CHAPTER 17

NOT OJASWINI

She heard me.

Clumsy. Careless. The excitement is building — has been building for months, actually, ever since February when I first watched Tapsee crush a pill between two spoons in her Juhu kitchen and mix the powder into Deven's afternoon raita — and the excitement is making me sloppy. I stood at her door too long. I wanted to hear her breathing change. I wanted to know the exact moment her nervous system registered my presence — the shift from sleeping-breath to alert-breath, the acceleration of the heart, the cortisol flooding the amygdala. I know these rhythms because I've studied them. Six months of reading neuroscience papers while my father's company built AI systems and my stepmother crushed pills and my life narrowed to a single point of purpose.

I retreat to the east wing. My room — the one nobody knows about. Fourth floor, behind the linen closet, through a door that looks like wall paneling. The wood grain is continuous — you can't see the seam unless you know where to press. Deven's mother showed it to me when I was eleven. Kamala-tai. She was the only person in this family who understood secrets. She kept them the way other women keep jewelry — polished, organized, locked away but always accessible.

The room is small. Six feet by eight. A single cot with a thin mattress. A folding table. My laptop — charged from the generator before I drained the fuel tank. And the monitor array: four feeds, split-screen, each one showing a different room in the mansion. Wireless cameras hidden in smoke detectors and picture frames and ventilation grilles. Fourteen cameras total. I installed them over three visits in the last year — each visit supposedly to "pick up my things" from the storage room, each visit actually a surgical insertion of another eye into the walls.

I check the cameras. Feed one: Ojju's hallway. She's standing in her kurta — cotton, block-printed, the kind they sell at Fab India for ₹1,200 — her phone flashlight sweeping the floor in slow arcs. She sees the wet footprints. I watch her face. The way her jaw tightens. The way her free hand curls into a fist at her side. She's scared but she's not panicking. Good. Panic is useless to me. What I need is sustained dread — the low-grade, constant hum of cortisol that keeps the body in fight-or-flight for hours, that degrades judgment, that makes people do things they wouldn't normally do.

Let her wonder.

Let the cortisol build.

I switch to the drawing room feed.

Tapsee is alone. Deven went upstairs twenty minutes ago — I tracked his footsteps through the first-floor hallway camera. He went to his study, not the bedroom. He's on his encrypted phone. Making arrangements. He thinks he's the architect of this weekend. He thinks the deepfake evidence and the planted pills and the elaborate frame-up of the chef is his design, his narrative, his masterpiece of calculated cruelty.

He has no idea he's a character in my script.

Tapsee is sitting on the sofa in her Sabyasachi lehenga, the red fabric pooling around her like spilled wine. Her phone is in her hand. She's been typing a message for six minutes. I watch her thumbs move on the screen — hesitant, starting and stopping, deleting and retyping. The body language of a woman composing something she knows she shouldn't send.

I zoom in. The camera resolution is sharp enough to read text at three meters.

The message is to Dhruv.

It's done. I put it in the raita. He'll feel it by morning. Three more doses and we're free.

She stares at the message. Her thumb hovers over the send button. Then she deletes it. Character by character, watching each letter vanish. Types again.

I love you.

Deletes that too. Faster this time. Like the words burned.

She puts the phone face-down on the cushion. Picks up her wine — the Sula Rasa Shiraz that Deven ordered specially for the weekend. Drinks. Her hand is trembling. Not the pill-tremors — the emotional kind. The hand of a woman who has just poisoned her husband's raita and is waiting for it to work.

Poor Tapsee. She thinks she's running the show. She doesn't know I swapped her antidepressants with placebos two weeks ago — drove to her Juhu penthouse while she was at a charity luncheon, used the spare key I'd copied from Arya's ring, opened the bathroom cabinet, and replaced sixty clontriptyline tablets with identical-looking lactose pills I'd had a compounding pharmacy in Vashi prepare. ₹3,400 for a bottle of sugar pills that look, taste, and weigh exactly like the real thing. The pharmacist didn't ask questions. In Mumbai, pharmacists never ask questions if you pay in cash.

The crushed pills Tapsee has been slipping into Deven's food — into his raita, his dal, his morning smoothie — are sugar. Pure lactose.

He's not being poisoned.

He's fine.

But she doesn't know that. And when I kill her tomorrow night — when I stop her heart with a real overdose, administered in the dark, while the chef sleeps upstairs with planted evidence in her bag — the story will be: the chef poisoned the wife, the wife was poisoning the husband, the chef was the hired killer all along. The police will find Tapsee's crushed pills, Deven's fabricated WhatsApp messages, Arya's body in the cottage, and a chef from Mumbai with a motive written in fake text messages and drugs in her luggage.

Three bodies. One survivor. And the only story that makes sense is the one I've written.

I lean back on the cot. The mattress is thin and the springs creak. Above me, the ceiling is low — I can touch it with my fingertips if I raise my arm. The room smells like old linen and dust and the faint chemical residue of the cleaning solutions Arya used to maintain the closet outside.

Arya.

I don't think about Arya. Not yet. That's tomorrow. That's the hardest part of the script — the scene I've rewritten a hundred times in my head, looking for a version where she lives. There isn't one. The math doesn't work. She knows this house. She knows the cameras. She knows the hidden room. She knows me. She'd recognize me in a heartbeat — the girl she braided hair for, the girl she taught to catch crabs, the girl she called Sayali-baby until I was thirteen. She'd tell the police everything. And the story falls apart.

I check the time on my laptop. 11:52 PM.

Twenty-four hours.

The script enters its final act.

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