Nikki's Gambit

Some daughters pray for their mothers. She waited for hers to die. He was just the entertainment in between.

He saw every red flag. He counted them. And he trusted her anyway.

In A Nest of Vipers, the second book in the Nikki's Gambit trilogy, Madhav Razdan, a lonely, successful man in Delhi who has buried everyone he ever loved, lets a woman he has never met talk him out of the one thing that ever kept him safe: his judgement. She asks him to stop noticing. To trust completely. To go all in, for a future she promises they are building together.

So he does. And what follows is one autumn, kept as a nightly journal, of the most intimate and devastating manipulation of his life.

A psychological true-to-life thriller about love, control and the slow art of being undone by someone who never once breaks character.

Told entirely in his own voice, this is the story of a clever man's descent into a romance and crypto investment scam so patient, so surgical, that he narrates his own ruin in real time and keeps choosing her on every page.

Readers who love this book will find:

• A first-person psychological drama with the intimacy of a diary and the dread of a thriller
• A slow-burn story of coercive control, gaslighting and emotional manipulation drawn from real events
• A villain who earns her darkness through her own words, no melodrama, only the cold logic of a person with a use for everyone, including her own mother
• A deeply human, sympathetic narrator whose loneliness will feel unbearably familiar
• Short, quotable, screenshot-worthy lines on almost every page
• A cliffhanger ending that makes Book Three impossible to skip

If you were moved by the emotional precision of literary psychological fiction, the manipulation of a romance scam story or the dread of a coercive-control thriller, this book will stay with you long after the last page.

She never asked for his money. Only his fear of dying alone.

I have noticed everything. I am going to do it anyway.

Book Two of the Nikki's Gambit trilogy. Can be read on its own.