Ajay Kulkarni's digital life had evaporated. No bank transactions after the fifteenth. No mobile phone pings. No credit card activity. No social media logins. He'd gone dark with the thoroughness of someone who'd studied how the police trace people and systematically eliminated every vector.
But he was still in Mumbai. Priya knew this with the certainty of someone who understood obsession. Ajay wasn't running — he was executing a plan. And the plan required him to be here, in this city, close to his targets, close to her.
The Crime Branch mobilized. ACP Deshmukh, now fully understanding the scope of the threat, assigned thirty officers to the case. Priya's photograph of Ajay — taken from his BioShield employee records — was distributed to every police station, every railway station, every major transit point in Mumbai.
Dev Sir was arrested, charged with conspiracy, and placed in judicial custody. His lawyer, a retired public prosecutor who owed him a career's worth of favours, arranged bail within seventy-two hours. Priya didn't fight it. Dev Sir was seventy-one years old with Parkinson's. He wasn't the threat.
The threat was a twenty-seven-year-old chemistry graduate with two hundred milligrams of one of the world's deadliest pesticides, a grudge as deep as his brother's hospital bills, and detailed surveillance photographs of Priya's daily life.
Including photographs of Ananya.
Priya pulled her daughter out of school. Ananya protested — loudly, tearfully, with the full arsenal of a teenager who feels her life is being dismantled without her consent.
"I have exams in three weeks, Maa!"
"You'll study at home."
"My friends will think I'm dead!"
"You can talk to them on the phone."
"This is insane! You're treating me like I'm five!"
Priya knelt in front of her daughter — this fierce, furious girl who had her father's eyes and her mother's stubbornness — and said, very quietly: "Someone is threatening our family. I will explain everything, but right now I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"
Ananya searched her mother's face. Whatever she found there — the fear, the determination, the love that was sometimes indistinguishable from control — made her stop arguing.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, Maa."
Rajan moved into the spare room. Priya didn't ask; he informed her, and she was too exhausted to fight it. He set up a security perimeter with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before — cameras at the entrance, a direct line to the nearest patrol car, a protocol for entering and leaving the building.
"You've done protection details before," Priya observed.
"In Delhi. That's partly why I was transferred."
"Partly?"
