Novels by KIRTI

ELLIOTHe had been in the theatre for every second of it and he would never forget a single one.He stood on the other side of the screen in hospital scrubs with one hand holding Kieran's and the other pressed flat against the bed rail because he needed something solid and the bed rail was what was there. He kept his eyes on Kieran's face the whole time. Not on the screen, not on what was happening behind it. Just Kieran. The tight line of his jaw. The slow deliberate breathing. The expression he wore when he was managing something enormous and had decided nobody was going to know about it.Elliot knew that expression. He had watched it for nine months across boardrooms and hospital corridors and kitchen tables at five in the morning. He knew the version that meant I'm fine and the version that meant I will be fine and the version that meant I am at the absolute limit of what I can hold but I will hold it. Kieran wore all three at different points during those twenty minutes and Ellio

KIERAN POV The contractions started at two in the morning.Not the practice ones he'd been having for the last two weeks, the ones Dr. Chen had told him to ignore unless they got regular. These were different. They had a different quality to them, something purposeful underneath the pain, like his body had finally decided it was done waiting and was going to do what it came here to do whether Kieran was ready or not.He lay in the dark and timed them on his phone and told himself it was fine. He'd been managing pain for nine months. He could manage this.By three he woke Elliot.He didn't say anything dramatic. He just said: "I think it's starting." Elliot was sitting up before he finished the sentence, fully awake in the way he got when something needed to happen, and within fifteen minutes they were in the car and Maya was on the phone being told to meet them there and the city was passing the windows and Kieran was breathing through his nose and trying to count and generally faili

Maya wasn't coming until six. At five-fifteen the apartment was wrapped in the kind of quiet that only existed before life changed forever. The overnight bags rested beside the front door, packed and repacked so many times that Kieran could no longer remember what was actually inside them. Tiny blankets, newborn clothes, paperwork, snacks, chargers everything should have been there. Should. He stood in the bathroom holding Dr. Chen's checklist for the fourth time, staring at the words without really reading them. His mind usually worked with comforting precision. Today it felt wonderfully, hopelessly unreliable. Had he packed the second folder? The spare swaddles? He couldn't remember. A soft whistle from the kettle drifted in from the kitchen. Giving up with a quiet laugh, Kieran folded the list and slipped it into his pocket. "If I've forgotten something," he murmured to himself, "we'll survive." Today wasn't about being perfectly prepared. Today was about meet

He couldn't sleep.This wasn't a surprise. He'd been sleeping badly for weeks, the particular bad sleep that came from being thirty-seven weeks pregnant with two people who had strong opinions about the position he was lying in. Tonight was different though. Tonight the not-sleeping was less physical and more the kind where your brain simply refuses to stop going even when your body is exhausted.He got up at half past midnight. He went to the living room.Elliot was already there.He was sitting on the couch in the dark with his phone face-down on the cushion beside him and his arms on his knees, looking at the window. He turned when Kieran came in and the expression on his face said he'd been awake for a while too."Couldn't sleep?" Kieran said."No." He moved over on the couch. "Come sit."Kieran sat. The apartment was quiet the way it only got very late, the street outside having given up on noise for the night, just the occasional car going past somewhere further away.They sat t

The letters went out on Friday.Not through Hartley. Not through the company's legal team or a PR contact or anyone whose job it was to make difficult things easier to deliver. Elliot wrote them himself on Thursday evening at his desk, two separate letters, and sealed them and had them sent by hand the next morning.He told Kieran on Saturday. Just: I sent letters to Sophia and Rachel. Settlement offers. Handwritten. Thought you should know before they respond.Kieran sat with his tea and read the message and didn't reply immediately. He thought about Sophia in the café three months ago, saying I took it for myself, there's a difference. He thought about Rachel on the phone saying don't call me again after this, just don't do it to anyone else. He thought about Helen who was not ready and might never be and whose number he'd kept anyway.He texted back: Okay. Let me know what they say.✦ ✦ ✦Sophia called him directly.Not Elliot. Him. He picked up and she said: "I read it." Just th

Dr. Chen did the scan herself that morning.She didn't always at this stage. She had a team, and they were good, and at thirty-seven weeks a routine scan was routine. But she was there herself, moving the probe slowly, going through every measurement with the kind of focus that meant she was actually looking rather than ticking boxes.Both of them.Both measuring right. Both where they were supposed to be.She set the probe down and looked at the screen for a moment without saying anything. Then: "Alright." That was it. One word, in the tone she used when something she'd been quietly worried about had come back okay.Kieran lay on the table and stared at the ceiling.Thirty-seven weeks. He'd done the math on this number so many times in the last nine months that it had become almost abstract. A target. Something to reach. And now he was here and both twins were here and Dr. Chen had just said alright in that tone and he felt something in his chest that he couldn't quite describe. Not

Svetlana showed up at eleven-thirty with a paper bag of sandwiches and immediately started looking at the wrong wall.Katya was in the middle of a measurement on the east window sill, balancing the tape with her knee the way she'd done a thousand times, when she heard footsteps she recognised and looked up to find her sister standing twenty feet away in the courtyard, neck craned back, staring at the west side of the building with her hand shading her eyes."That wall has a problem," Svetlana said, without looking at her."Good morning to you too.."The stone there." Svetlana pointed. "The third row from the top on the right section. The fill between two of the blocks looks wrong. Different colour than the rest."Katya looked. She saw what Svetlana was pointing at. It was a difference of maybe three shades, something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it."Late repair," Katya said. "Nineteen-forties probably. Non-original material, we know about it.""Okay, but if the fill is alrea

The meeting Irina wasn't supposed to know about happened on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon in a private dining room above a restaurant on the east side of the city.She knew about it anyway, because she had sources and Gregor did not know about all of them. One of the waitstaff at that restaurant had a sister who ran a supply account with Volkov shipping. Small connections. Irina had spent twelve years building a web of small connections, and right now that web was telling her things she did not enjoy knowing.Three men in that room: Gregor Malshin, regional council chair, sixty-one years old, a wolf who had been building quiet power in this region for two decades by finding other people's soft spots and pressing on them. Beside him, the Petrov pack representative, young, nervous, mostly there because Gregor had something over his family going back eight years. And across the table, two senior wolves from the Shashin pack, who had wanted a larger cut of the river trade routes for t

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