Something flickers across his face, too quick to catch, there and gone like a light behind a closing door. Relief, maybe. Or something else. Something that makes my chest ache with a hope so fierce it actually hurts.
“I will compensate you, obviously,” he says, straightening his shoulders and reaching for the armour I can see him rebuilding in real time, brick by careful brick. “For your time. The travel expenses. Any professional inconvenience?—”
“Arjun.” I say his name gently, because I can see his hands shaking behind his back and I need him to stop talking about money before I do something deeply unprofessional in this closet, like pull him against my chest and not let go. “You don't need to pay me. We're... I mean, we work together. We're friends. Right?”
The word friends lands between us like a scalpel on a surgical tray. Precise. Sterile. It’s inadequate for what it's trying to describe, and we both know it.
“Colleagues,” he corrects quietly, and the word is so careful, so deliberately chosen, that it tells me more than he probably intended.
“Colleagues,” I agree, because I will call this whatever he needs me to call it. I would call this a CRA tax audit if it meant I got to stand next to him in Rajasthan and pretend that the most brilliant, most infuriatingly guarded man I've ever met chose me. “Colleagues who are about to pull off the world's most high-stakes fake engagement. Easy.”
He looks up at me, and for one long moment, I see everything. The exhaustion, the fear, and the loneliness that lives behind those green eyes like something that's been locked in a room for years. And underneath all of it, something warm and tentative and almost unbearably hopeful that he probably doesn't even know is showing on his face.
Then he blinks, and it's gone, and he's the Dread Prince again.
“I'll send you a dossier,” he says, all business, pulling his phone from his coat pocket. “Comprehensive family profiles. Threat assessments. Behavioural predictions. You'll need to memorize it.”
“A dossier.” I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt so I don't smile. “Like a scouting report? Wait, did you just say threat assessments?”
“If that analogy helps you process the information, then yes. Like a scouting report. And yes, threat assessments. My family can be lethal, and you must come prepared for every eventuality.” He pauses, his thumb hovering over his phone screen, and glances up at me through his lashes in a way that is almost certainly notdeliberate and rearranges my entire circulatory system. “Thank you, Casey.”
Three words. That's all. But he says them so quietly, with so much weight, that they settle against my ribs.
“Anytime, Doc,” I say, and I mean it with every oversized, too-loud, hopeless inch of me.
He nods once, crisp and military-precise, pulls open the closet door, and walks out without looking back. I watch him go, that rigid, elegant stride, hands clasped behind his back, white coat settling around him like a cape. The ER swallows him up in three seconds. Nurses snap to attention. An intern visibly flinches. The Dread Prince is back in formation.
I stay in the supply closet for a very long time.
I stand there, surrounded by saline bags and boxes of nitrile gloves, and I press both hands over my face and breathe. My pulse is a catastrophe. My hands are shaking. I’m six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty pounds and I just got taken out at the knees by a hundred-and-forty-pound, when wet, neurosurgeon in a supply closet, and I’ve never, in my entire life, been this happy and this terrified at the same time.
I’m going to India. I’m going to pretend to be engaged to Arjun Kapoor. I’m going to meet his apparently warlord mother and her retainer astrologer and his eighty strategically ruthless relatives and friends of the family, and I’m going to do it while hiding the fact that I’m so irreversibly in love with him that the word ‘pretend’ is a joke my body physically cannot tell.
I drop my hands and look down at my scrubs. There’s still blood on my Stegosaurus. My fuzzy purple pen is still sitting at the nurses' station. There’s a holographic dinosaur sticker on my stethoscope, and somewhere in this hospital, a nine-year-old named Brayden is still drinking apple juice and showing off his scalp laceration to the nurse like a war wound.
And somewhere three floors above me, Arjun Kapoor is sitting in his pristine, silent office, typing up a family threatassessment dossier for the man he panic-named as his fake fiancé, and he has no idea what he's just done to my heart.
I pull out my phone. I have one text to send before I go back to the floor and finish my shift like a professional.
I open a message to my mom.
Hey Ma. Quick question. Totally hypothetical. How do you feel about India?
Three dots appear almost instantly.
India, the country? Or Indiana, the state?
The country.
I feel very positively about it! Why? Are you going to India?? Is this about a boy???
I stare at the screen. I stare at it for a very long time.
I'll call you tonight.
CASEY JAMES WELLING. DO NOT LEAVE ME ON A CLIFFHANGER.
I shove my phone back into my pocket, press my hands over my face one more time, and walk back out into the screaming chaos of the paediatric ER.