get some rest. I might get to bed late, so don't wait up."

Rakesh watched her head back to her home office with worried eyes. There was definitely something going on with her, and Sharath was just now realizing he didn't know enough about Rakesh's methods to understand what his plan even was.

...

About an hour later, Sharath lay in bed, doing a little research.

Now that it was becoming clear that Rakesh's plans were having an effect on Kusha, it was important that Sharath understand his enemy. And luckily for him, Rakesh had published a sort of online playbook that Sharath could sneak a peek at.

"Premium Maal" looked just as trashy as the name implied. Rakesh's porn site had an aesthetic of lurid neon lights against velvety blackness. The premise of the site was simple: Rakesh's performers weren't porn stars, allegedly at least. They were normal, average women who had been tempted away from their everyday life by the lure of sexual debauchery.

It was an interesting concept, although Sharath assumed that it had to be bullshit. Rakesh probably just hired amateur porn stars who weren't widely recognizable and sold them to the public as girls-next-door to increase the taboo appeal. But even if it was all fake, the sorts of things that Rakesh wrote about the performers on the website would hopefully tell Sharath a lot about how Rakesh thought these types of seductions should work in theory.

It wasn't necessary for Sharath to pay for an account to browse through the performer profiles, which were part of the "free tour'. Which was lucky, because Kusha monitored their bank statements closely. There was a high chance she would notice if he paid for a porn subscription.

Sharath scrolled through the profiles. Each had a gorgeous desi woman staring at the camera with a smile, wearing clothes ranging from translucent chiffon sarees, plunging blouses, thigh high slit dresses, lingeries to women in empty beaches wearing sarongs, bikinis, or nothing, with an arm strategically covering their breasts. They objectively looked much better in comparison to actresses from adult webseries such as Ullu, Alt balaji, etc., that Sharath used to watch and fap to before meeting Kusha.

Clicking into a few of the profiles, Sharath found that many of the women were married, and a good number of them had been highly-paid professionals like Kusha before entering the world of porn. Or so Rakesh claimed at least. But it was harder than he thought to find useful information in the small blurbs about the various women. It usually just briefly commented that Rakesh had "taught them how to be a slut", or "put them in their place", or other degrading language, before encouraging the reader to "watch their videos to find out more!".

Sharath couldn't help feeling a little aroused by the content of the website, even as it made him uncomfortable. It was a compelling fantasy, even if it was dark and twisted. That an ugly, crass man like Rakesh had some sort of irresistible sexual magnetism. That something about him could turn proud women into sluts, desperate for his cock.