Suspense
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The Return to Dhanakpur
Arvind Ray Chapter 1: The Hit-and-Run Vikram Jadhav had never imagined his life would change because of a late-night accident, especially not in Mumbai, where chaos reigned at every corner. It was around midnight when he was returning from a meeting with investors. The street was dimly lit, with rainwater shimmering in the orange glow…
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The Deep Trace
Talia Verma Part 1: The Signal Beneath the Code Riya D’Souza had spent the last thirty-six hours in the analytics lab of Delphatech Systems with nothing but a lukewarm soy latte and a dozen lines of untraceable code for company. She blinked at the double-screen setup in front of her, the left monitor displaying her…
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The Red Room Number 9
1 The lobby smelled of fresh orchids and expensive silence. Maya D’Souza pulled her oversized sunglasses lower over her nose, scanning the opulence of the Ocean View Grand, Mumbai’s most luxurious hotel. A chandelier hung like a frozen explosion of crystal above her, refracting shards of morning light across the marble floor. She hated places…
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The Midnight Tutor
Aditi Roy Sharma 1 Samar Ghosh stared blankly at the glowing screen of his laptop, its harsh blue light reflecting off his glasses as the world outside his hostel window drifted into silence. The ceiling fan above creaked lazily, slicing through the thick summer night air of the campus. Around him, the room was cluttered…
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13 Steps to the Rooftop
Armaan Lahiri The rain came early that year. Not the lazy monsoon drizzle that made the city dreamy—but a sharp, relentless downpour that beat against the windowpanes of hostel room 3C like an accusation. Rishi Banerjee sat cross-legged on his metal cot, headphones dangling around his neck, eyes scanning a half-scribbled cheat sheet for his…
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The Third Locker
Chayan Ghoshal Chapter 1: The Letter The newsroom smelled of overbrewed coffee and paper dust—an aging beast barely held together by buzzing tube lights and worn-out keyboards. Subhasree Roy sat in the far-left corner, tapping absentmindedly on her laptop, staring at an unfinished draft on land scam allegations against a corporator who would likely never…
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The Whispering Walls
Nina V. D’Souza Part 1 The letter arrived on a Monday, folded neatly in an ivory envelope sealed with red wax. There was no return address, only Aria Langford’s name written in elegant cursive on the front. She stared at it for a long minute before tearing it open, curious but cautious. The apartment was…
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Red Spores
Drishti Mehra Part 1: The Glass Vial The town of Ravenswood had never seen a murder. Not in decades, at least. It was a place where the loudest disturbance was the occasional power outage or Mrs. Langley’s cat climbing the church steeple. So when Dr. Eleanor Reed was found dead in her laboratory one crisp…
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Married to My Enemy’s Son
Sanika Mehra Part 1 – The Truce Dress The first time I saw him, he was standing at the far end of the room like a statue carved out of contempt. Arjun Singh—my husband by decree, my enemy by blood—wore a black silk sherwani that looked like it had been stitched out of shadows. His…
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The Nawab’s Mirror
Manav Chouhan Chapter 1: The Letter from Chowk The rain had barely stopped drumming against the windows when Meher Chaudhary found the envelope waiting on the windowsill of her Delhi studio, damp but intact, as though it had arrived with the storm itself. Its paper was of an oddly antique texture—off-white and fibrous, sealed with…
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Sixteen Minutes Late
Tushar Deb 1 The night train rumbled through the sleepy heart of Bihar, its windows reflecting the ghostly blue of an almost-full moon. The Guwahati–Delhi Express was known for its long, uneventful journey through forests, fields, and forgotten towns, but no one paid attention to one particular stop: Dharmapur Junction. It wasn’t printed on any…
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The Vanishing Filter
Vivek Awasthi Part 1: The Filter Nobody Posted It all began with a shimmer—not in the sky, not in the water, but on Rhea Malhotra’s face, caught mid-selfie. She was seated on her bed, hair loose, sunlight filtering through the window, giving her skin a natural glow she wished she could bottle. She’d clicked dozens…