Chapter 1 - The Empty Room

The first thing I noticed about Suvarna Colony was the silence. It wasn’t a real silence, not with the chirping of some exotic fucking bird outside my window and the distant hum of the colony’s water pump. It was a heavy, suffocating silence. The kind that settles in a place where there should be noise, where there should be a man’s voice cursing at the cricket match or the clatter of his keys on the table. But there was none. The man was gone.

My father.

I rolled over in my new bed, the sheets stiff and smelling of cheap detergent. My room was small, with a single window that looked out onto a meticulously manicured lawn and the house directly across the street. A perfect, picturesque little prison. My cock, already half-hard with morning wood, throbbed against my thigh. Eight inches of pure, unadulterated purpose. I didn’t need a coffee to wake up; I just needed to remember that I was here, in a place that felt like it was custom-built for me.

My father, the coward, had lasted exactly three weeks. Three weeks of playing house with his new wife before the weight of responsibility crushed his pathetic soul. He’d mumbled some bullshit about a “urgent business trip” in Dubai, packed a single suitcase, and bolted. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t hurt. I was just ... annoyed. He’d left me behind. Me. His only son. But the real annoyance wasn’t his abandonment; it was the inconvenience of it. Now I had to play the long game with Devi alone.

Devi. My stepmom.

Just thinking her name made my dick twitch. She was the reason I hadn’t thrown a fit when my father decided to remarry and drag me to this high-end suburban paradise. At thirty-five, she was a masterpiece. Not one of those stick-figure actresses you see on TV, but a real woman. Voluptuous, with hips that flared out from a surprisingly small waist and breasts that strained against the simple cotton kurtas she always wore. Her face was a contradiction of innocence and sin; wide, doe-like eyes that could look so vulnerable, set above full, pouty lips that were made for wrapping around a cock. She was fair, a stark contrast to my own scrawny, brown-skinned frame, with a waterfall of black hair she usually tied up in a messy bun, exposing the delicate nape of her neck. She was ... something else. Not desperate. Confident. Self-sufficient. She had moved on from my father before his suitcase was even packed. I’d overheard her on the phone with a friend, laughing. “Good riddance,” she’d said. “Now I can finally get this place painted the way I want it.”