Bangalore’s air was thick with the scent of wet tarmac and jet fuel as Siddharth stepped out of Terminal 1, his backpack slung over his shoulder like it belonged there. Despite the humid July morning, he looked composed, stiff, straight-backed, sharp in every move. His army-trained eyes swept across the waiting crowd before settling on a tall man in jeans and a green hoodie waving wildly like an air traffic marshal on caffeine.

“Major Iyer! Over here!” the guy hollered.

Siddharth winced.

He walked over briskly, keeping his voice low. “Don’t yell out my name like that. You’re Tejas?”

Tejas grinned, unbothered. “Relax, boss. Nobody knows which Iyer you are. Plus, this is Bangalore. Half the men are Iyers.”

Siddharth gave him a long, measured stare. Tejas didn't seem to register it. Or worse—he didn’t care.

“I’m your field contact,” Tejas continued, leading him toward a parked car. “Think of me as your sidekick. Robin to your Batman. Although personally, I think I’ve got more charisma than Robin.”

Siddharth said nothing. His silence had the texture of stone.

Tejas glanced at him. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

“I talk when there’s something worth saying.”

“Oof. Tough crowd,” Tejas muttered, sliding into the driver’s seat.

The ride from the airport was long. Bangalore’s roads were a nightmare of tangled traffic and noisy chaos. While Tejas chattered non-stop about local food, city secrets, and why Siddharth must try filter coffee, the Major stared out of the window, letting the city blur past. A whole new operation, a whole new identity, a whole new face to wear.

His identity, for now, was Siddharth Iyer—Digital Marketing Manager, Zaventra Marketing Pvt. Ltd. No one here would know about his years in Kashmir. No one would connect him to the ghosts he carried.

They reached the apartment in Indiranagar—a sleek, modern flat with high ceilings and a sterile, corporate feel. The kind that offered anonymity, not comfort.

“You’ll be staying here for the rest of your mission,” Tejas said, handing over the keys. “WiFi password is stuck on the fridge. You need anything else?”

Siddharth shook his head. “Just a map of the company’s internal structure. Names, faces.”

Tejas tapped his phone. “Already mailed it to you. Good luck tomorrow. Sneha Ma’am is a firecracker.”

“Who?”

Tejas grinned. “You’ll see.”

***

Next morning, Siddharth stepped out wearing an ironed white shirt tucked neatly into formal grey trousers, his leather shoes shining despite Bangalore’s dusty roads. He was halfway to Zaventra’s headquarters when he noticed a crowd gathered near a broken-down car. A luxury sedan stood lopsided, one tire flat and the driver—an elderly man in a crisp black suit, looked visibly flustered.

Traffic was snarling up behind it. Horns honked like angry geese.

Siddharth was about to walk past when he caught sight of the old man trying to lift the spare tire from the trunk by himself.

“Wait,” Siddharth said, stepping in. “Let me help.”

The man looked up, surprised. “Oh, no, no, it’s okay. I’ve called someone.”

“You’ll get crushed by a bus before that someone arrives.”

Within minutes, Siddharth had rolled up his sleeves, jacked up the car, and changed the tire with clinical efficiency. He barely broke a sweat. The onlookers dispersed, unimpressed that nothing scandalous had occurred.

The old man smiled, brushing off his suit. “Young man, thank you. That was very kind.”

Siddharth wiped his hands on a cloth. “It’s nothing.”

“You didn’t even ask for my name.”

“I’m late for work,” Siddharth replied simply, already walking away.

“Wait,” the man called after him. “Where do you work?”

Siddharth glanced over his shoulder. “Zaventra.”

The old man’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. He simply smiled, shaking his head in amused wonder.

***

Siddharth stood at the base of Zaventra Marketing Pvt. Ltd.—a gleaming tower of glass and ego carved into Bangalore’s grey morning. The building mirrored a sky still undecided about rain. He adjusted his ID badge, the lamination cool against his thumb, and took a single step forward.

He never saw her coming.

It wasn’t a bump. It was a small collision with the force of a storm compressed into five feet of fury. A shoulder slammed into his chest, paper sliced the air like startled birds, and a cup of coffee arced up, hung there weightless for a cruel heartbeat, and cascaded in a dark, unforgiving streak down the front of a navy pantsuit.

Her heels skidded half an inch. His hand shot out—reflex, muscle memory, the kind that didn’t ask permission—to catch her elbow before gravity dragged her down. For a second, the world reduced itself to a few undeniable facts: the press of her bones under his fingers, the heat of her anger pulsing through the air, the sharp citrus-and-jasmine snap of perfume mixing with scalding coffee and something coppery like blood memory that wasn’t really there.

She steadied herself, yanked her arm back, and looked up.

Siddharth had never seen eyes sharpen that fast. They weren’t just annoyed. They were predatory. They measured. They cut. The rest of her was small, compact, a blade disguised as jewelry. Dusky skin, sleek hair pulled back for war, lips that curved into expressions like thrown knives. She was power packaged with ruthless efficiency—and she was drenched in coffee.

“You have got to be joking,” she said, her voice a blade sliding from a sheath. Not loud. Dangerous.

Siddharth’s jaw flexed, the soldier in him searching for calm ground. “You walked into—”

“Don’t,” she snapped, holding up a palm that was stained brown at the edges. “Don’t finish that sentence. If you tell me I walked into you, I will personally ensure your ID gets deactivated before you even warm your swivel chair.”

Behind them, the glass doors inhaled and exhaled people, the lobby security guard pretending not to watch, a receptionist swallowing a grin. A delivery boy slowed his bike to stare. The city paused to enjoy the spectacle the way cities do.

Siddharth lowered his hand, the one that had caught her. “Are you hurt?”

She blinked. Slowly. “Hurt? Oh, I’m enchanted, Mr—” her gaze fell to his badge “—Mr. Siddharth Iyer, Digital Marketing Manager.” She tasted the words like something bitter. “You just redecorated me with a latte five minutes before a board meeting.”

He followed the line of coffee soaking into the sharp navy of her suit, trickling toward the crisp white blouse beneath, the stain blooming like a deliberate insult.

“That wasn’t a latte,” he said, because precision was a reflex he couldn’t kill. “Americano.”

She stared at him. The line of her mouth didn’t move. The voice, when it came, had gone colder. “And you’re a forensic barista?”

“Just observant.”

“Of course you are. Observant enough to walk through glass and people and common sense.” She flicked a coffee-slicked file open with two fingers. The top page was ruined, ink bleeding like a wound. “Do you even understand what you’ve done?”

“I’ll replace the documents,” he said. “And your—” he caught himself before he said blouse, aware of how that would sound “—jacket.”

Her laugh was not a laugh. It was a weapon that happened to be shaped like one. “You’ll replace my jacket? How charming. Will you also explain to my board why the CMO of Zaventra looks like she lost a wrestling match with a filter coffee machine?”

He felt something old and combative uncoil in his chest. “If the CMO of Zaventra believed in walking like she had peripheral vision, the filter coffee machine might still be alive.”

That did it. The temperature dropped. She stepped closer, heels clicking, chin lifting by a fraction that redefined the geometry between them. She was a storm packed into a body that shouldn’t have had room for so much weather.

“Did you just blame me,” she said softly, “for your failure to walk in a straight line?”

“I didn’t fail,” he said, equally soft. “I adapted. You were headed at an unsafe speed for a lobby.”

“An unsafe speed?” she repeated, as if cataloguing the phrase for future use in homicide. “What are you, traffic police?”

“On time,” he said. “You should try it.”

Her eyes flashed. “Mr. Iyer, I don’t know how you got hired, and frankly I don’t have time to care, but here’s your orientation in ten seconds: I am your boss’s boss. I run this floor, half the one above it, and most of the disaster they call marketing strategy across three verticals. You don’t speak to me about unsafe speed. You don’t speak to me unless spoken to. And you don’t show up on your first day turning me into a coffee mural.”

He held her stare, the quiet inside him settling like snow, hiding the rock underneath. “Noted.”

“No, not noted,” she said, stepping even closer. He caught the precise, expensive scent again—citrus, jasmine, steel. “You will walk into that building, beg facilities for a portable steamer, get this stain out in the next three minutes, fetch fresh copies of every document you destroyed, and pray the board doesn’t ask why the CMO looks like an abstract painting.”

“You want me to clean your clothes?” He didn’t inflect it. He allowed it to hang there, offense bleeding into amusement and back again.

She smiled like a guillotine. “I want you to fix the mess you made. Or do you only function when someone else clears your corners?”

The soldier in him bristled. The spy in him observed. The man did neither; he simply shifted his weight, aware suddenly of the weight disparity between them and how little it mattered. “I’ll get the documents,” he said. “The stain is physics. And you’re late.”

“Don’t you dare tell me I’m late.”

“You’re already five minutes behind your ‘unsafe speed,’” he said, glancing at the wall clock through the glass. “Arguing costs you more time.”

For a second—for the briefest second—he saw it: the flicker of calculation in her gaze, the way leaders triage disasters without letting anyone see the stitches. She inhaled, steadied, and then the fury returned with better posture.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said, voice returning to that precise register that could slice steel and butter both. “You will go to HR and IT and Facilities and Legal if you have to, and you will produce the marketing deck I’m presenting to the board in”—she checked the time—“eight minutes. You will then send an apology email to the board assistant explaining that you delayed me. You will CC me. You will not attempt to be witty. And then you will go to your desk and stay there until I decide whether you’re useful or a hazard.”

“You want me to take the blame.”

“Welcome to corporate life, Mr. Iyer.” A thin smile. “If you wanted fairness, you should have joined the Army.”

Something flashed behind his eyes—snow, blood, a scream that never really left. It was gone before she could see it. He let the quiet cover it like a tarp. “I’ll get your deck.”

“You’ll get it formatted exactly the way I like it,” she said, pivoting on a heel that struck the marble like a verdict. “Arial Narrow for the charts, Roboto for the headers, no SmartArt, no gradient backgrounds, no stock photos unless they look expensive, and if you put a pie chart in there I will end your employment by lunchtime.”

He nodded once. “Message received.”

“And Mr. Iyer?”

He paused. “Yes.”

“If you ever lay a hand on me again without permission—even to ‘steady’ me—I will have Security escort you out and HR rewrite your employee ID as former.”

He held her gaze. “I caught you before you fell.”

“I would have preferred the floor,” she said, and the way she said it made him believe it. “The floor doesn’t condescend.”

She turned and started toward the elevators, coffee darkening the navy into something that looked like war paint. People parted before her without knowing why. The receptionist pretended to arrange pens. The security guard found the CCTV monitor fascinating.

“Ms. Shetty,” he said.

She stopped. Turned just her head. The angle implied this had better be worth it.

“You dropped this,” he said, bending to pick up a single sheet that had skated beneath a chair. He held it out. It was smudged, but the headline was legible: Q3 Brand Strategy—Board Version.

She took it without brushing his fingers. “Of course you’d pick up the one page I don’t need anymore.” Then, after a beat, because she could not resist the final cut: “Try not to crash into any more senior leadership on your way to the printer.”

“And you,” he said, “try not to carry scalding liquids into combat.”

Her mouth curved, not into a smile. Into something that promised future battles. “We’re not in combat, Mr. Iyer. We’re in marketing.”

He let his eyes flick briefly to the stain, back to her face. “Same thing.”

The elevator arrived with a polite chime. She stepped in without looking away, pressed the button, watched the doors begin to slide shut with the attention one gives to a rifle sight. Just before they met, she spoke, low, like a promise wrapped in silk.

“You’re a problem,” she said. “And I’m excellent at solving problems.”

The doors cut her in half and then erased her. He stood there listening to the softened hum of cables and counterweights carrying his enemy upward. The lobby exhaled. Somewhere, a printer shrieked to life like a summoned demon.

He looked down at his shirt—one errant streak of coffee along the cuff where her sleeve had brushed him. He wiped it with his thumb, didn’t bother to make it clean, and turned toward the admin corridor with the kind of focus he usually reserved for more lethal tasks.

“Nightmare in heels,” he muttered, not the amused concession of a man charmed against his will, but the assessment of a soldier sighting a hostile position. “And harder to navigate than a kill zone.”

Then he went to war with HR, Facilities, IT, and a printer that smelled faintly of burning, because this battlefield didn’t care how many medals you didn’t wear. It cared if you delivered slides in seven minutes flat and made it look easy.