Chapter 1: The Awakening and the Betrayal

My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing, and every missed call made my heart race, but nothing prepared me for what I was about to hear.

In that moment, the tension in the air was as thick as those sticky summer evenings in Delhi, when even the ceiling fan can’t drown out the worries swirling in your chest. Rohan sat upright, his dark eyes stormy with something wilder than pain, while his friends jostled and whispered. Even through the phone, I could sense the heaviness—the scent of burning incense, the distant pop of colony kids bursting crackers outside. His voice, rough and stubborn, buzzed through my phone, as if the network itself was struggling to carry the weight of his words.

"Why should I make it so easy for her, yaar? We werewolves, once we mark someone, that’s it for life."

He squared his jaw, as if the family’s izzat rested on this moment. The memory of our childhood games—chasing kites on the terrace, stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s tree—felt so far from the man wrestling with himself now. If Amma were here, she’d have clicked her tongue and muttered, “Naata hai toh nibhaana toh padega.”

"When Ananya comes, even if she begs to help me, I must endure!"

But he waited and waited, and I never showed up!

He didn’t know that his brother’s bodyguard had already blown up my phone:

The display flashed with WhatsApp messages and missed calls—the kind you only get when someone’s in real trouble or when a wedding’s about to erupt in the family. I tried to ignore it, watching the monsoon clouds gather outside my window, but the bodyguard’s insistent voice finally cut through:

"Miss Sharma, the young master has always seen you as his only partner!"

His tone held that unique urgency—a desperate hope I’d only heard when my own mother pleaded with the doctor outside the ICU years ago. The words echoed in my chest, colliding with old wounds.

"Please, could you come over and kiss him?"

It turns out that five years ago, I fell into a gorge while trekking in Manali and died. His brother, to save me, split half of his werewolf lifespan with me through a mark, snatching me back from the jaws of death!

Sometimes, fate twists you up like those endless traffic snarls at the Delhi-Gurgaon border—no matter how much you honk, you’re not moving till it lets you go. I never thought my life would be held by such a supernatural thread.

Late at night, I wrapped my arms around his brother’s neck and coaxed him: "Bhaiya Kunal, don’t hold back. Tell me, how many years have you secretly liked me?"

The hospital’s faint antiseptic smell mixed with the sharper tang of old wounds and something wild—a scent that, in that moment, felt achingly familiar and strangely comforting. My voice, soft but steady, seemed to float in the cool air as the city outside went quiet, and for once, nothing and no one interrupted.

I thought I knew who would always stand by me. That night, I learned how wrong I was.