CHAPTER 22

OJASWINI

Back in my room. Door locked — the iron bolt rammed home so hard the bracket creaked. Knife in my hand. The Wüsthof's handle was slick with palm-sweat and I kept adjusting my grip, the German steel catching the faint lightning glow through the window every time the sky splintered.

Heart trying to break out of my ribcage. Not a metaphor. I could feel it — each contraction slamming against the inside of my sternum, a trapped animal throwing itself against a cage. My pulse was in my ears, in my fingertips, in the balls of my feet where they pressed against the cold stone floor. My body was an alarm system and every signal was screaming: danger, danger, danger.

Someone was in the tunnel.

Someone was in the house who wasn't supposed to be here. Someone who breathed in the dark below the study. Someone who hummed a lavani my dead grandmother used to sing. Someone who knew where the tunnel entrance was, how to open it, how to move through this three-hundred-year-old house without triggering a single creak in the floorboards.

I went through the options. Systematically. The way I went through a prep list before service — item by item, nothing skipped, nothing assumed.

Deven — playing mind games. Psychological warfare. Making me paranoid, fraying my nerves, so when something happened my story would sound insane. The chef was hearing voices. The chef was seeing figures. The chef was unstable. He had the motive. He had the skill. His entire career was built on fabricating evidence that passed forensic analysis. Why not fabricate a haunting?

Tapsee — but she was sick. Genuinely, visibly sick. Could barely stand at breakfast. Her hands shook when she held a cup. Her skin was the color of wet ash. Could she physically climb stairs, walk through a dark hallway, descend into a tunnel? Could she hum a lavani with lungs that struggled to breathe? No. The body doesn't lie like that.

Arya — in the guest cottage. Fifty meters away across the rain-battered garden. She had a kerosene stove, a torch, a locked door. No reason to be in the tunnel at midnight. No reason to hum a folk song in the dark. Unless she was checking something. Unless she knew something about this tunnel that she hadn't told me.

Someone else.

The thought was a physical sensation — cold spreading through my stomach like swallowed ice water. Someone else. A fifth person on an island where there were supposed to be four. A person who wasn't on any guest list, any manifest, any record. A person who knew this house — its hidden rooms, its disguised doors, its Portuguese secrets — well enough to move through it like a ghost.

My breathing was too fast. Hyperventilating. The edges of my vision were sparkling — those warning signs of a panic attack, the ones I'd learned to recognize in my second year at the restaurant. I forced it to slow. In through the nose — four counts, the air cold and damp, tasting of stone and old wood. Hold — seven counts, my chest tight, the muscles between my ribs aching. Out through the mouth — eight counts, slow, controlled, the exhale making the nearest candle flame dance. A technique Riddhi had taught me during my first panic attack — the night after I signed the restaurant lease and realized I'd committed to ₹55K monthly rent on a 3.2-star Zomato dream and no savings.

The panic receded. Not gone — it never goes, it just moves to the edges of your awareness, crouching, waiting. But manageable. Functional. The way stage fright is manageable — you learn to cook with it, to plate with shaking hands, to present food while your stomach is trying to digest itself.

I checked the time. 11:47 PM. The phone screen was painfully bright in the dark room.

Dawn was at 5:30 AM. Sameer would come.

Five hours and forty-three minutes. Three hundred and forty-three minutes. Twenty thousand five hundred and eighty seconds. I counted them the way I counted prep time before service — breaking the impossible into increments. Making the unbearable merely difficult.

I didn't sleep. I sat on the bed with my back against the headboard — the old teak pressing against my spine, the carved wood pattern imprinting itself into my skin through the kurta. The knife across my lap. My eyes open. Watching the bedroom door. Watching the thin strip of darkness beneath it where someone's shadow might fall.

The house talked to me through the hours. The Portuguese walls expanding and contracting with the humidity, making sounds like an old man's joints. The wind changing direction — I could track its rotation by the way it hit different windows, first the north-facing bedroom, then the east-facing hallway, then back. The rain intensifying and easing in cycles, like breathing.

At 2 AM the footsteps came again.

This time they didn't stop at my door.

They went past. Soft. Deliberate. The pad of bare feet on stone — I recognized the sound now, had catalogued it, knew the difference between shoes and bare feet, between walking and creeping. These footsteps were confident. Unhurried. The footsteps of someone who knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do.

Down the hallway. Toward the stairs. Descending — the sound fading with each step, the stone swallowing the echo.

I heard the front door open. The massive teak door with its Portuguese iron fittings, the hinges that Arya kept oiled but that still groaned under the door's own weight. The wind screamed in — a blast of cold wet air that I felt even upstairs, even through my closed bedroom door.

Then the door closed. Heavy. Final.

Whoever it was had gone outside. Into the monsoon. At 2 AM.

I went to the window. Pressed my face against the glass. The glass was cold and damp with condensation, my breath fogging a circle that I kept wiping with my palm. Lightning strobed the landscape — freeze-frame images, each one lasting a fraction of a second but burning into my retinas: the garden, the stone path glistening like a river, the frangipani trees bent sideways by wind, the cliffs beyond, the sea a white chaos of spray.

A figure.

Small. Dark-clothed. Moving fast through the garden — not running but walking with purpose, bare feet on the stone path, rain hammering down on them. They weren't hunched against the weather. They were moving through it like it wasn't there.

Moving toward the guest cottage.

Where Arya was.

I pressed both palms against the cold glass. My breath stopped. The lightning flickered and went dark and the figure disappeared into the black and I stood there for ten seconds, twenty seconds, a minute — waiting for the next flash, waiting to see the figure return, waiting for anything.

The next lightning flash showed an empty garden.

The figure was inside the cottage.

---