CHAPTER 1

NOT OJASWINI

It's happening.

The anticipation hums beneath my skin like electricity before a monsoon storm. I can feel it building — that tightness in my chest that's half fear, half exhilaration. The kind of feeling that sharpens the world into high definition. Every raindrop on the window distinct. Every groan of the two-hundred-year-old teak beams settling into laterite foundation is a note in a symphony I've been composing for months.

Five days of planning. Three contingencies. One perfect night.

I watch the rain slash against the study window, sheets of water turning the Arabian Sea into grey violence. The waves are eight feet high, maybe more. The weather app on my tablet says wind speeds climbing to 65 kilometers per hour. The ferry services between Malvan and Devbagh suspended operations this morning. By tomorrow, even Sameer's boat won't attempt the crossing.

Perfect.

The Portuguese built this mansion in 1823 — I found the cornerstone date carved into the foundation when I was nine years old, crawling under the veranda while Arya called my name. Before the Portuguese, Kanhoji Angre's Maratha fleet used these islands as smuggling outposts. Before that, fishermen told stories about spirits in the rocks. Ghosts of drowned sailors. Women who walked into the sea and never came back.

I don't believe in ghosts. But I believe in narrative. And this island has the perfect narrative architecture for what I'm about to do.

My phone vibrates against the teak desk. The notification I've been waiting for.

She's confirmed.

I close my eyes and let the cortisol build. Controlled. Measured. The good kind of fear — the kind that makes your senses crystalline. I learned this from a psychology textbook I stole from the Malvan public library when I was seventeen: the amygdala response. The way fear sharpens cognition before it overwhelms it. You have to ride that edge — the moment before panic, when everything feels electric but you're still in control.

Tomorrow the boat arrives. Tomorrow the chef walks into a weekend that will destroy her life.

She doesn't know it yet. She thinks she's coming here to cook a birthday dinner. To make ₹2 lakhs and save her failing restaurant and prove to her father that dropping out of her MBA wasn't a mistake.

Poor thing.

I check the cameras on my tablet. Fourteen wireless feeds throughout the mansion. Kitchen. Drawing room. Bedrooms. The tunnel entrance in the study. Even the guest cottage where Arya sleeps, oblivious.

All the pieces are in place.

Tapsee thinks she's poisoning my father. Crushing her antidepressants into his raita every meal, building the dosage slowly, waiting for his heart to give out so she can inherit ₹450 crore and run away with her pharmacist boyfriend Dhruv.

My father thinks he's poisoning Tapsee. Grinding extra pills into her evening gimlet, accumulating the toxicity, waiting for the cardiac arrest that will look exactly like her existing medical condition.

And neither one of them knows I swapped Tapsee's pills with sugar tablets two weeks ago.

They're both executing murder plans that will never work. They're both so focused on each other that they haven't noticed the third player.

Me.

Sayali Shrivastav. The rejected daughter. The screenwriter he dismissed as a dreamer. The one he cut from his will three years ago because I wanted to write films instead of joining his cybersecurity company.

Filmmaking is timepass,* he'd said. *Do something real with your life.

Well, Father. I'm about to write the most real story you've ever lived.

I stand up from the desk. Walk to the window. Press my palm against the rain-cold glass.

Tomorrow the chef arrives. The clock starts ticking. And in seventy-two hours, when the coast guard finds the bodies and the fabricated evidence and the perfect narrative that explains everything, I'll be the only one walking off this island alive.

The rain intensifies. Thunder cracks — not the rolling kind but the sharp kind, like a bone breaking.

I smile.

She doesn't know it yet. But I've already written the ending.

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