Novels by KIRTI

Elliot worked.He worked more than he had worked in years, which was already a lot, which meant he was working at a level that his assistant Ryan had started noting in a neutral tone that was not quite concern but was adjacent to it. Elliot noticed Ryan noticing and did not address it because addressing it would require a conversation about why he was taking every meeting and staying past nine every night, and he was not ready to have that conversation with anyone except possibly Clara and only at midnight.He took every meeting. He cleared the backlog of decisions that had been waiting on him for two months. He rewrote the omega employment policy framework from scratch, not because the lawyers had asked him to, not because anyone had flagged the existing version as insufficient. He rewrote it because he could not sleep and the work was something he could do correctly and the framework needed to be better and he had the time.It took him four nights. When he handed it to the legal tea

Dr. Chen's office had a specific smell, the kind of medical office smell that was not bad exactly, just permanent, the same every visit, and Kieran had decided somewhere around week twenty that he associated it now with cautious optimism and low blood pressure readings and the specific sound of two heartbeats on a monitor.Maya drove. She had been driving him to the appointments since the previous one, where Elliot had been in the passenger seat and it had been different in all the ways that were now visible by absence. She did not point this out. Neither did he. They talked about other things in the car the way they had been talking about other things for the past week, covering the large obvious gap with the particular care of two people who had decided not to make the other person say it.Dr. Chen had him on the table for the ultrasound and she moved the probe with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a few thousand times and she told him what she found, which was the sa

Elliot found out on a Tuesday that Kieran had stopped answering his calls.Not from Kieran. From the silence itself, which was a specific kind of silence that was different from busy or distracted or bad timing. He called twice on Tuesday and once on Wednesday morning and the phone rang all the way through each time. No voicemail. No text back. Nothing.He texted Maya on Wednesday afternoon: Is he okay?She replied in about ten minutes: He's okay. Give him time.He texted back: How much time.She did not reply to that one.He gave it time. He was genuinely bad at giving it time. He sat at his desk and he worked and he went through two days of meetings that he was present for physically and somewhere else in his head, and he gave Kieran time the way a person gave time when they were holding the phone every hour and checking to see if anything had come through and nothing had.On the fourth day Maya called him.She said: "He wants you to come. Maya's apartment. Now if you can."Elliot s

KIERANDr. Chen's appointment was at eight.He got there on time, which was a minor miracle given that he hadn't slept properly and had spent the last forty minutes of the drive running through damage-control options for the consortium situation in his head. Maya was in the car with him and she could tell something was wrong and she was being good about not asking while he clearly needed to work through it.He sat in the waiting room and checked his phone.There were four unread messages from Ryan. Two from Jessica. One from his lawyer. One from Hartley.And one from an unknown number that turned out, when he opened it, to be from a PR contact he'd given his number to months ago — a woman named Dara who worked in Sinclair's communications team.It said: Have you seen the statement? Just went live. Thought you'd want to know.He stared at that for a second. Statement. He hadn't been told about a statement. He opened his browser.It was on Sinclair Industries' official communications ch

The article went live at six in the morning on a Thursday.Kieran was already awake — had been awake since four, because that's what week twenty-eight looked like — and he read it on his phone in the kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside him.It was good. That was his honest assessment. Jessica had done exactly what she'd said she'd do — the Marcus angle was the headline, documented and sourced and written in a way that made it very hard to argue with. The omega employee pattern was handled carefully, both Sophia and Rachel given space to speak in their own words. The pregnancy was one line, buried in the middle: An anonymous employee has filed for medical accommodation, which the company has confirmed.Clean. Accurate. Not cruel.He was on his second read, checking for anything that might cause problems, when he hit the paragraph near the end.He read it once. Read it again.Sources close to Sinclair Industries confirm that the anonymous employee has maintained a personal relat

The board meeting lasted six hours and Kieran wasn't in the room for any of it.He sat in the building's lobby with his laptop and his water bottle and his evidence file all of it submitted formally that morning through Hartley's office, titled Suspicious Vendor Activity: Full Assessment, because Kieran had learned a long time ago that the most dangerous documents were the ones that looked boring. He worked through a Sun City contractor review while upstairs thirty-two people were deciding whether to believe two months of his careful, patient, documented work.Ryan texted at eleven-fourteen: Going well.At one-forty-two: Still going.At three-oh-seven: It's done.Kieran closed his laptop and went to find a bathroom to splash water on his face because he'd been running on three hours of sleep and an adrenaline-adjacent feeling that wasn't quite relief yet.He came back to find Elliot in the lobby.Elliot looked like someone who'd just come out of six hours of being professionally immov

She put the envelope on the kitchen table and sat down and read it a third time.She wasn't sure what she was looking for on the third read. The first time had been enough to understand it. The second time had been her checking that she'd understood correctly. The third time was something else — her brain needing to go over the words slowly, one at a time, and let each one land before moving to the next.99.9%.Dmitri Volkov. Her boys.She'd known. She'd known from the first morning at the monastery when she'd turned around and seen his face across the courtyard and then looked at her sons and the comparison had been so obvious, so right there, that she'd had to breathe through it before she could move. The amber of Niko's eyes, the way Ivan tilted his head when he was thinking — she'd looked at those things every day for four years and seen her own colouring and told herself that was all she was seeing.She'd known and she'd filed it under not right now and not dealing with this toda

The envelope arrived at nine in the morning and he left it on his desk until eleven.He knew what it was. He'd been waiting for four days since he'd sent the samples to the pack doctor's private lab — no hospital record, no shared system, just a clean result delivered to him and no one else. He'd done this because Katya didn't need to find out through a document that had gone through half a dozen hands before reaching her. She'd find out because he told her.He worked until eleven. He read the Helsinki manifest. He answered two messages from the Riga office. He looked at the border patrol report Irina had left on his desk. He did all of it normally, efficiently, one thing after the other.At eleven he opened the envelope.One page. Lab letterhead. Technical information across the top half that he read quickly. A number at the bottom.99.9%.He put the page down on his desk. He put both hands flat, one on either side of it, and looked at it.He had known. He'd known from the first mome

Dmitri's going to be my friend."Niko said it the way he said most things — right in the middle of breakfast, between bites, like he was reporting the weather.Katya had been lifting her coffee cup. She put it back down."What?""He's going to be my friend," Niko said. He had porridge on his chin and full confidence in his eyes. "I decided last night.""That's not really how friendship works, Niko. You don't just decide."He looked at her like she'd said something puzzling. "Yes you do. I decided Leo was going to be my friend at the last school and then he was. I decided Maya was going to be my friend at the park and then she was. That's how I do it.""Leo and Maya are four years old. Dmitri is a grown man.""So?" He ate another spoonful. "You're grown and you're my friend.""I'm your mother.""You're both," he said, like this was obvious, and went back to his porridge.Katya opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked across the table at Ivan, who was eating his toast in the careful, met

The second cup had been on her site table every morning for three days.The first morning she'd noticed it and assumed one of the workers had left an extra. Then she'd seen him come through the east wing archway with two paper cups and set one down at her end of the table and she'd understood. She'd said nothing. She'd kept working.The second morning she'd arrived before him and the table had been empty and she'd felt the absence of the second cup before she could stop herself from feeling it, which was information she did not want to have and filed away quickly under not thinking about this.The third morning she sat down and drank her own coffee and looked at her blueprint for the west courtyard drainage and thought about water flow and load-bearing walls and the specific challenge of a building that had been patched and re-patched across four centuries. She thought about the work. She did not think about the second cup.He came at seven forty-five. Same as the previous two days. T

The knife slipped at 1:47 in the morning and cut across his thumb.Not deep. A thin line of red, gone in seconds because his blood ran fast the way wolf blood always did. He pressed it against the leg of his jeans anyway and held it there and looked at what he had so far on the desk in front of him.A rough shape. Four legs that were starting to hold their angles right. A body. A head that still needed work on one side. He'd been at it for two hours and had maybe a third of what he wanted.The office was dark except for the lamp on his desk. The Velgorod city building kept a skeleton crew at night security downstairs, a cleaner who had come and gone already at midnight. He had the floor to himself. The city outside the window was doing what Velgorod always did in the late hours: sitting quiet under snow, every sound muffled, the streetlights turning everything a pale yellow-white.He wasn't sure exactly when he'd decided to do this. He'd been sitting with a shipping manifest at nine i

She started going to the site at night.Not every night. Two or three times a week, after the boys were asleep and Svetlana or the neighbor's teenage daughter was sitting in the apartment with the spare key and instructions to call if anything moved. Katya would put her boots on and walk the twelve minutes to the monastery in the dark with her flashlight and her notebook and two or three hours of quiet.She told herself it was practical. The site was less distracting at night. No workers, no questions, no phone calls from the city council about permits. Just the building and the work and her own brain, which was when she did her clearest thinking.The real reason was that the building was beautiful at night. Snow on the old stones, the whole courtyard silver under the moon. She'd stand in the middle of it sometimes and just look, and feel something settle in her chest that didn't settle anywhere else.She was in the chapel on a Wednesday when Dmitri found her.* * *The chapel was her