I sit, forehead pressed to my knees, letting the emptiness of the room close in around me. Shadows cling to the walls, absorbing what little light there is, making it feel as if the whole space is breathing, alive with secrets. This is how The Organization wants it: sterile, unmarked, a place where people like me and Kavya drift between one life and the next without attachment, without memory. It's how they keep us… clean.
I don't know who I am anymore, not in a way that means anything. I don't even know if I care to remember. There's only the role, the missions that filter down to me through coded messages and whispers, each one filling my mind with places I'll never truly see and names I'll never truly know. But somewhere, deep in the folds of that darkness, I catch glimpses of something else—half-formed memories that vanish as quickly as they come. Maybe it's just exhaustion. Or maybe there's a piece of myself out there, wandering the spaces I can't reach.
A faint knock pulls me from the haze, and the door creaks open. I don't lift my head, but I can already tell who it is—Kavya. She stands there for a moment, letting her presence settle into the room. I sense her eyes, sharp and dark, watching me, her expression as calm and unreadable as ever. She moves soundlessly, folding her long legs to the floor beside me, her gaze flickering over me like she's assessing some invisible crack that might be forming.
"They've given us another one," she says softly, her voice slicing through the silence. No details, no prelude. Just the way The Organization trained her.
I raise my head, the room tilting slightly as I blink against the dimness, meeting her gaze. For a moment, I wonder if she sees the fractures that I can feel, if she knows what it's like to be haunted by the fragments of someone else's life. But I know better than to ask. Kavya was built for this, each step deliberate, each thought placed exactly where it should be. She's 6 feet of controlled elegance, dark hair cascading over one shoulder, her brown eyes as steady as stone.
"Jaipur this time," she murmurs, letting the name linger in the air between us, heavy with whatever danger awaits us there. "They want us there by dawn."
Jaipur. It tastes strange, like I should know it, like I've walked those streets before. But the memory slips, dissolving, like every other fleeting thought of the life that must have belonged to me once. Now I'm just Envy, a codename, a hollow name The Organization handed to me like a blank slate. Something to fill with missions and operations, with shadows and smoke.
Kavya stands, stretching out a hand to me, her grip firm when I take it. She doesn't offer words, and I don't expect them; this place doesn't leave room for sympathy. We're just assets, pieces to be moved across a board with exacting precision.
But as I rise, a sudden stillness fills the room. For a fleeting moment, the world outside—the cold, calculating mission ahead—feels distant. It's just her and me, the quiet stretching between us, heavy and palpable. My pulse quickens, not from the mission or the weight of the coming assignment, but from the unspoken tension that lingers between us. I can feel it now, a charge in the air, something unresolved. Something more than just two agents bound by duty.
I catch the faintest shift in her posture as she steps closer, her eyes never leaving mine. There's a subtle pull, something magnetic, something that tells me she can feel it too. The space between us grows smaller, and before I can stop myself, my heart beats faster, a thud in my chest that feels louder than it should.
She doesn't look away. Neither do I.
Then, in a moment that feels suspended in time, she reaches out, her fingers brushing the edge of my arm, grazing against my skin. It's a fleeting touch, but it feels like an electric current that courses through me, igniting something that I can't quite place. My breath catches, but I don't move away.
Kavya's gaze softens for a split second, something raw flickering in her brown eyes, something that's usually buried beneath layers of control. My mind races—this moment, this proximity—it's dangerous. It's everything we've been trained not to feel. We're just assets. Just tools. But the pull between us… it's there. It's real.
Her hand lingers, just a breath away from mine, and I can almost hear my own heartbeat pounding in the silence. I'm not sure what I'm waiting for. I can feel the tension between us like a storm that's about to break. Maybe, just maybe, we're both wondering if this—this closeness—means something more.
She steps even closer, and for an instant, her breath mingles with mine. The space between us narrows until I can feel the heat of her body, her presence overwhelming in a way I wasn't prepared for. Her lips are inches from mine now, and I can feel the pull, the weight of it, like the rest of the world has fallen away.
And then, just as suddenly as it came, I stop myself. I pull away, a surge of clarity crashing through the fog of desire.
"Stop it," I whisper harshly, my voice rough in the stillness. "They're watching us."
The words hang in the air like a cold slap, cutting through the moment we were about to cross into something dangerous, something irreversible. Kavya freezes, her expression shifting just slightly. She doesn't pull away immediately but meets my gaze, her eyes narrowing slightly in silent acknowledgment of the truth in my words. The eyes of The Organization are always on us, monitoring, calculating. Our every move, our every thought—they know. They control.
Kavya exhales slowly, the tension in her body loosening just a fraction. "You're right," she says, her voice low but steady, though the faintest trace of something unspoken lingers between us. She steps back, though I can still feel the weight of her presence, just inches away from mine. The air between us crackles with the leftover energy of what could have been, and I can't shake the feeling that something fundamental has shifted.
I can't decide if I'm relieved or disappointed. Maybe both. All I know is that I don't have time to think about it. We have a mission to complete, and that's all that matters.
She straightens up and turns, her back to me once more, the cool, controlled Kavya reappearing like she's flicked a switch. "We leave in five minutes," she says, her voice once again impassive, as if the moments before had never happened.
I nod, unable to say anything. I can feel my heartbeat slowly returning to normal, but the tension remains, hanging in the air like a shadow we can't shake. As much as I try to push it down, that spark, that brief connection, lingers inside me, unspoken, unresolved.
We leave together, slipping into the darkness outside the room, into a night as indifferent as The Organization itself. But in the quiet, as I follow her footsteps, I can't shake the feeling that somewhere, lost between my past and the life they've built for me, a part of me is still waiting, still searching. Maybe it's just a shadow. Or maybe, one day, I'll know what it was trying to tell me.
But for now, all I can do is follow her, and pretend that nothing happened, even though something inside me tells me that it did.