He meets her eyes and, for once, does not answer immediately. The question has teeth. It is not only about the office. It is about him, his appetite for attention, the way he keeps stepping just close enough to the fire to feel warm while insisting he is not burning.
The silence stretches.
Then he says, very quietly, “Do you want the honest answer?”
Nandita’s face is unreadable, but her breathing has changed. “I want the safe one.”
He smiles faintly. “Then no. I don’t want trouble.”
“You are trouble.”
He looks at her for a long moment, and the room feels smaller again, the glass walls suddenly insufficient to their purpose. “And yet you keep meeting me alone.”
Her eyes flash.
The air tightens.
He can almost see the words she doesn’t say: because I have to. Because you’re good at your job. Because this is work. Because I am not the sort of woman who gets caught in a room with a twenty-three-year-old marketing executive and forgets herself.
Instead she says, in a tone she has clearly rebuilt from the ground up, “Get out before this becomes more awkward than it already is.”
He stands slowly, taking his laptop. “Awkward is a strong word.”
“It’s the polite one.”
At the door he pauses, hand on the handle. Not enough to turn back fully. Just enough to make the moment feel deliberate.
“Nandita.”
She does not answer, but she is listening.
He turns his head slightly. “If you’re worried about gossip, I can handle it.”
Now she looks at him. “Can you?”
He smiles then—small, controlled, almost gentle. “I usually do.”
It is not a boast. That is what makes it dangerous.
For the first time, something like uncertainty passes through her expression. Not fear. Not even doubt. Just the brief awareness that he may be better at this game than she would like him to be.
He leaves before she can answer.
By noon the floor has gone subtly electric.
It starts with a whisper near the pantry. Then a pause in the corridor. Then the strange phenomenon of people lowering their voices when he passes and raising them again only after he is gone. The rumours are still shapeless, but shape is being given to them. That is how these things begin. Not with proof. With atmosphere.
Aalekh knows better than to ask direct questions. He prefers the soft net of observation.
He takes his coffee to the window bay near the workstation cluster, where two junior employees are pretending to check spreadsheets and failing. One of them, a boy from finance named Karan, keeps glancing at him with the strained courage of someone who has decided to be brave only because fear has become more expensive.
Aalekh smiles at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Karan startles. “No, sir.”
“‘Sir’ is how people speak when they’re lying.”
Karan laughs nervously. “Actually, I was just—”
“Yes?”
The boy shifts. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Aalekh takes a slow sip of coffee. “If it’s nothing, then it won’t kill you to say it.”
Karan looks around. One of the coordinators is typing furiously, pretending not to listen. The corridor is not empty enough.
Lowering his voice, Karan says, “People are talking.”
“I assumed they were.”
“About… I mean, about you.”
Aalekh keeps his face mild. “That narrows it down less than you think.”
Karan swallows. “There’s been… remarks. That’s all. About meetings. About who you’re with. Some people think—” He stops.
Aalekh tilts his head. “Think what?”
The boy’s ears go red. “That you’re getting close to senior people in a way that… looks different.”
Aalekh does not move.
Different.
He lets the word sit between them like a dropped glass.
“Who,” he asks, still perfectly calm, “is people?”
Karan’s mouth opens, then closes. He is young enough to want to confess and old enough to know better.
“Forget it,” Aalekh says at once, softening the blade. “I’m not here to make your life difficult.”
Karan looks relieved, which is useful. Relief makes people talk later.
Aalekh sets his cup down on the ledge. “Listen carefully. If anyone asks, you said nothing. And if anyone tells you to repeat something, you didn’t hear it from me. Understood?”
The boy nods.
Aalekh gives him a thin, friendly smile. “Good. Now go be useful somewhere else.”
Karan disappears almost instantly.
Aalekh remains by the window a moment longer, watching the city through the glass. Traffic crawls below like blood through a vein. The towers opposite the Varnika headquarters reflect the same merciless winter light, all sharp edges and ambition. He could almost admire the simplicity of the problem if it weren’t his problem.
Rumours are not danger. Not yet.
But they are traction.
And traction, once it starts, becomes momentum.
He is still considering the shape of it when his phone buzzes.
A message from an unknown number.
Not a text. A screenshot.
He opens it.
A chat thread. Cropped. Enough to be understood, not enough to be traced. His name appears once, then again. A line about “the young one upstairs.” Another about “too much access.” A final message, half-obscured by the crop, that reads: If this reaches HR, somebody is finished.
His jaw tightens.
For the first time all morning, he feels the clean edge of irritation. Not fear. He has never been particularly good at fear. But irritation is useful. It sharpens the body.
He looks up.
Across the floor, Nandita is standing near her cabin, speaking to someone from HR with her back half-turned. Her posture is composed, but there is a tension in the line of her shoulders that says she is already managing damage. She glances up once and catches him looking.
The look lasts barely a second.
Enough.
He sees in it not accusation exactly, but the beginning of a decision.
By late afternoon, the office has adopted the careful energy of a place where one wrong sentence could become a file.
Emails are answered faster. Meetings are shorter. People approach each other with professionally neutral faces that conceal a feverish appetite for information. Aalekh feels the shift in every corridor he crosses. Not all of it is about him, but enough of it is.
He is called into a small review room at 4:15 under the pretext of aligning on next week’s launch calendar. Nandita is already there when he arrives, along with Sangeeta from HR, who has the bland expression of a woman trained to sound non-threatening while measuring your pulse.
“Sit, Aalekh,” Nandita says.
He does.
Sangeeta smiles in a way that contains no warmth. “This is informal.”
That is never true.
Nandita opens a file. “We’ve received feedback that some team interactions may be getting… misread.”
Aalekh keeps his face open. Interested. Slightly puzzled.
“Misread how?”
Sangeeta glances at Nandita, then back at him. “There’s concern about perception. About closeness.”
He offers a small laugh, as if the matter is mildly absurd. “I work with leadership. Closeness is part of the job.”
Nandita’s eyes move to him, warning and steady.