Dr. Arjun Nair pressed his palm against the chilled steel of the autopsy table. The body beneath the white sheet was that of a 23-year-old woman, brought in at 2 a.m. — “unexplained sudden death,” the police report read.

He spent the next four hours in the mortuary’s small library, pulling down the old, battered copy of Ignatius’s toxicology section. Chapter 9: Metabolic Poisons . He read it twice.

The case was closed. Not murder. Not suicide. An industrial accident written in the color of her blood.

The constable flipped through his notes. “No, sir. Ceiling fan. Sealed windows. No burns, no smoke.”

But there was no source of carbon monoxide.

Her name was Kavya. And her lips were a perfect, cherry-pink.

Arjun had read the first edition of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology by Ignatius P. X. as a first-year student, the pages already dog-eared and coffee-stained. He’d memorized the chapters on asphyxiants, poisons, and post-mortem lividity. But no textbook could prepare him for the smell of a life interrupted.