Chapter 7 #2
He turns and looks at me, and his expression is not intimidated.
It is not overwhelmed or resentful or any of the things I had braced for.
It is something worse. It is something soft, and wondering, and achingly perceptive.
Because Casey Welling is looking at this palace and seeing, with that devastating clarity he carries like a weapon he doesn't know he's holding, the boy who left.
“I grew up in a bungalow with a screened-in porch,” he breathes. “My dad rebuilt the porch twice because the raccoons kept getting in. It didn’t stop them.” He pauses. “This is incredible, Arjun.”
“It's a prison with beautiful landscaping,” I say, and I don't mean to say it, it comes out before I can clamp my jaw shut, raw and honest and completely unacceptable, and I immediately look away.
Casey says nothing. But his hand, resting on the seat between us, moves one inch closer to mine. And stays there.
The car pulls through the main courtyard and stops at the base of a wide stone staircase that leads to the central entrance.
Staff are already emerging, a small, efficient choreography of people in crisp uniforms, ready to take bags, offer water, usher us inside.
This is how arrival works at the Kapoor estate. It is a production.
I step out of the car and into the dry, fragrant heat, and before I can straighten my jacket, a voice hits me like a thrown object.
“Well. The prodigal prince returns.”
Priya is standing at the top of the stairs.
My sister is twenty-nine years old, and she is a precision instrument in human form.
She is slim, middling height, with striking, long brown curls that cascade over one shoulder with a carelessness that I know takes her approximately forty-five minutes to achieve.
She has our grandmother's sharp, intelligent green eyes, and she is wearing a casual salwar kameez in deep blue that manages to look simultaneously effortless and like it costs a small fortune, which it almost certainly does.
Her arms are crossed. Her head is tilted.
One eyebrow is raised at an angle that communicates, with lethal efficiency, that she has questions, she has opinions, and she has had approximately twenty-four hours to prepare both since Mother called to announce my impending arrival with a mystery fiancé.
Her eyes flick to me. They perform a rapid, comprehensive assessment of my physical state, my expression, and my posture, and I watch her catalogue the data with the same cool efficiency that I bring to a pre-operative scan.
Then her eyes move to Casey.
She looks at him for a long time. She takes in the full six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound, blonde-curled, blue-eyed, wrinkled-henley-wearing, sweat-dampened reality of him, and her other eyebrow joins the first.
“Arjun,” she says, her voice carrying down the stone steps with crystalline, aristocratic clarity.
“When Mother said you were bringing someone home, I expected... well, frankly, I expected a carbon copy of yourself. Some gaunt, terrified surgeon with immaculate cuticles and a pathological fear of carbohydrates.” Her eyes sweep Casey from boots to curls. “This is not that.”
“Priya,” I say, climbing the steps with my hands clasped behind my back. “This is Dr. Casey Welling. My fiancé.”
Casey climbs the stairs behind me. Each step makes the scale of him more apparent, and by the time he reaches the top and stands beside me, Priya has to tilt her head back to look at his face. She is not intimidated; nothing intimidates her. She merely adjusts her angle of assessment and continues.
“Dr. Welling,” she says, extending her hand.
“I'm Priya, Arjun’s sister. Otherwise known as the reasonable one.
I have many questions, but I'll start with the most pressing.” She pauses, her eyes bright with an intelligence that misses nothing.
“How on earth did you get my brother to agree to bring someone home?
We've been trying for years. Did you use anaesthesia?”
Casey laughs, that deep, booming, full-body laugh that echoes off the stone walls of the courtyard like a detonation, and I watch three members of the household staff physically startle.
“No anaesthesia,” he says, taking her hand and shaking it with the easy, enveloping warmth that he radiates like a space heater. “Just persistent charm and a superb magic trick.”
Priya's mouth twitches. It is the Kapoor mouth twitch, the one that means someone has surprised us and we are trying very hard not to show it. I know it because I do it. I do it constantly around Casey.
“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 me everything.
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.