A Valentine's Algorithm
Copyright© 2026 by Tantrayaan
Chapter 2
The walk back from the Anchor Bar was a path his body knew by heart. City lights bled around Vikram as he moved, a ghost in a frozen February night. The scotch sat in his chest, a useless little furnace against the chill. Archived. Cold case as of Tuesday. Inna’s verdict played on a loop, a nasty earworm he couldn’t shake.
Keys. His fingers were thick, stupid with drink and a deep, bone-tired exhaustion. The metal screeched against the lock before it finally went in. Somehow he remembered how to open the door and and stepped into the flat.
The quiet swallowed him. It had weight, that silence. It had settled over his life like a layer of grime the night Elara disappeared. He didn’t flip the light switch. What was the point? He knew the shape of the darkness here.
He sagged against the shut door. The latch clicked. A sound absurdly loud in the silence. Back at the bar, surrounded by strangers and the steady, solid fact of Inna across the table, he’d managed to keep the walls up. Here, alone in the hallway that still smelled faintly of her shampoo, the performance was over. His legs gave out. He slid down the wood until he was just a heap on the floorboards, the heels of his hands digging into his eye sockets.
A sound leaked out of him. More air than word. “Elara.”
For a second, he swore he caught the ghost of her lavender laundry soap on the coat hanging by the door. A stupid trick of memory. He knew the truth. If he dragged himself over there now and buried his face in that wool, he’d find nothing. Just dust and the hollow, empty scent of a life halted.
His thoughts, treacherous, slithered to Inna. Kind. Kinder than the situation required. She’d been the one to bring him the frame. She’d sat there and let his angry, shattered monologue about the system wash over her, never flinching, never offering him that damp look of pity he’d come to expect from everyone. Then her pinky had brushed his. A spark, tiny and vicious. It had felt like a threat. The first sensation in six months that wasn’t just ... a numb, endless cold.
That was the real betrayal. That spark. It didn’t warm him; it just carved the cold inside him into something deeper, more profound. How could his own stupid body react to anyone when Elara was still out there in the dark, lost?
He hauled himself up, legs jittering under him. He needed light. The small lamp on the side table clicked on, its yellow glow pooling over the couch where she’d always curled up with a book. This whole room was a minefield now.
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