Chapter 2: Who are you?

ARMANI

*Who are you?*

Eight months and she picks tonight to ask.

Not a random Tuesday. Not after one of those late conversations where something almost real slipped through before one of us pulled it back. Tonight. When her fiancé had brutally thrust inside her best friend in doggy style and her father had looked her in the eye and told her it didn’t matter.

Tonight was when Drisana Varma finally wanted to know who I was.

I watched her through the camera I planted by the nightlight at her door. Positioned to cover the entire room. She thought the laptop camera was the only one. She had taped over it three weeks after I let the ring habit slip, my one moment of sloppiness in eight months, a mistake I wouldn’t repeat. She checked the tape religiously every night before bed, pressing her finger against it like a small private ritual. It almost made me smile every time.

She was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up, phone in both hands, lower lip caught between her teeth. She did that when she was concentrating on something. Working through a problem. Filing and sorting and building her next move even when the current one had just collapsed under her.

She bit her lip and something pulled tight in my chest. I pressed my thumb against the scar on my left hand and held it there until the feeling passed.

I was barely hanging on by a fucking thread.

Every ounce of self-control I had was screaming at me not to drive over there, kick her damn door open, and kiss the hell out of her. I wanted to kiss her hard, deep, and filthy until those juicy lips were swollen and bruised red. I wanted her gasping, choking for air, her hands clawing at me while I stole every breath from her lungs.

I needed it. Needed her.

Just the thought of leaving her there afterward, dizzy, panting, and marked by me, had my hands shaking on the laptop keyboard.

Fuck. I was losing it.

*Hiiiiiii?????? Are you there?*

I read it twice. Then I typed the only thing I was going to give her tonight.

Someone who has been watching you long enough to know that what happened tonight wasn’t an accident.

I watched her face on the screen. Her eyes went wide. She jerked up from the bed immediately and crossed to her dressing table, opened her laptop, and checked the tape over the camera. Her lips moved. I turned up the audio on the room feed.

“How the fuck did he know about what happened tonight? I didn’t tell him anything yet.”

I almost smiled again. She was already three moves ahead of where most people would be and still two moves behind where she needed to be. That was the thing about Drisana. She was the smartest person in almost every room she walked into. Almost.

Her text came in.

*What does that mean?*

I closed the laptop.

Let her sit with it. She had spent her whole life getting ahead of situations before they could surprise her. One unanswered question in the dark was not going to kill her. It was going to keep her up though. A sleepless night with an unanswered question was the least I owed her.

I hadn’t planned to send that last message. That was the problem with Drisana. Eight months of clean discipline and she could still make me sloppy without being in the same room. She asked one question and I gave her a grenade because some part of me wanted her pulling at threads before I was ready for her to find where they ended.

I pressed my thumb against the scar and held it there.

I had watched her for years before I ever made contact. Years of knowing exactly where she was, what she ordered, how she held her coffee cup with both hands when she was tired even though she would never admit she was tired. Years of watching her manage everyone around her with the precision of someone who had learned early that people were safer as pieces on a board than as anything real.

For most of those years, I told myself it was manageable because of what I believed about her. That she was family. That the feeling I couldn’t name was something distorted by grief and proximity and the fact that she had a face that did something to my chest I had no clear explanation for.

I believed that for a long time.

Then I overheard my stepbrothers talking one night. The name they mentioned changed everything I knew. Exactly what I needed to put a name or reason on why I was obsessing over Drisana.

Drisana Varma shared none of my blood. I had sat with that for three days and not pulled up the feed once. Told myself it changed things. Told myself I could stop.

On the fourth day, I opened it before I was even fully awake. I stopped telling myself I could stop.

She wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t family. She wasn’t connected to me by anything I could point to and justify. She was just the one thing in my life that had never been assigned to me. Enzo had not manufactured it. Nobody had handed it to me and told me what to do with it. It had happened on its own, slowly and then completely, and that made it the only real thing I had.

Nobody was taking it from me.

Not Enzo. Not Raj Varma. Not Carter Reyes, who had just spent the evening with his hands on Sloane while Drisana drove across the city in jeans that Sloane had told her looked good. Carter who had no idea what he had been given access to and had wasted it completely.

She belonged to me and I belonged to her and the only difference between us was that she didn’t know it yet.

I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. My cock was hard. It had been hard since I watched her bite her lip. That was nothing new. Most nights ended like this.

I yanked open the drawer and grabbed her silk scarf. The one I stole from her that night at the restaurant. I was supposed to hand it back like a good boy but I didn’t. I pressed it to my face and inhaled. Her scent was still buried in it, sweet, warm and a little floral. It made my head spin.

God… she must have smelled fucking incredible wrapped in that.

I wrapped it around my cock and stroked. Slow at first. Then faster. I kept my eyes on the blank screen of the laptop, but I wasn't seeing it. I was seeing her. The way she bit her lip. The way her fingers twisted that ring.

I came into the scarf. Lay there with my chest heaving and the ruined silk in my fist.

My phone buzzed.

I let it ring. I already knew who it was. He had been patient with me for eight months. Sending his check-ins, his updates, his quiet reminders that the mission was still the mission. He wasn't a man who tolerated patience being wasted.

After tonight, I wouldn't need this pathetic piece of cloth anymore. I was finally going to see her in person. Touch her. Smell her real skin, not this faded ghost of her scent.

The call ended. A text came through immediately.

*We need to talk. Tomorrow. Don't make me come to you.*

I set the phone face down on the bed.

Tomorrow was tomorrow. Tonight Drisana was awake in the dark with my question sitting unanswered on her phone and no idea that the man who sent it was already planning exactly how he was going to introduce himself.

She thought she was the one who set traps.

She had no idea she had been walking into mine for years.