The room Farah was led to had no cameras behind carved screens, no need for them. Her father didn't require surveillance to know when someone was lying to him. He'd never needed it with her, even when she'd been young enough to think she was good at hiding things.
"You look well," he said, not rising from his chair, which told her everything about how this conversation was going to go before either of them had said anything real. "DARF suits you better than I expected it to."
"Abbu."
"Sit." He gestured, and she sat, spine straight, the old posture returning to her body without her permission, the posture of a daughter who had once wanted very badly to be exactly the kind of person this room expected. "You bring outsiders into our home under false names and ask me not to notice. That is either very brave or very foolish, Farah, and I confess I am still deciding which."
"They're not a danger to this family."
"Everyone is a danger to this family. That is the entire premise of how we've survived four generations." He studied her for a long moment, something old and tired moving behind his eyes. "Why are you really here?"
She didn't answer immediately, weighing exactly how much truth this room could safely hold. "Zaid's name surfaced in something we're investigating. Something dangerous. I needed to see for myself whether it was true."
Something in her father's expression closed, subtle but unmistakable. "Zaid is not disowned, if that's what you're circling toward asking. He simply operates in rooms this family finds convenient not to look at too closely. That has always been true. It will likely always be true."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I'm prepared to give you tonight." He leaned forward slightly, voice dropping into something almost gentle, almost a warning wrapped in concern. "You left this family for a government badge, Farah. I did not stop you, because I understood why you wanted to. But do not mistake that badge for protection inside these walls. If anyone senior enough decides your outsiders are more trouble than they're worth, no DARF rescue team is reaching this house in time to matter. Do you understand me?"
"I understand."
"Good." He sat back, and something in the room's tension eased fractionally, though nothing about his expression suggested the conversation was truly finished. "Then be careful, beta. Whatever you're chasing. I would prefer not to bury a daughter I already lost once to a different kind of family."
Farah left the room some time later with her composure fully intact and her hands, once out of anyone's sight in the corridor beyond, shaking very slightly, in a way she hadn't allowed since she was nineteen years old.
"Okay," Anya said, once the servant had finally left them alone with the single oil lamp and the small, deliberate irregularity behind the carved screen. "We should — probably—"
"Yes," Shyam agreed, with the particular confidence of a man who had no idea what he was agreeing to.
They stood roughly a meter apart for a long, excruciating moment, both extremely aware of the fixture in the corner, both extremely aware of each other, neither one moving first.
"This is ridiculous," Anya finally said, and closed the distance, wrapping her arms around him in a hug so stiff and formal it would have convinced absolutely no one of anything, elbows locked, spine straight, the posture of two people performing an embrace they'd read about rather than experienced.
"You're very tense for someone playing my girlfriend," Shyam said into her shoulder.
"You're not exactly melting into it either, Vikram."
"I don't actually know how to hug someone while being watched by a hole in a wooden screen, Reet. This wasn't covered in the briefing."
Despite everything, Anya laughed — a real one, muffled against his shoulder, and something in both of them loosened at once, the performance cracking just enough to let something more natural slip through.
"Honey," Shyam said, deadpan, pulling back just enough to look at her properly, "we should probably sleep. Early start tomorrow."
Anya stared at him. "That was the worst delivery of that sentence I have ever heard in my life."
"I panicked."
"Clearly." But she was smiling now, unguarded, and together they navigated the absurd choreography of settling into a single bed meant for two people who actually knew what they were doing, ending up lying stiffly on their backs, a careful distance between them that neither entirely closed nor entirely maintained, the oil lamp guttering low across the ceiling above them.
For a long while neither of them spoke. Then, quietly, into the dark, Anya said, "Can I ask you something real? Not for the cameras."
"Go ahead."
"Why did you actually say yes to this mission? Rathore gave you every reason to refuse. You have no way to fight if this goes wrong."
Shyam considered the question honestly, the dark somehow making it easier to answer than daylight would have. "Because for the first time since I left home, someone handed me something that mattered and trusted me to carry it anyway, without a weapon in my hand to make me useful. I didn't want to be the person who said no to that."
"That's either very brave or very reckless."
"Farah's father probably said something similar to her tonight, if I had to guess."
Anya was quiet for a moment. "I'm scared for you. In there tomorrow. Genuinely, not — not for the story we're telling everyone."
"I know." He turned his head slightly, found her already looking at him in the low light. "I'm scared too. But I trust you to get us both out if it goes wrong. I don't think I've trusted anyone that completely in a very long time."
"Since when?"
Since his uncles taught him which rooms to stand near the door of, he thought, and didn't say it, not yet, not tonight, though something in his face must have shifted, because Anya's hand found his under the thin blanket, fingers lacing through his without either of them quite deciding to let it happen.
"Since a while," he said instead, which wasn't the whole truth, but was closer to it than anything he'd told anyone in this house so far.
They didn't speak again after that, not because there was nothing left to say, but because the silence itself had become something worth staying inside — two people lying in a bed built for a lie, holding onto something that had stopped, somewhere in the last hour, being one.
Farah found them like that in the grey edge of early morning, when she finally came to check on them before the household woke — asleep, hands still loosely joined beneath the blanket, the oil lamp long since burned out.
She stood in the doorway a moment longer than strictly necessary, something complicated crossing her tired face — relief, maybe, or envy, or simply the particular ache of watching two people find something uncomplicated in a house that had never once, in her entire life, allowed her the same.
Then she pulled the door quietly shut, and went to prepare herself for whatever the coming night's transaction was actually going to cost all three of them.