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ISHANI'S POV
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I have walked into crime scenes, abandoned warehouses, and interrogation rooms without blinking.
But there is something about walking into a room full of New York's most powerful people — in a dress that fits like a second skin and heels that add three inches to legs that already didn't need the help — that feels different.
Not nervous. Never nervous.
Just... aware.
Desai's penthouse was everything old money looked like when it was trying to appear casual — marble floors that cost more than most people's apartments, a skyline view that stretched from one glass wall to the other, champagne that appeared in your hand before you'd decided you wanted it. The kind of party where everyone already knew everyone and the conversations were mostly performance.
I stood at the entrance for exactly three seconds — enough time to read the room — and then I walked in.
I felt it immediately. That shift. The way the air in a room changes when something enters it that wasn't there before. A few heads turned. Then a few more. A man mid-conversation forgot what he was saying. Another one's gaze followed me from the door to the center of the room with the helpless focus of someone who had completely lost control of their own eyeballs.
I didn't look at any of them.
I knew what I looked like tonight. I had known since I looked in that mirror. I wasn't arrogant about it — arrogance implies you're surprised by something. I wasn't surprised. I was simply aware of what I was working with, the way a chess player is aware of every piece on the board.
Tonight I was the queen.
"You just made twelve people forget their own names," Raghav murmured beside me, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of sparkling water. He held one out. "Also I counted. Four men walked into things."
"Only four?"
"The fifth one was looking at me."
I almost smiled. "Stay close but not obvious. If you see Vikram Malhotra, don't stare at him."
"Unlike literally everyone staring at you right now?"
"Raghav."
"Right. Professional. Got it." He drifted away toward the canapés, looking almost but not entirely unlike a detective.
I moved through the room slowly, deliberately, letting the evening settle around me. I picked up sparkling water from a passing tray, found a position near the windows where I could see the entire space without being cornered, and began to work.
Faces. Names from Mehta's briefings. Old business connections, government adjacents, people with clean public records and not-so-clean private ones. I catalogued them quietly, the way I always did — filing, cross-referencing, building the map.
I had been there eleven minutes when I felt it.
A gaze.
Not the wandering unfocused kind I'd been collecting since I walked in. This one was different. Deliberate. The kind that meant someone had decided to look at you, not just reacted to you.
I didn't turn immediately. I finished my thought, took a slow sip of water, and then — casually, as though I was simply admiring the skyline — I turned.
He was across the room.
Vikram Malhotra was exactly what his file had suggested — tall, composed, dressed in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than my monthly salary, with the kind of face that was almost unfairly well-constructed. Sharp jaw, dark eyes, the easy posture of a man who had never once walked into a room and wondered if he belonged there.
He was already looking at me.
Not the way the other men had looked — with that dazed, automatic quality. This was focused. Considered. Like he had seen something that required his full attention and had simply... given it.
I held his gaze for exactly two seconds. Then I turned back to the window.
Three minutes later, he was beside me.
I didn't turn right away. Let him come. Let him speak first. I already knew he would.
"I don't believe we've met."
His voice was smooth. Measured. The voice of a man who chose every word before it left his mouth.
I turned then, unhurried, and looked at him with the same calm I'd give anyone. "We haven't."
"Vikram Malhotra." He didn't offer his hand immediately — he offered his name, which was its own kind of power move. Like the name was supposed to do the work.
"Ishani," I said. Just the first name. Let him want the rest of it.
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. He wasn't used to that. Good.
"Can I get you a drink, Ishani?"
"I don't drink."
A beat. Most men stumbled here — tried to convince, offered alternatives, made it weird. Vikram simply nodded, like my answer was entirely reasonable, and signaled a passing server for two sparkling waters without being asked. Smooth. Very smooth.
"You're not from this circuit," he said, handing me the glass. "I know most of the people in this room."
"Should I apologize for that?"
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. "What do you do?"
"Wedding planning." I let it land naturally, easily, the way truth lands. The best lies always feel like truth. "Events, high-end productions. I'm relatively new to New York."
"Weddings." He looked at me for a moment with those careful dark eyes. Something was turning over behind them — I could see it, the way you see calculation moving under still water.
"Something funny about that?" I asked.
"Not at all." He tilted his head slightly. "Actually — it's remarkably convenient."
I looked at him. "How so?"
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that wasn't empty — it was full of someone deciding exactly how to say something.
"My younger brother is getting married," he said finally. "In three weeks. The wedding is being held at the Blackwood estate outside the city." He looked at me directly. "We don't currently have a wedding planner."
I kept my face perfectly neutral. Interesting.
"And?" I said.
"And—" another pause, this one deliberate, like he was choosing the next move on a board, "—my grandfather has been asking me to bring someone. To the wedding. As my..." he seemed to consider the word, "...companion."
I stared at him.
I was not a person who got played. I had been in interrogation rooms with men three times his age who had tried and failed. I had read manipulation the way other people read weather — before it arrived, before it even formed.
But Vikram Malhotra was good. He was very, very good.
Because he wasn't pretending this wasn't a transaction. He was laying it out clearly, calmly, like a business proposition — which somehow made it more convincing than any flattery would have. He wasn't saying you're so beautiful, I had to meet you. He was saying you are useful to me and I am useful to you and we are both intelligent enough to acknowledge that.
He was right, of course.
He just didn't know how right.
"You're asking me," I said slowly, "to be your fake girlfriend. At your brother's wedding. To a man you met six minutes ago."
"Eight minutes," he corrected, with a calm that was almost insulting. "And I'm asking you because you're clearly intelligent, clearly composed, and clearly not the kind of person who would be overwhelmed by a room full of powerful people." His eyes held mine. "I'm also offering to pay for your services. Both the wedding planning contract and the... personal arrangement."
The wedding planning contract.
There it was.
I felt the mission click into place like a key turning in a lock. He was handing me exactly what I needed — access, cover, legitimacy — wrapped in a business deal and presented with a glass of sparkling water.
I let the silence sit for a moment. Let him think I was deciding.
I was deciding. Just not about what he thought.
"I'll need to know the details," I said finally. "The wedding, the family, the expectations."
"Of course."
"And the arrangement ends the moment the wedding does."
"Naturally."
"And if at any point I'm uncomfortable with something—"
"You walk." He said it immediately, without hesitation. "No questions."
I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back, steady as stone.
"Alright, Mr. Malhotra," I said.
"Vikram."
"Alright, Vikram." I held out my hand.
He shook it. His grip was firm and brief and entirely professional.
Neither of us smiled.
We had just made a deal — him thinking he'd gotten a convenient plus-one and a wedding planner.
Me knowing I'd just walked through the front door of the Malhotra empire.
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AUTHOR'S POV
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ADRIAN
The Blackwood Industries boardroom on the thirty-eighth floor had a view of the entire city.
Adrian didn't look at it.
He sat at the head of the table — twelve men arranged on either side, all of them senior, all of them experienced, all of them watching him with the particular careful attention of people who had learned, through observation or experience, that missing something Adrian Blackwood said was not a mistake you made twice.
The presentation on the screen behind him showed a shipping company. Clean financials. Reasonable acquisition price. The representative from the company sat at the far end of the table with his hands folded and his expression professionally optimistic.
Adrian looked at the file in front of him.
"Page nine," he said.
The room turned to page nine.
"The insurance claims. Fourteen in three years." He didn't look up. "Four of those claims were processed through a subsidiary that no longer exists." He closed the file. "Which means either your risk management is catastrophically incompetent—" he finally looked up, at the representative directly, "—or you're moving something through those ships that isn't on the manifest."
The representative's professional optimism developed a crack. "Mr. Blackwood, I assure you—"
"I'm not interested in your assurances." Adrian's voice was level, unhurried, with the finality of a door closing. "I'm interested in the fact that you brought this deal to my table without disclosing those claims, which suggests you either didn't know — which makes you incompetent — or you did know — which makes you something else entirely." He let that land. "Neither version ends with me signing anything."
Silence.
"Luca." His head of acquisitions looked up immediately. "Contact their board directly. Not through him." A glance at the representative that lasted exactly one second. "And remove this from my calendar."
He stood.
Every person at the table stood with him — automatically, instinctively, the way grass bends when the wind decides to move.
Adrian walked out without another word. Into the corridor, past his assistant's desk, into his office — a vast, dark-furnished room at the corner of the building where two walls of glass met and the whole city sat below him like something that had agreed to stay in its place.
He stood at the window.
His phone had six messages he hadn't read. A meeting in twenty minutes he would shorten to ten. A family lawyer who had been trying to reach him about the estate arrangements for the wedding.
The wedding.
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
His estate — his silence, his space, the one place on earth that belonged entirely to him — was about to be handed over to florists and caterers and the Malhotra family for three weeks. He had said no. He had been very clear about no.
And yet here was his assistant, appearing in the doorway with the expression of someone delivering news they would rather not deliver.
"Sir. Your mother called again."
Adrian looked out at the city.
"And your grandmother."
The city looked back.
He was silent for a long moment — the kind of silence that wasn't empty but full, weighted, the silence of a man who had made a decision and was in the process of despising it.
"Reschedule Tuesday," he said finally. "And tell the estate staff to prepare the east wing."
His assistant blinked. "Sir?"
"For guests." His voice was flat. Resigned in a way that sounded almost like a threat. "I'll be there."
He did not turn from the window.
The city sprawled below him, indifferent and enormous, full of people living lives that were messy and loud and full of exactly the kind of things he had spent years building walls against.
Three weeks, he told himself.
Just three weeks.
End of Chapter 3