“A magic trick,” she repeats. Her eyes slide to me, and in that single glance I can see everything: the curiosity, the suspicion, the sharp, sisterly radar pinging with the knowledge that something about this situation does not add up, and the equally sharp awareness that whatever is happening, her brother looks different. Not happier, not softer, nothing that obvious. Just... different. Like a photograph that has been shifted one degree on its axis.
“We'll talk later,” she says to me, and it is not a question. It is a statement of absolute fact, delivered with the quiet, unwavering certainty of a sister who has been dismantling her brother's defences since childhood and has no intention of stopping now.
“I look forward to it,” I lie.
She smiles, bright and dangerous, and loops her arm through Casey's with a possessiveness that makes something unreasonable flare up within me. “Come on, Dr. Welling. Let me show you around before Mother descends. You'll want to be fortified.”
“Call me Casey,” he says, letting the Kapoor steer him with the agreeable ease of a man who has no idea he has just been claimed.
“Casey, then.” Priya leads him through the archway into the central courtyard, and I hear her voice drifting back: “Tell meeverything. Start from the beginning. Leave nothing out. If you lie to me, I'll find out because my brother lies the worst in this family, and he has almost certainly redacted whatever he told you about his childhood.”
I stand at the top of the stairs, watching them disappear into the cool shadow of the courtyard. Casey's blonde head bobs above Priya's dark one. His laugh echoes off the marble. He is already talking, gesturing wildly with his hands, and Priya is listening with her head tilted at that angle that means she is absorbing every word and cross-referencing it against her own intelligence files.
I should be alarmed. I should be strategizing, running interference, managing the variables. Priya is brilliant, she is relentless, and she will see through this arrangement faster than anyone except Daadi. She is the first layer of defence I need to penetrate, and I should be calculating my approach.
But I am standing here watching Casey Welling make my sister laugh in my family's courtyard, and the sound of it is so unexpected, so bright against the ancient sandstone walls, that for one traitorous, unguarded moment, I forget that any of this is fake.
Then a voice reaches me from inside the house.
“Arjun, darling! Is that you? Come in, come in! Parwinder, bring the tea!”
My mother.
I close my eyes. I take one breath. I clasp my hands behind my back.
And I walk through the archway toward the sound of a teacup clinking against bone china, and the razor-sharp smile of the woman who has been planning this moment since the day I left.
I can see her through the open doors of the main drawing-room, framed like a portrait in the archway. She is standing at the far end of the room beside a carved rosewood table, pouring tea from a silver pot with the unhurried precision of a tactician who believes timing is a weapon and has never once lost a battle.
She is wearing sea-foam green, again. Of course she is. The silk sari is still draped with an elegance so practiced it looks effortless, and the massive diamond on her finger catches the afternoon light that streams through the arched windows and throws tiny, sharp rainbows across the marble floor.
She looks up. She smiles.
The smile is brilliant. It is warm. It reaches her eyes. And underneath it, moving with the focused, purposeful efficiency of a surgeon's blade, is the kind of strategic intelligence that has toppled careers and rearranged marriages and redrawn the social map of three continents.
“There you are, darling,” she says, setting down the teapot. “Come. Sit. Tell me everything about this fiancé of yours.” Her eyes drift past me, toward the courtyard where Casey's laugh is still echoing off the stone.
“I look forward to meeting him properly. I caught a glimpse from the window. He's...” She pauses, selecting her word with the care of a jeweller choosing a setting. “Substantial.”
The teacup clinks against the saucer. The bougainvillea rustles outside the open window.
The war has begun.
Chapter 8
The Matriarch Strikes
Casey
Meera Kapoor is the most terrifying person I’ve ever met, and I once got crosschecked into the boards by a six-foot-five defence-man named Svensson who had a missing front tooth and a personal vendetta against my ribcage.
Svensson was easier.
Svensson hit you, and you knew where you stood. There was a clarity to it. A man that size, skating at you with that look in his eye, you had approximately one point five seconds to brace, absorb, and decide if you were getting back up. Simple. Binary. Hockey math, the best kind of math, really.
Meera Kapoor doesn’t hit you. Meera Kapoor pours you tea from a silver pot, adjusts the angle of the cup so the handle faces exactly the right direction, smiles at you with a warmth so genuine it reaches her eyes, and then asks you a question that slides between your ribs like a stiletto blade so finely crafted you don't feel the cut until you're already bleeding out.
We’re sitting in the main drawing room of the Kapoor estate, and I use the word ‘room' loosely, because this space is roughly the size of my entire apartment and contains more square footage ofPersian rug than I have of total living area. The ceiling is high, arched, painted with intricate floral patterns in gold and deep red. The furniture is carved rosewood, upholstered in silk, and arranged with the kind of precise spacing that suggests someone has deliberately measured the distance between each piece with a ruler. Afternoon light pours through the arched windows, catching the dust motes and turning them into tiny, floating galaxies.