Chapter 1: The Glass Cage
Rain hit the windows in sheets, forty-five floors above Manhattan, and Kabir didn’t hear it. He never did. The penthouse was built to keep sound out. Gray stone, black steel, glass so thick the city looked like a photograph rather than a place. He’d chosen it that way on purpose, and he’d long since stopped noticing the silence, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat.
He was hunched over structural drawings for a tower going up in Singapore when the intercom buzzed.
“Sir.” The doorman’s voice, flattened by rain and old wiring. “There’s a young woman here to see you. Says she has a pass tied to your corporate trust. She won’t leave until you come down, or let her up.”
Kabir set down his pencil. No one used that pass. No one but the lawyers who managed a fund he hadn’t looked at in twenty years, and they didn’t show up on a Tuesday in the rain.
“Send her up.”
He told himself it was nothing. He was still telling himself that when the elevator chimed.
The doors opened on a girl in a soaked denim jacket, hair plastered to her jaw, a camera the size of a toaster strapped diagonally across her chest. Combat boots left wet prints on his concrete floor as she stepped out, shook her head like a dog shaking off a lake, and looked straight at him.
The pencil hit the table before Kabir knew he’d let go of it.
He knew that face. He’d spent twenty years trying not to know it: the tilt of the chin, the wide-set eyes, the sharp line of a jaw that used to tip up right before she laughed at him across a library table in Mumbai, back when he was twenty-five and thought he had all the time in the world. For one full second, the floor of his own apartment didn’t feel solid.
“Ananya,” he said, before he could stop himself.
The girl’s mouth curved, but there was nothing soft in it. “Wrong girl.” She dropped her jacket over the arm of his very expensive sofa like it was a coat hook. “I’m Rhea. You’ve been paying people to keep me away from you for twenty years, so I figured I’d save everyone the trouble and show up myself.” She held out a hand he didn’t take. “Nice to finally meet you, Guardian.”
