Priya

The farmhouse on Kolar Road was the kind of property that did not announce itself from the road. A discreet gate, gravel inside, fairy lights strung between trees that had been old for thirty years. A banner: Mehta Cement Co. Annual Social Evening. A bar with good bottles. White-coated staff moving between guests with practiced efficiency.

Two of the staff were not professional caterers.

Priya noticed Baldev’s wrist before she noticed his face. The bandage was fresh, clean, visible below his cuff. He was carrying a tray of champagne flutes with his good hand, the other held carefully at his side. When he looked up and saw her, the tray did not shake. He was a man who had decided, sometime in the past week, on a particular form of composure.

Baldev had been in many rooms with frightened women.

This was what his experience had taught him to expect. He came in. He made clear that the situation was serious. He let the silence do most of the work. The rest — the calculation, the concession, the understanding that cooperation was the sensible option — followed without much effort from him.

He had not expected her to be calm.

The large man’s name was Baldev. Priya learned this in the first sixty seconds — the smaller one called it out when he thought she wasn’t paying attention to them at all.

She was.

Baldev had taken three steps into the room, slow, the way a man moves when he wants you to understand that he is not hurrying because he doesn’t need to. He had looked at the candles. He had looked at the music still playing from her phone on the bedside table. He had looked at her in the ivory saree, which was designed for a different evening entirely, and his smile had the quality of a man who considers himself lucky.

Wrong Key is a four-part thriller about a newly-married couple, a government audit, and what happens when the wrong people come through the right door.

Aryan is an IAS officer posted to Bhopal. Priya is the wife he has been married to for four months and does not yet fully know. R.K. Mehta is the man who made a decision he will spend the rest of the series undoing.

Part 1 — The Night They Came

Their first night in the new flat. Aryan has a surprise planned for after dinner. He doesn’t make it home.

The email arrived at 7:14 in the morning, while Aryan was still in the shower.

Priya read it on her phone sitting on the edge of the bed. Government quarter allotted, Nehru Nagar Road, Bhopal, possession from today. She forwarded it to him, then got up and started on the second bag.

He came out with a towel around his shoulders, read it standing in the doorway, said nothing for a moment. Then he picked up his phone and called the cement company to confirm his audit schedule for the following day.