Breathe For Me

Pune, December. A physiotherapist is found in her bed, as if asleep. Then a marketing executive with a book open to its last page. Then a retail worker in a field outside the city, her mother's ring still on her hand.

There is no struggle at any of the scenes. No forced entry. No name that turns up in more than one life. Inspector Devendra Gaikwad has three folders on his desk and one sentence he cannot prove: someone chose these women.

Someone did. Rishabh Malhotra is the most attentive man any of them has ever met. He remembers the cutting board goes on the second shelf. He asks the question no one else asks. He teaches each woman, patiently, over months, to set down the thing she has always had to carry alone — and then, breath by breath, to ask for the very thing that will end her.

Rhea Deshpande, the Herald's best crime reporter, is the first to see the method behind the deaths. She is also the one woman he cannot find a gap in. So when he reaches out, he comes as a source: accurate, generous, always one step ahead of the task force. And Rhea, who has always walked toward the closed door, keeps coming back.

By the time she understands what he is, her phone belongs to him, her messages to the police are disappearing, and the only proof that would hold up in court is the one thing she can get only in his room.

She has the name. She has the story out on paper, out of his reach. On the last night in March she walks up four flights of stairs to his door anyway.

Gaikwad is forty metres away, waiting for a signature.

Breathe For Me is a psychological thriller told largely from inside the mind of a methodical killer, and from the minds of the two people clever enough to find him. Book 1 of the Breathless Grip novels.