CHAPTER 10

NOT OJASWINI

She's figured out he knows.

Smart girl. Took her seven hours, which is five hours longer than I expected, but the isolation is working on her exactly the way the textbooks said it would. Fear slows cognition. The amygdala hijacks the prefrontal cortex — floods it with cortisol, shuts down the rational-thinking centers, triggers the survival response that makes humans do stupid, predictable things. Fight or flight. Freeze or fawn. I read all of this in a psychology textbook I stole from the Malvan district library last summer — a dog-eared copy of Emotional Intelligence that someone had donated, the margins annotated in pencil by a previous reader who clearly had their own reasons for studying the architecture of fear.

I know the architecture well.

I've been building inside it for three years. Since I was nineteen. Since the night my father told me — casually, over dinner, while Tapsee poured herself a third glass of wine — that he was removing me from his will because I'd "chosen my mother's side" in the divorce. He said it the way you'd announce a change in the weather. Oh, it might rain tomorrow. Also, you're no longer my daughter.

The rain is picking up again. Wind speeds hitting 60 kmph according to the weather app on the tablet. The satellite internet connection up here is stable — 12 Mbps, enough to stream the camera feeds in real-time, enough to run the voice synthesis software when I need it. The ferry services won't resume until Monday at the earliest. I confirmed this by monitoring the Malvan port radio frequency — Sameer's boat is the only vessel still making crossings, and even he stopped at noon today after a wave nearly capsized his bow.

Good. Everything is closing in.

I adjust the camera angle on the kitchen feed. Pan left. Zoom. Watch her standing at the counter, palms flat on the marble, head bowed, breathing like someone who's just finished running. The knife she set down is a 10-inch Wüsthof chef's knife — Classic line, forged steel, full-tang handle. She grips it when she's scared. Did it three times today. Her fingers wrap around the handle and her knuckles go white and she holds it for exactly four seconds before she realizes what she's doing and puts it down.

Four seconds. Every time.

She doesn't know about the tunnel yet. My father will tell her — he tells everyone about the tunnel, he's proud of it, the same way he's proud of the house and the island and the whiskey collection and every other acquisition that proves he's a man of substance. He'll frame it as history — Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha naval commander, the smuggling routes, the Portuguese escape passages. He'll make it sound romantic.

If he doesn't tell her, Sameer will. Sameer tells everyone about the island's history — it's the only thing he talks about with genuine passion, the fishing heritage, the Maratha naval history, the colonial layers. He's proud of this coast the way people are proud of their families.

Either way, she'll know about the tunnel by tomorrow morning. And she'll remember it. Because when you're trapped, you memorize every possible exit the way you memorize the location of fire extinguishers in a hotel — automatically, unconsciously, the survival brain cataloguing escape routes while the conscious mind pretends everything is fine.

That's fine. The tunnel is part of the plan.

Everything is part of the plan.

I pull up the second camera feed — the bedroom wing, third floor. Tapsee's room. She's sitting at her vanity, grinding something with a small mortar and pestle she keeps in her makeup bag. From this angle I can see the label on the bottle beside her: Clontriptyline 50mg. She thinks she's grinding real pills. She's grinding lactose tablets that I switched eight weeks ago.

Third feed. My father's study. He's at his desk, laptop open, the blue-white glow of the screen reflecting off his reading glasses. I can't see the screen from this angle, but I know what he's doing. He's been working on something for weeks — something involving video files and audio recordings and a piece of software his AI team built for Sentinel. Something he doesn't want Tapsee to see.

I know what it is.

I found it on his backup drive three months ago. The deepfake files. The synthetic audio of Ojju's voice — sampled from her Instagram cooking videos — saying things she never said. The fabricated chat logs between Ojju and a fictional lover, describing in detail how they would poison someone. The metadata carefully edited to look authentic.

He's building a frame.

He's going to kill Tapsee and make it look like the chef did it.

Funny thing is — Tapsee is trying to kill him. And he's trying to kill her. And neither one knows that I've been watching both of them plan their murders for months, adjusting their plans from the shadows like a puppeteer who learned that the best stories require the characters to believe they're writing the plot themselves.

I check the time. 4:47 PM.

Thirty-six hours.

The rain hammers the window. The cameras glow. The house hums with secrets it doesn't know it's keeping.

And I wait.

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