• Crime - English

    The Listener

    Devraj Sinha Part 1 — The Echo in the Dark The gallery stood like a lone lantern in the sleeping street, its glass façade throwing pale squares of light onto wet cobblestones. Midnight rain had just stopped, leaving the air sharp with that metallic scent London kept after a downpour. Lena Brooks had been watching the place for an hour, hood drawn low, hands in her jacket pocket, the spray can warm against her palm. She’d chosen this night carefully. No security guard on the roster—she’d checked the rota online—and the CCTV camera above the side alley had been broken…

  • English - Horror

    The Accountant’s Game

    Dilip Joshi 1 The spreadsheets didn’t scream. They whispered. Subtle inconsistencies in formatting, curious repetition in transaction references, and the strange appearance of a dormant offshore subsidiary—“VKL Capital Holdings (Cayman)”—that had shown no activity for nearly four years suddenly blinking back to life with a $212 million transfer flagged under “legacy adjustments.” To most eyes at Vincent & Klein Bank, it would have passed as routine. But Tarun Vaidya wasn’t most people. A forensic accountant trained to read patterns, Tarun spent his days in the dim, soulless cube on the 17th floor of the Mumbai head office, cross-verifying compliance sheets…