NUISANCE BLOOD

CHAPTER SIX: HER STUMBLING

Dust swirled in the amber light of a single bulb, hanging naked over a metal desk that had seen decades of blood, cigarette burns, and bad decisions. The office sat in the belly of a warehouse district, where the sea air curdled with diesel and rust. Prithvi Sharma, silver-bearded and heavy-eyed, crushed a cigarette under his thumb with the slow, deliberate pressure of a man who’d killed with the same motion. The smoke curled up like a dying prayer.

Shakti entered without knocking, because Shakti knew better than to waste time. In his hand, a small black tracker blinked red, its signal pulsing with the rhythm of a heartbeat. He laid it on the desk.

“Sethji. Signal came alive twenty minutes ago. Same frequency as the bracelet you gave her. Location is fixed now. Outskirts. Old colonial manor near the sea. Heavily guarded.”

Prithvi didn’t look up immediately. He stared at the crushed cigarette, the paper splitting, the tobacco spilling like entrails. When he spoke, his voice was gravel dragged over steel. “Karan Singh’s territory. That boy. That arrogant, knife-licking boy. What is my daughter doing in his house?”

Shakti shifted his weight. He was a large man, built for breaking things, but even he hesitated before delivering unpleasant news. “She might be a guest. Or—”

“There are no guests in Karan Singh’s house.” Prithvi cut him off with the finality of a coffin lid closing. “Only bodies and bargaining chips. If she’s breathing, it’s because he hasn’t figured out whose blood she carries. Yet.”

The old man stood, joints creaking, and pulled a coat over his shoulders. His eyes, furnace-hot, fixed on the far wall where a map of the city was pinned, marked with territories and graves. “Should we move? I can have twenty men ready in an hour.”

Prithvi laughed—a dry, humourless bark. “No. Twenty men against Karan Singh is a funeral procession, not a rescue. He’d slaughter them and send their heads back in gift boxes. I’ve seen him do it. That boy was raised by wolves and sharpened by grief. He’s not a gangster. He’s a surgeon with a grudge.”

He walked to the map, tracing a finger along the coastal edge where the manor would sit. “Then what, Sethji? Leave her?”

“I didn’t raise a fool.” Prithvi’s voice softened, but it was the softness of a blade being unsheathed. “If Shraddha’s alive, she’s already playing him. She’s my blood—she’ll be cataloguing exits, learning names, planting thorns. No. I won’t storm his gates. I’ll slip through them. Find me a man on the inside. Someone who can be bought. Every fortress has a crack.”

Shakti nodded slowly. “There’s a secretary. Vikram. Cold, but ambitious. Might be open.”

“Vikram.” The name rolled off Prithvi’s tongue like a bitter seed. “I know that name. Give him a number. Tell him the Sheikh family pays better than Singh. And Shakti—find out who sold us this signal. Someone intercepted her bracelet before it reached us naturally. I want to know who’s playing both sides. That person is either an ally or the next head I’ll deliver to Karan personally.”

Shakti pocketed the tracker and left. Prithvi remained, staring at the map, the dying bulb flickering overhead. His daughter was in the belly of the beast, and he wasn’t riding in with guns blazing. He was going to burrow into the beast’s heart and rot it from the inside. That was the Sharma way. No heroics. Just survival, slow and venomous.

The dining hall still held the ghost of the meal—the faint perfume of cardamom, the cooling wax of candles, the silence that pooled between two people who’d stopped pretending this was anything but a battlefield with china plates. Shraddha ate. Not because she wanted to, but because she’d made a calculation: starve tonight, and tomorrow she’d be weaker. Weakness was death. So she chewed, each bite a small, strategic surrender that tasted of both ghee and fury.

Karan hadn’t moved. His fork lay untouched. His elbows rested on the mahogany, chin propped on folded hands, eyes fixed on her with the weight of a microscope. He wasn’t just watching—he was absorbing, cataloguing, and the attention was a physical thing, pressing against her skin like humidity before a storm.

“You chew like you’re angry at the food,” he said, voice low and conversational. “What did the chapati do to you?”

She didn’t look up. “It’s cooperating with the enemy. That makes it guilty by association.”

“The enemy. Still? After I fed you with my own hands? You’re ungrateful.”

She tore off another piece, her jaw working with deliberate precision. “You forced my jaw open. That’s not feeding. That’s assault with a side of bread. Don’t expect gratitude.”

“And yet you’re still eating. More, even. Your third piece. Your body doesn’t share your politics.”

“My body is a traitor. I’ve made peace with it.” She lifted her gaze then, just for a moment, to flick a glance at him. “Are you going to stare at me all night, or do you have a hobby?”

He smiled, slow and crooked. “Right now, this is my hobby. Watching you. The way your lips—” He paused, a fraction of hesitation that she caught like a slip in his armor. “—quiver, just slightly, when you bite into something. Like you’re fighting the pleasure of it.”

Inside her skull, the response was ice: ‘He’s studying me like a specimen. Don’t let the food taste good. Don’t give him the satisfaction.’ She made herself swallow without any visible enjoyment, though the warm bread was the first real comfort her body had felt in two days.

“Quiver? It’s called chewing. Humans do it. You should try it sometime instead of surviving on cigarettes and ego.”

He laughed, a short exhale through his nose. “There’s that tongue again. Sharp enough to slice. You know, when you were unconscious, I thought you’d wake up broken. Most do. But you woke up sharper. How do you do that?”

“Practice. Years of it.” She tore another bite, this time from a piece of paneer, and chewed with the same mechanical defiance. “Now, are we done analyzing my eating habits, or do you want me to narrate each swallow?”

“Each swallow. Yes.” The words came out softer than he intended, almost to himself.

She took a bite of chapati, the ghee glistening on her lower lip. She chewed. He watched. Her throat moved as she swallowed, the delicate column of muscle and skin that he’d held in his hand earlier that same evening. And then—unbidden, unconscious—his own throat moved. He swallowed with her. An echo. A mirror.

He blinked, realizing what his body had just done. A cold trickle of something unfamiliar slid down his spine. ‘What is this? I’m mirroring her. Like a dog following a master. No. Focus. She’s a captive. A clue. Not a… not this.’

But the thought dissolved as her lips closed around another morsel. A drop of dal lingered at the corner of her mouth. Her tongue flicked out, quick and pink, catching it. And Karan, the man who’d sent a severed head tumbling onto her canvas not forty-eight hours ago, thought unbidden of giving her water from his own mouth. The image was so vivid, so intimate, so utterly wrong that it hung in his mind like a blasphemous painting.

He shook his head slightly, trying to dislodge it. But it stayed.

‘When did she become this?’ The realization unspooled with the quiet horror of a man catching his own reflection doing something unguarded. ‘Under the rooftop lights, she was a nuisance. Blood on her canvas. Fury in her eyes. I looked at her and saw a problem to solve. Now I’m looking at her and seeing… something else. The curve of her jaw. The defiance in her eyelashes. The way her neck bent under my hand like it belonged there. I overlooked it. I was too busy throwing heads. A rare beauty. Hiding in plain sight. And I almost killed her.’

The weight of that almost pressed against his ribs. He’d never cared about almost before. He’d killed people for less reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the thought of this woman—this sharp-tongued, paint-stained fury—lying cold on that rooftop instead of sitting here, chewing chapati like it had personally wronged her… it disturbed him in a way he didn’t have language for.

Shraddha pushed her plate away slightly, her eyes narrow. “You’re doing it again.”

He blinked, pulled back to the present. “Doing what?”