#anu writes

His lower lip had split skin from the bejewelled ring smashed against it and he could still feel the slight swell and the throbbing pain in his teeth. He clutched the edges of the stone embedded sink with his trembling hands and ruthlessly pushed the violent urge to throw up. 

The bitter aftertaste of cum was like poison on his palette. 

Shauryaman swung open the cabinet drawer and nicked a painkiller and popped it down with a swig of the clear vodka that was remaining in the glass tumbler kept beside. 

He probably shouldn’t have mixed alcohol with drugs but his entire body was aching with a furious vengeance that threatened to drown him. 

And perhaps a hallucinogen will take his mind off the white hot agony pulsating between his legs. He looked down and saw the mess of blood soaked tissues he had deposited inside the trashcan. Still there remained an impressive splatter of ruby drops on the white marble flooring, making it look like a macabre canvas of a Jackson Pollock.  

He probably needed an antiseptic. 

Dr. Galvankar will write him a prescription. 

The man took the bucks and kept his mouth shut. Though sometimes he could spot the accumulating pity in the older physician’s eyes when he would tumble through his doors, once in a while. 

Shauryaman resisted the urge to smash his fist into the man’s face out of foresight, if not anything else— even if the pity hurt him more than the monster fucking him to near death ever could. 

Poor pathetic Shauryaman Gaur. Useless, stupid, playboy who can only throw around daddy’s money. Oh he tried becoming a lawyer, this one, do you know? Got kicked out from there as well. Pitiful isn’t he?

He gritted his teeth and pulled up the trousers swallowing the whimper of pain as the fabric settled harsh on his abused skin. Then followed it up with his shirt and jacket, hiding the finger shaped bruises and teeth indentations that had marked his tanned skin like a tattoo. 

A brand like those African slave traders used to burn into the skin of their pet humans as they dragged them around the earth like their very own plebian possessions. 

Shauryaman closed the door of the bathroom gently and slinked out of the room, throwing furtive glances at the snoring man on the bed. He tiptoed around the empty corridor, feeling like a cat burglar and almost jumped out of his skin on seeing the silhouette of the woman standing at the foot of the staircase. 

He took his time, going down the stairs, holding the railing for support and mincing the noises of pain that kept hammering inside him with practiced fervor. 

Leena Sahani gasped when she could finally see him in the dim lights of the pool area casting a blue-green sheen over everything in the otherwise pitch black living room. 

“Oh good, you are back. At least he will let me be at peace for a few weeks”, Shauryaman said icily. 

Leena had her hands pressed to her own mouth, eyes crushed close. She barely reacted to the twisted words spoken but he could see the tears sliding down her pallid face. 

Shauryaman rifled through his hollowed out insides to find any shred of sympathy that might have survived the cruel irony his life had always been, and came up sickeningly empty. 

“Shaurya..”, the woman whispered but he cut across her wavering words tonelessly. 

“There is blood on the bathroom floor, I tried cleaning it as best I could. Don’t slip and fall—”

Leena Sahani couldn’t suppress the sob clogging her throat and Shauryaman left the frail woman standing on the steps, gingerly making his way outside the hellscape and welcomed the cool air of the night caressing his heated face. 

The Mumbai breeze was perhaps the only tender contact left in his life. 

Shauryaman had managed to climb inside his car with much difficulty and was wondering the merits of wrapping the thing around a pole, if only excused under the influence of the chemical madness travelling down his veins when his mobile rang startling him badly. 

He didn’t check the number and put it to his ear, irritated. 

“Whatever the fuck you want, I don’t give a fuck”, he snarled and would’ve cut the call had the person on the line not spoken immediately, almost overlapping with his own words. 

“They are not letting me see her.. Please..”, the voice sounded stuttered, weak— the kind of illegible faintness associated with age and grief in an invariable tangle. 

“Who..what? Who are you and where did you get this number?”, he asked sharply. The fog descended from the drugs and the booze was settling heavy and comfortable on him. 

Yet there was a distinct note of awareness that refused to let him fly away into the world of happy delusion. 

At least for a few hours, be it. 

“I..I..you are her lawyer aren’t you? The card was there in her bag. I—”

It was like a bucket of ice cold water being thrown on his face and he straightened immediately like a bowstring drawn tight, despite the sharp pain igniting in his lower back at the careless movement. 

“Who are you speaking about? What happened? Whom are they not letting you see?”, he shot rapidly while turning the key in the ignition. 

The other side of the line crackled once and twice, the static reminiscent of very old mobile phones or could even be a landline. But if Shauryaman’s instincts were correct, it was most probably a payphone. 

His heart was hammering like thunder striking and bouncing off an indestructible trampoline. 

“I am Kumud’s grandmother. Your name was there on the card…so. The police aren’t letting me even see her. It has been three days. What should I do?”

Shauryaman cursed in the most colorful language he could, completely forgetting about the old woman sobbing on the line and turned the wheel of his car so hard, he almost took off the bender at the gates of the mansion. 

Oh no.. oh no no no.. they can’t. 

He should have known..he should’ve.. 

He was too busy drinking himself to death. 

They fucking can’t— the evidence. 

All the evidence..oh god. 

____________________________________

Present Time

Meenakshi was blinded by the flash of the cameras as the reporters almost fell over themselves trying to get close to her husband. 

They were walking down the steps of the courtroom while Shauryaman looked strangely detached from his surroundings. 

There was no trace of triumph on his face, or lines of guilt, or even the ever familiar softening of relief. 

It was worse than trying to read a sphinx. 

Earlier in the courtroom he had made a beeline towards her but had been intercepted by Inspector Gokhale. The man had looked visibly angered at having to let his golden goose go. 

“Don’t think we are done yet, Mr. Gaur. One of these days, I will catch you and then no amount of dilly-dallying in court would save you”, the taller man had said between gritted teeth while he had signed the release papers. 

Shauryaman had given him his infamous rage provoking lopsided smile and patted Dattarao’s collars with the dismissive rudeness of an entitled child. 

“Gokhale ji, if you had put even one ounce of this inexplicable passion to prove me a villain into the effort of catching the actual perpetrator then today, Soma Mittal would have gotten her justice.”

Gokhale had growled, barely managing to stop himself from strangling the other man. 

Shauryaman had only shaken his head in mock sympathy. 

“Alas.. you and the prosecution bit into me like a couple of dimwitted terriers keen on shaking imaginary clues loose and ended up wasting everyone including the court’s valuable time.”

Meenakshi had intercepted them before the inspector could pummel her husband into the floor. 

God, the man should come with a warning label of his own. 

“Inspector Gokhale, thank you for your stellar service. Please be assured to appraise me on the situation of my husband’s attacker that you all had fished out off the premises today. I will be in touch with your superior”, Meenakshi had said, pulling Shauryaman by his elbow, putting him out of the fuming police chief’s range. 

She had specifically mentioned the superior for the exact bitter reaction Gokhale was giving her. It was a roundabout threat made in the most polite way possible. 

Meenakshi hadn’t forgotten about the murder attempt. 

No, sir. 

She could still feel the lingering aftershocks of the pure unadulterated terror that had gripped her when she had heard the shot and then watched her husband go down like a marionette with its strings severed. 

It was harrowing, those few seconds till he had leaped up and ran inside the courtroom. For that miniscule moment stretched into an immeasurable time Meenakshi had forgotten about everything— the case, the doubts, the exhaustion and confusion. 

It was like being dunked under water and ice crystallising in her lungs. 

She hadn’t been able to breathe till she had felt his heart beat against her face in the life affirming vibrancy through his chest and the fabric of his red henley. 

Shauryaman had tugged her beside him and had somehow managed to expertly put himself like a physical barrier between her and the cameras as they walked towards their car. It had appeared intentional and she could sense the warmth of his fingers curled around her own. 

Fingers that had caressed her hair when he had thought she had been sleeping. 

Fingers that may have curled around a set of keys that had jabbed into the vulnerable throat of an innocent girl. 

“Mr. Gaur, did you kill Soma Mittal?”

“You have been kicked off the board of your company. Care to comment?”

“How can you sleep at night knowing you have destroyed an entire family?”

“Mr. Gaur, what do you have to say about the allegations of corruption that have been brought against Gaur Constructions in the land grabbing cases?”

Shauryaman stopped and turned for a moment, angled in a way that kept his wife out of the frame and the mics being shoved at his face. He ignored the rest and stared straight at the reporter who had asked the last question. 

The man took a step back almost instinctively.

Meenakshi could concur, the face her husband had on— she had rarely, if ever seen him look so spectacularly icy even if he hadn’t spoken a single word. His eyes were like twin razors, a sudden inexplicable and one-eighty degree shift from the brainless buffoon he portrayed himself to be ninety percent of the time or the lecherous playboy, for the rest ten. 

This was the real man. 

The man, Meenakshi had gotten little peeks of throughout the one year of their marriage. 

It unnerved her.  

This severe, almost cunning version of her husband. 

“Keertan..right? From Samachaar ?”, he asked, tone utterly blase and the young reporter nodded, looking slightly discomfitted at being identified and unexpectedly singled out like this. 

“Tell Nandita to be present in the party tomorrow evening and she might just get all her answers”, he turned to the rest of them, charcoal eyes flashing dangerously, “and you all… talk to my lawyer. After all, Ikka is the messiah of the innocent and wrongly accused, isn’t he?”

Shauryaman finished almost sweetly and grinned like a shark, a predator before a hunt— looking utterly unbothered about the circus happening at his expense before turning around and practically tugging Meenakshi along towards the car. 

The reporters kept screaming after him but he paid them no mind, letting their bodyguards swarm them before disappearing into the black Mercedes. He had taken the passenger seat,strangely enough. 

Meenakshi took the driver’s seat in turn and they were on the road leaving the ruckus of the courthouse compound and the TV stations and media network and the horde of activists far behind. 

It was only then she noticed that Shauryaman hadn’t left her hand. He was still holding onto the fingers of her left hand on his lap. He was leaning back on his seat, finally looking tired. 

So that was another mask. 

Or twenty. 

Who was her husband? Did she even know him?

The questions were merciless and relentlessly circling her mind and she had no definitive answers, neither could she manage to sort all of them properly so that they could be expressed out in the open.

But she had to know. 

Even if it topples everything, crashes her world into smithereens and throws her off a cliff, she still has to know— beyond a shadow of doubt. Beyond the theatrics of the court and the games everyone is supposedly playing around them. 

“Shauryaman..”, she said and he opened his eyes, the grip on her hand loosening almost as if instinctively. 

“Meenakshi I—”

She cut him off. 

“I don’t need to know the reason. Frankly, I don’t think I care but..I need to know the truth. Just this one. I have trusted you this far, through all of this, through every scandal and doubt, even through things I personally would never conceive to support and yet for you, I have done it. And I think I deserve the truth”, she said firmly, carefully keeping her eyes on the road and not on his face. 

If she had, she would have seen his lips spasm once, his eyes losing that charade of composure and dulling at the edges. 

“You deserve so much more”, he whispered instead— again with that raw almost savage honesty that somehow only she could bring out of him. The power was dizzying and yet she felt like he had kept her outside the door. 

“Yes”, she answered and felt him flinch and drop her hand and she brought it to the wheel, mourning the loss of his warmth almost immediately. 

“Did you kill Soma Mittal? Yes or no.”

She couldn’t see his face, she didn’t want to. 

Was she protecting herself or him? 

Did it even matter anymore?

A single breath and Meenakshi saw her entire world balanced at the precipice of a single syllable. 

“No.”

Meenakshi snapped her head towards him immediately, narrowly avoiding stepping on the gas a little harder out of sheer adrenaline. 

Shauryaman was looking at her already. As if letting her read him. She could sense it. The walls were down, completely down, dialed back to leave the real, unfiltered man behind. 

His eyes were on her and the gaze was so intense she couldn’t hold it. 

Sheer relief had made gravity ten times weighty and Meenakshi could melt into a puddle on her seat. She swallowed the emotion threatening to tear out of her throat and nodded once sharply, then twice and blinked hard enough to give herself a headache. 

“So why did you set a false alibi? Where were you at that time? Why were you with her that night— you were sleeping when I came back and then I woke up and you were gone—”

Shit shit shit. 

She is rambling. She is being emotional. 

So what if that was the night of their wedding anniversary? So what if she had found him barely conscious, almost blue in the face with trauma? So what if he decided to blow some steam with some random girl and the girl died of pufferfish toxin like an idiot?

Meenakshi kept forgetting that their relationship was based on a contract. 

It was she who had told him that they would keep separate lives. He owed her nothing. She owed him nothing. It worked. There was no reason to mess up a perfectly functional relationship over trivialities like emotions. 

The heart was a fickle mistress anyway. 

A cruel cunning evil mistress. 

She cannot fall weak like this. 

They weren’t supposed to be like this. 

Meenakshi almost jumped out of her skin when Shauryaman took her left hand back in his own larger one again. He was rubbing his thumb over her knuckles. A habit she had sensed her husband liked to do to comfort her, or himself maybe— who even knew what went on in that twisted brain of his. 

“It is a long story. A very long story and I wish..oh god, Meenakshi you have no idea how much I want to tell you everything— it’s like an angry river slamming against me with its terrifying waves and I can already feel the cracks. But I still do not have all the pieces of the puzzle. Give me a little more time. Just another day, I promise. And then—”

Shauryaman stopped and swallowed hard and brought her hand to his lips and pressed them to the center knuckle so softly it felt like a butterfly’s wing brushing against her skin. 

But the contact, as usual, was electric. 

She could feel it brand her skin. 

Like a soulmark, if those even existed beyond the fairytale castles of a child’s dream. 

“And then if you want, we can end the contract. Get a divorce. I won't contest it, I swear”

Meenakshi hadn’t expected the next words and stopped violently in the middle of the road, almost jolting herself over the steering wheel, pressing on the brake in sheer shock. Shauryaman barely managed to stop faceslamming on the dash and gasped— probably at the seat belt cutting into his chest. 

The cars behind started honking madly and they were fortunate that none banged into their rear. 

“Meenakshi! Watch out..what are you doing?”, he said, wide eyed. 

Meenakshi restarted the engine and slammed on the accelerator so hard, Shauryaman was thrown back against his seat with the motion. 

There it was again, that bubbling wrath that was drenching her vision in blood.

“Breathe…Meenu breathe”, her inner voice almost always took her father’s tempered tone. 

How easily he had said, to break the contract. 

After everything she had done for him. 

Well, he can go to hell— she doesn’t give a flying fuck. It's not like her life is going to end. He is the one on the sinking ship, no endless supply of money anymore, how long will the trust fund support his lavish lifestyle, she has a company to run. 

She doesn’t have time for this nonsense. 

“Meenakshi..”

He whispered, almost a tad afraid for the first time since he had been arrested and wasn’t that a charm to know? Jail doesn’t scare Shauryaman Gaur as much as his wife being furious does. In his defense, she had kicked him in the stomach hard enough for the blood to clot. 

“Meena—”

“What?”, she snarled, stopping his timid call midway. 

“I didn’t mean to upset you..I just—”

“I am not upset. I am fine. Don’t give yourself so much credit.”

Shauryaman seemed to sink back into his seat, appropriately cowed. 

There was an awkward silence in the car for some minutes. Then Shauryaman turned towards her, looking subdued. He had been fiddling with his phone for the past five minutes. 

“Did..papa call you?”, he asked quietly. 

Meenakshi frowned. 

“I don’t think so..no”, she replied, trying to remember the last time she had spoken with Harshvardhan. Maybe that disastrous boardroom debacle the day they kicked the Gaur heir off the table, so to speak. 

He hadn’t talked to her but she had caught him throwing her furtive, almost anxious glances. 

“Oh..okay”, there was a strange defeated resignation in his voice that made something knot nauseatingly inside her stomach. 

Harshvardhan hadn’t been in the court for even a single proceeding, hadn’t even asked after Shauryaman from Meenakshi. It was a damning sobering thought that had escaped her before. 

Shauryaman laughed lightly, but the jubilance fell flat in his eyes. There was no brightness on his handsome face, only slant shadows and streaks of light pouring from the sunroof in a mystifying pattern of gold and grey blanketing him. 

“I didn’t know what I had expected. Maybe he would have at least wanted to know whether I am alive. I guess the television showed him— he must be busy with the board”, he said quaintly. 

Oh..oh

Meenakshi felt someone had taken hold of her heart and was squeezing it mercilessly. She also felt an intense desire to deck Gaur senior but she kept it to herself. 

Shauryaman was still smiling a little blankly at the passing sunset over marine drive. 

“What did I hear about a party tomorrow that you invited a random reporter to?”, Meenakshi said suddenly, if only to distract her husband somewhat. 

How can one distract someone from such a base primeval agony?

But Shauryaman seemed excited all of a sudden. There was a strange almost endearing childish glee on his chiselled face. His dark eyes had its mischievous twinkle back and Meenakshi couldn’t help but suppress a smile of her own. 

His sudden unprecedented cheer was dangerously contagious. 

“You know, when I was a baby, maa used to read all these stories to me at bedtime. It was my favourite time of the day. She was an avid reader and adored classics but I was always more fascinated with mystery. The clues left throughout the book, the invisible threads which joined so seamlessly at the end— the final reveal..”

Shauryaman seemed to have gone into a trance, or maybe surfing through the memory lane which held the happier times of his life. The smile on his face that usually swung between extreme cynicism and salacious charm had softened into one of those inordinately rare softness. 

Pauravi Gaur must have been a lovely woman. 

“When I grew up a little, papa got me all those whodunnit books that I would devour like an addict. I think my fascination towards law had somehow begun from there. It was a nice..those days when mama was alive and papa liked me a little—”

The last words had tangled together making his cadence thicken into an uncomfortable emotion and Meenakshi had to swallow the lump formed in her throat. 

If she focussed hard enough she could picture a little boy with Shauryaman’s eyes but with chubbier, fuller cheeks and that annoying waves of hair over his forehead with his head buried in a book, swinging his legs from his perch on their kitchen island. 

There was no melancholy in his gaze, none of that hollow eyed trauma hidden beneath sharp words and a cavalier attitude. 

It made her ache somewhere. 

“Anyway”, Shauryaman’s sudden exclamation broke her reverie, “what I meant to say was that my favourite moment in all those stories was the time of the reveal. Call everyone, the guilty, the innocent, the co-conspirators, the spectators at one place and unravel the truth— curtain fall.”

She turned to look at him. 

Shauryaman had a wicked glint in his eyes now. But there was also a darkness threaded into the look like a possessive vine around an oak. It was strangely attractive— like a macabre sort of pull that forced one to stare into the abyss even if they know better. 

A party? 

The curtain-fall moment. 

For some reason, Meenakshi felt like destiny was waiting at the doorstep of this enigmatic celebration that was supposed to unravel the truth that had been hankering at her heels from the first moment she had laid eyes on Shauryaman Gaur.

The question was, would she be able to tide this oncoming tsunami and remain standing at the other end?

_________________________

Eleven Years Ago

“...I was just saying that had we established precedent, all the mental gymnastics we had to do after wouldn’t have taken so bloody long—”

The young lawyer collapsed on the desk, face first into the pages of the Criminal Law Edition XII that was nestled in between a thousand other papers and files and ensuing paraphernalia. 

“We still won the case— the farmers of Bishnoi will have their natural biosphere reserves intact and the Hingorani group will have to remove their pollution intensive plant from their land”, the older man remarked, nudging the younger’s head off the book and putting it back on the bookshelf in its designated place. 

“But, had we told the judge about the Tribals of Manjhipal Vs. The Ruia Group case we could have saved so much time and effort running behind clues and witnesses”

“Shaurya, you are a brilliant lawyer and your points hold merit but sometimes we have to consider the human angle as well. This was a media intensive trial and I didn’t want to remind the public or the court about the scandal surrounding Purna Ruia. The girl had already been through enough— you know how the press is. The court would have called her and then the press would have dragged her name and character all over the place in the name of truth and reporting.”

There was a thick distaste in Arjun Mehra’s voice that was palpable in the air. 

Shauryaman was looking at him sideways now, still loathed to remove his head completely off the desk. 

He had been surviving on caffeine, Twix bars and sheer will since the past week. 

But the satisfaction of a conviction always superseded everything else. 

It was like a drug— a shot of heroin that made him forget about the bitter truths of his life. 

“You are too noble for your own good, Mister hundred percent. One day someone is going to use this against you and get their job done at your expense. Or worse, someone is going to do something horrible and get a pass because you are too righteous to exploit the loopholes”, he declared sagely. 

Arjun swatted at his head with a heavy binder making the latter yelp in protest and rub the spot of abuse, almost pouting at being tapped like a child. 

“Hey now—”

“And you are too young to be making futuristic premonitions of wisdom, little lawyer. You need to sleep. Get some shut eye and don't drive yourself into a tree or your father will kill me”, Ikka chuckled trying to manage the pandemonium on his desk. 

“Don’t call me little. I am just fifteen years younger than you. Also papa wouldn’t care if you hang me upside down from the rafters and leave me to bleed to death”, the last part came muffled from where Shauryaman had tucked his face inside his arms on the desk, ending his bitter words in a small yawn. 

The sudden touch on his head startled the younger man. 

Arjun was threading his fingers through his hair almost soothingly. 

“Don’t be an idiot, kid. He is your father. Of course he cares, even if he is shit at showing it sometimes. He calls me up almost every week to ask how you are faring—”, Ikka sounded almost fond. 

Shauryaman was carefully still like the fingers inside his hair was a bomb ready to detonate on the slightest movement. He couldn’t let himself be nudged for even a fraction more. But he didn’t pull away like Arjun had expected. 

In fact he almost seemed to lean into the touch. 

It was strange for the usually prickly and cynical Shauryaman Gaur.

The boy was a genius but also impossibly ill-mannered and completely amoral. He needed to be directed towards his potential to be used for the good more often than general silliness and the usual vices of the men of his social status. 

But he was a good boy. 

Deep underneath all those spikes and acidic disregard. 

There was softness in him. 

“Well..he never asks me”, the young intern said morosely. 

“Well then he is being an idiot. Tell him, I said so and that Ikka never lies”, Arjun winked at him and walked around the corner to push the photocopies of the police reports inside the thick binder. 

Shauryaman giggled from behind him. 

An honest to god, giggle from a twenty five year old shouldn’t sound so endearing. Maybe he needed a shut eye as well. The case had dragged on for forever and all the mental hoopjumps had exhausted him. 

“Good night boss”

Shauryaman stifled a yawn and dragged himself to the exit, almost asleep even as he stumbled outside. 

Arjun smiled to himself and called his driver to get the Gaur heir home safely. 

He would definitely meet with an accident if he drove in this state— the fool. 

The next case on the docket was a strange one indeed. 

A woman accused of murdering her own husband. One of those endless pro bono cases they took up as per the mandate set by Arjun for the firm. 

He had a feeling this would be one of those cases that made him wrack his brains. 

If only he had known then—

_________________________

Vikram Phulkar was so nervous he almost dropped the glass three times since he had refilled it for the second time. 

Arjun Mehra was a formidable man and had the hundred yard stare of that infamously strict principal of your school. He had been quiet for the entire duration of thirty minutes that it had taken for Vikram to recount the events of that night. 

When he finally spoke, the older man’s voice was steady, yet hid a simmering adrenaline underneath. 

“And why didn’t you come forward while the case was ongoing?”

Vikram swallowed hard. 

“I…I was scared. That man..he looked unhinged. And he saw me. He knew where I lived. I was scared stiff that he would find a way to close my mouth permanently— so I ran and hid in my friend’s house in Goa”, the man stuttered. 

“So, why are you here now?”

“Because..oh god, I can’t take it anymore, sir. I see that girl in my dreams and the guilt doesn’t let me eat, or sleep or breathe. I have to..even if it kills me. I have to.”

“So let me get this straight”, Ikka leaned forward in his seat, keeping the man in laser focus, “you have seen the man? His entire face. You can identify him and you are ready to testify in court against him?”

“Yes!”, Vikram let out and sagged in his seat like he had run a marathon. 

Arjun smiled and leaned back in his own chair, satisfaction swarming his entire self in tandem. Then he picked up his mobile, dialing the first number in the recent call list. 

Fortunately the contract of his firm with Gaur constructions had been broken that afternoon itself. Or else, getting this information to the correct parties would have had him in a pickle. 

But God looks after those who fight for the truth.

“Hello..yes, Madhura. I have something for you—”

Gotcha now bastard!

________________________________

Inspector Dattarao Gokhale wiped the sweat off his forehead with a stained white handkerchief and leaned against the wall. His muscles were burning gratuitously and despite the impromptu workout in the holding cell, he was feeling euphoric. 

He might have taken out his wrath at the failed conviction and Shauryaman Gaur’s stupid ass face on his so-called attacker, but it was well used. 

The man had been a tough nut but eventually everyone broke. 

He had garbled out the names of his associates and especially the man who had hired him. That had sent half the police department into a frenzy. Never before had anyone even dared to utter his name lest agree to testify against him. 

Raghav fucking Chotan— that slippery eel who has the Mumbai underworld in a chokehold because of his drugs. 

He had so many open cases on him that it could probably fill the entire station but they could never catch him before. He always slid off with some technicality and more often than not under the patronage of the powers that be. 

But the crown was slowly shifting. There were rumours of a structural change happening in the government and unfortunately for Chotan— he and his gang had fallen in with the losing side in this war. 

The central powers were slowly ingratiating themselves into the governance and the Chief Minister’s throne had been shaking precariously since the land corruption cases had been brought to the forefront. 

This was the perfect time to catch Chotan once and for all and somehow get him either to turn on his actual boss or have him shipped to Tihar. 

Dattarao could already smell the polish of his new badge and a shiny promotion waiting at the corner.

Looks like that murderous brat came to be of use after all. 

The inspector only wished the stupid attacker had killed that entitled fucker before getting caught. It would have been one less criminal on the street and justice for that poor girl whose mother was still sitting empty eyed in the courtroom. 

“Sir, the DIG is on the line—”, an SI gave him his cell and Gokhale straightened immediately. 

“Yes sir.. Yes. We have him, sir. I will get the teams ready. What..but, but sir what if he tries to run? Oh..okay. Tomorrow sir? Alright. Yes sir.”

Dattarao cursed as the line cut. 

He hoped Raghav didn’t bolt before he could put the handcuffs on him. 

Why did the DIG ask him to wait and keep watch for today and only arrest him tomorrow evening, he didn’t know.

Well, at least it wasn’t a ‘look the other way’ command that he has been receiving since years. 

Raghav Chotan was a big fish but Dattarao wanted bigger. 

He wanted Tony Braganza. 

________________________________________

“The sheer gall of the boy! He has invited me for some celebratory party”, Tony Braganza’s rough cadence filtered from the line. 

“Then he is more foolish than we give him credit for—”

“Or, delusional. Does he seriously have no idea who called the hit on him?”, the older man continued sounding pinched. 

“Your man failed”, the voice answering was tempered in a way only polished diplomats expressing mild annoyance could be. 

“The brat moved at the last moment. It was a fluke. The security around was too tight, he didn’t get a second chance”

Braganza sounded miffed. Someone’s head was about to roll. 

“And now he is in custody—”

“Don’t worry. There will be no blowback on us. These people are insects, they die out and proliferate at the same pace. I will have someone take him out before the police get anything and even if they do— Raghav will take care of it”

The man just hummed absent minded. 

“Are you going to the party?”, he asked finally. 

“Why should I?”

“Maybe you should. Would give us both a good alibi—”

“Hmm, as if you need an alibi. The police lick your boots and the government has your back. You are protected, but me—”

The man cut through Braganza’s tirade amicably. 

“Arre sir, you are just as protected. Remember, I take care of my friends. Do come, it would be an educational experience..”

There was silence on the line before Tony spoke again, this time a mild curiosity and just a hint of concern in his raucous tone. 

“If the boy gets arrested again, it would be a headache to get to him before the courts—”

The man looked at the invite on his desk and smirked. 

He should have picked it up and thrown it right at the trashcan but he had hesitated. There was, after all, a different kind of beauty in watching a gazelle being torn to shreds by a tiger or rather, a foolish little hummingbird being pulled down from the air and smashed underfoot. 

Who was he to refuse when the prey himself had called upon his predator?

It has been too long since the man had enjoyed a good spectacle. 

He had already learnt what was about to happen from his sources at the police department. He knew Arjun “Ikka” Mehra wouldn’t sit still and let a rich brat play him. 

Honestly, who even leaves an eye witness of a murder alive?

The sheer level of delusional stupidity that most of these trust find kids lived with astonished the man. He had had his concerns about involving the idiot in their business but he had delivered the permit plans as promised and Braganza had vouched for the man. 

In his line of work, he had to keep the underworld relatively happy. 

Braganza’s man may have missed that day but Shauryaman Gaur’s fate was sealed the moment his lasciviousness had resulted in targeting him. 

The media might keep crying all they want but they would never get to the bottom of the fiasco that the very public trial of Shauryaman Gaur had started— he had too much leverage in the market. 

But unfortunately for Gaur Jr. someone has to be the collateral damage. 

“You leave that to me, Mr. Braganza.”

He cut the call before the other man could say anything— something he knew very few people can do and live to tell the tale. 

The man dialed another number on his phone, this time to his most trusted confidante and right hand man. The line clicked after three rings as usual. 

“I have a job for you—”

___________________________________

The party was being held at the Oberoi. 

Harshvardhan Gaur had spared no expense and it showed in the lavish ambience and high class treatment of the guests. 

But most people knew what it was actually trying to compensate for—

A paltry attempt to convince the public and the high society of Mumbai that Shauryaman was proclaimed innocent of a crime everyone has already declared him guilty of, irrespective of the court’s verdict. 

He may have won the case but he has lost the media trial badly. 

It definitely didn’t help that the company was dragged through the mud, thanks to the corruption charges which the government was still battling exhaustively. That was a PR nightmare that the board had stayed awake for weeks together to handle. They had barely managed to bypass the charges and the ensuing litigation. 

This was a way of loosening up for one night if anything. 

Shauryaman walked down the staircase, a buttoned white shirt under a black blazer letting his hair fall in artfully arranged waves of dishevelment— the epitome of rakish charm and suave roguishness befitting his less than stellar reputation perfectly. He was grinning at whoever caught his eye, carefully keeping the mask of the jubilant hero having returned home. 

A curtain of pretentious cheer and bright glee twinkled in his dark eyes as he searched the massive hall for his targets. 

Most of them seemed to be in attendance and he had personally received them in turn. 

Tony Braganza had walked in flanked by his gigantic bodyguards, with the fervor of a man used to the ostentatious arrangement and clearly entitled towards the wave of wariness that had suffused in the air around him. He had smirked at Shauryaman, peering down at him with that same unnerving stare that bespoke of a tiger considering a deer. 

“Congratulations are in order, I suppose. Yet I believe you could have avoided the entire circus by easier means—”, the older man had said in that characteristic snakelike tone. 

Shauryaman had barely managed to swallow the shudder and had instead given him an empty headed smile. 

“Of course of course… you know how all of these things go, police, media, lawyers and the shenanigans of the disgruntled public—”, he had waved it off and handed him a glass of the scotch he had observed the other man drinking before. 

Braganza had only slapped him on the back once, giving him a toothy smile resembling a demon having crawled out of hell. The man was as transparent in his disdain of Shauryaman as the crystal chandelier above head and saw no qualms in making it known through his gaze alone. 

“You have much wisdom to learn, boy..”

And he had mingled away in the crowd of the other businessmen, shaking hands with the lot. 

Shauryaman had resisted the urge to bare his teeth and spit his own words back at him with a herculean effort. 

Just a little more… 

He had been surprised on seeing Madhura Banerjee in the crowd but hadn’t approached her, content to let her exist at the edge of the hall. 

He had hoped she would accept the invite but had been increasingly skeptical of her actually turning up. After all, his world represented everything the young prosecutor derided with open passion and then, she had been trounced at court. 

Oh..maybe she was called by someone else. 

“Nandita, my love. So nice of you to make time—”, he had crowed at the chief editor of Samachaar. So, that reporter from yesterday, Keertan, had conveyed his message to his boss, after all. 

“Don’t get gassed. I could care less about whatever shitty excuse you gave the court. If you are expecting me to do a puff piece and whitewash your dirty laundry, you will be sorely disappointed, Mr. Gaur.”

Nandita Kothari retorted, rolling her eyes and sipped on what looked like a dirty martini from her glass, looking resplendent in her usual hand crafted heavy silk saree and signature wide rimmed spectacles. 

The woman was infamous for her cutthroat reporting and neutral take on politics. 

And maybe that was the reason why her newspaper still hadn’t managed to get national coverage. No political party would back her. And that was the sole reason for calling her. 

After tonight, Samachaar would most likely top the TRP ratings for weeks to come if not months. 

“Oh come on, Di, couldn’t I have wanted my friend to come to my homecoming party?”, Shauryaman smirked, refilling her glass graciously. 

“Oh please… we aren’t friends. It was a one night stand, years ago. We were drunk and stupid and too fucking young—”

“Always a killjoy, Ms. Kothari. Anyway, enjoy the party and keep a lookout, you might end up catching a bomb trying to hook a fish.”

Shauryaman left Nandita with a confused frown at his cryptic words and made his way towards the man who had just entered the hall. 

His heart had almost leapt to his throat with repressed excitement. 

The moment he had been diligently waiting for the past ten years. 

So fucking close he can almost touch it. 

This had been his only source of anxiety since the day of his release. He had set the board and arranged the pieces but the game could only start if the King was on the floor. Looked like he had accurately judged the near arrogant complacency in the man. 

After all, who could resist watching someone get trapped in a web woven by them?

Not a man who is used to deference, to winning, to always having absolute control over every situation and person in his life. 

But the funny thing about control was it never remained with one person for too long— it was dodgy, shifty and invariably tied to destiny. 

And tonight, destiny was his to make. 

“Mr. Thatkar, welcome. We are honoured to host you—”, Harshvardhan was shaking hands with the man even before Shauryaman could reach him. 

Figures, his father would want to personally welcome perhaps the most powerful man in the state. 

Adarsh Thatkar smiled benignly, his handsome face effused with a sharp cunning wit and his hawk-like eyes bypassed the older man and fixed straight on his son. He seemed to rip through him with a single gaze, the base level of disregard like Shauryaman was a bug under his expensive boot. 

And then removed his eyes in a split second as if he wasn’t worth a second glance and focussed on Gaur senior, talking to him in low tones. Shauryaman didn’t break his stride, didn’t flinch or recoil or snarl back, instead smiled at him welcomingly. 

“Shauryaman, pretty nifty of you to slink out of the court’s jaws like that. It was rather..entertaining”, Adarsh drawled as if he was amused, once the aforementioned was in earshot. 

There was a clear insinuation of the latter’s guilt in Thatkar’s voice. His expression was pleasingly quaint but there was a strange malicious delight in those soulless eyes. Harshvardhan frowned heavily at that but before he could open his mouth, Shauryaman barked a loud enough laughter for a few of the guests to look their way. 

“See that is the funny thing— I learnt it from watching the politicians of this state. It was rather educational”, he said without missing a beat. 

Adarsh Thatkar’s expression didn’t twist but his eyes flashed murderously. The mockery hadn’t gone unnoticed and the former smirked nastily at Shauryaman— teeth sparkling like a predator’s fangs, positioned to sink into flesh. 

“One shouldn't dance when the ice beneath is so thin a single breeze could crack it”, he hissed the words in a saccharine tune. 

A plastic look of mock concern on those eerily beautiful features. 

A devil’s face if Shauryaman had ever seen any. 

“Indeed. Enjoy the party”, he smirked lightly and let the man pass.

“Why are you antagonizing him? Do you even know how powerful he is?”, Harshvardhan hissed once Thatkar had walked far enough. Shauryaman just looked at his father and tried to muster up the energy to match his irritation and surprisingly came up empty. 

His mind must have finally accepted the bitter truth. 

“Oh so now you want to talk? You couldn’t even find time to see my face since I have been out, forget when I had been in freaking jail”, he whispered and saw his father look aside, as if in refusal to let him witness his hesitation. 

He sighed. 

“I can’t do this right now..”, Shauryaman walked back inside the hall leaving Harshvardhan standing, staring rigidly at his wake. 

The King was here, the board was set, the game was on. 

Now he just needed the final strike. 

Shauryaman was so lost in his own musings he almost crashed into his wife who was walking up to him in that ever familiar power stride. 

Meenakshi— she was looking breathtaking in that black saree that glittered a dark navy whenever the light fell on the crevices of the heavy fabric that wrapped around her enviable figure like an amorous lover, complimenting the glistening cream of her skin perfectly. She had paired it with a corset blouse that had shaped her breasts so alluringly that it could make the damsels of heaven weep with envy. 

With her thick wavy hair open and styled to fall on her shoulder and curvy waist, black liner shaping the mesmerizing doe shaped eyes and a bold unapologetic red on those plump lips— she was a goddess. 

Shauryaman could stare at her for hours, like she was a priceless painting hanging on the wall of the Louvre, a masterclass in the art of power and poise. 

A tragic poetry in motion. 

She was wearing heels high enough that she was almost at level with his own height. The red soled tips clacked determinedly on the polished marble floor as she made her way confidently towards him. 

Shauryaman would never understand how she could move in such a fearless manner all the time. Like nothing could stop her or break her flow. That nothing around mattered, like the very air would bend around her to create a vacuum of power for her presence. 

She was effervescent, transcendental and so beautiful it made him want to avert his eyes and glue them to her face simultaneously. 

He was so pathetically gone on her that it wasn’t even funny. 

And the only thing that still made his rotten heart twist in phantom pain was that after this was over, the most probable outcome would see her walk out on him. 

He wouldn’t begrudge her a formal separation or even a divorce. 

It was imminent. 

She deserved the stars, not a wrung out, used and abused piece of broken trash, up to his eyeballs in daddy issues and every kind of mental trauma imaginable. 

Though she had been upset at him yesterday— after tonight’s revelation she would finally see what he had been trying to tell her quietly for months. 

He isn’t worth the effort. 

Not anymore. 

“The guests appear to be fairly manageable, lesser people than I would have expected but then—”, Meenakshi stopped and the silence spoke for itself. 

Shauryaman resisted the urge to stroke a fluttering curl off her beauteous face. 

“All the better. The less people witness the ensuing drama, the better chance we would have in controlling it—”, he said carefully, sweeping his eyes once over the ensemble cast of unwilling actors that he had erected for the night’s play. 

“You still haven’t told me, what disaster you are about to do now..”, she responded a little miffed but there was a smidgen of curiosity in her suspicious tone. 

Shauryaman just winked at her, making her roll those irresistible eyes at his antics. 

“Ikka? What is he doing here?”

Meenakshi’s next words brought Shauryaman’s focus back to the world in present and to the task at hand.  

“Arjun Mehra! What a pleasant surprise. Didn’t expect to see you here, mingling with us plebians in… what did you say it was? Ahh yes.. ‘wasteful frivolity’.”

Shauryaman chuckled, sweeping his arms around in a pantomiming gesture, wide enough to almost knock over a guest who had been passing by. 

There was a strange twinkle in Arjun’s wizened eyes— the look of a hunter who had finally trapped his bait. Shauryaman hadn’t anticipated his former boss to be here at all and by the strange looks and illegible murmurs of the other people in attendance coming from the corners, gave credence to their surprise as well. 

Ikka, though, looked completely unbothered at the stir he had created or the dramatic way he had been welcomed. 

“I could care less about your party, Shauryaman. There was a development in the case and I just couldn’t resist but deliver the brilliant news to you, myself”, the older man smirked at him in a completely uncharacteristic way. 

Shauryaman squinted, his smile faltering at the edges. 

“Whatever do you mean?”, he whispered and saw Mitali Mittal of all people coming up to stand behind Arjun. She was suddenly flanked by Madhura, almost like the latter was shielding her from view. 

There was that singular look of utter hatred in the woman’s eyes as she stared him down icily. 

Shit. Too soon.. It was too soon. 

“I mean, your game is up. The truth is out and you cannot force me anymore to abide by your deplorable conditions to save your own skin”, Arjun said with a victorious smile. 

“What? What are you—”

“You are charged with murder with intent of Ms. Soma Mittal under IPC Section 302 or BNS section 101 — first degree culpable homicide. You killed that girl in cold blood. It was not an accident, or an impulsive heat of the moment thing! You planned for it meticulously, it was a cold blooded premeditated murder”

Arjun’s words rang ominously in the otherwise warm atmosphere of the party rendering everyone within hearing distance mute with shock. Mitali Mittal’s eyes were burning now, her pale lifeless face from before having turned into a virulence of vengeful rage. 

Madhura Banerjee’s presence suddenly made perfect sense. 

“What? How—”

Someone stuttered from the crowd and Shauryaman could see his father stagger in place, eyes wide on a rapidly paling face. 

Arjun Mehra was still smiling in that annoyingly pleasant way. 

Adarsh Thatkar was leaning against the bar top a few feet away, looking at all of them with his beetle-like gaze, a half amused smile dangling from his lips. 

The man was enjoying the dramatic twist in the tale, no doubt. 

Good. 

“What proof do you have?”, Shauryaman asked coolly. 

“Oh unshakable proof. Nothing that can be twisted and manipulated in court. We have an eyewitness—”

A gasp reverberated. 

Shauryaman paid no heed to it, staring unblinking and vicious at his opponent— Arjun hadn’t lost his steam yet and continued unperturbed. 

“You thought you could scare the man away but alas, the conscience of a good person will always win over fear. He will testify in court on what he saw. You and Ms. Mittal getting out of the car, you jabbing the syringe in her arm and stabbing her in the neck with your car keys and then dumping her body on the road and driving away”

The silence in the hall was deafening. 

“And that stupid alibi you tried to establish? Calling your wife and asking her to make a fake call to the police helpline? Yeah, we know about that too. Your call records clearly show where you were when that call went through to Meenakshi Gaur and moments later, a call to the helpline. Also the servant she had appointed to screech in the background, you both should have trained him to pronounce your name better— honestly that ‘Meenaksi’, swallowing the ‘h’ was amateurish at best.”

Shauryaman didn’t turn to look at his wife but he could feel her absolutely still form beside him. She hadn’t moved for even a fraction and he knew there was no discernible expression on her face— Meenakshi was too good for theatrics. 

He could feel a bubbling hysteria unlock inside his core and he almost guffawed and barely managed to stop it. But he evidently hadn’t managed to will it away from his face because he could see Arjun’s face twist in confusion and Mrs. Mittal’s eyes explode in literal lava. 

“You think it is funny? You killed my poor girl! And for what! Her body? You lecherous demon! Now you will rot in prison for the rest of your miserable existence—”, Mitali shouted, finally bursting with the poison she had swallowed since the past few weeks. 

Shauryaman spluttered suddenly, unable to hold back the laughter anymore. 

“Sorry…sorry”, he hiccuped once and wiped his eyes knowing fully well how insane he must appear to the rest, “I just couldn’t take it anymore. The sheer ease with which you all were fooled was historic. I should direct a film—”

Meenakshi shifted for the first time but made no move to appear closer or distance herself. 

“You are mad..”, Madhura whispered incredulously. 

The young prosecutor was standing beside Arjun now, appearing just as proud as her so-called mentor. It would have made Shauryaman jealous at one time. Now, it just made him melancholic. 

“The eyewitness you were talking about.... Mr. Vikram Phulkar, right? Mr. Phulkar, yes… do come out from the crowd please—”

Everyone whipped their heads at the side of the hall from where a lanky man walked into the floor, shifting nervously. 

“What in..what are you doing here? You were supposed to be in the safehouse, you moron!”, Madhura hissed between her teeth. 

“Calm down, Ms. Banerjee. It isn’t his fault. I asked him to be here, especially for this scenario. I knew Ikka well enough, he couldn’t have resisted the urge to appear noble and heroic, only I hadn’t expected you all so soon..”, Shauryaman cocked his head to a side, eyeing the anxious man nonchalantly. 

“What the fuck are you on about?”, Arjun snarled finally. 

“Did Mr. Phulkar not tell you both that he is a recovering drug addict?”

The words seemed to fall like a thunderstrike in the room. 

Vikram paled considerably and Arjun stared befuddled at the other man. 

“His testimony is as admissible as a tree on the side of the road—”

“That does not.. I will prove to the court that he was in sound mind. He hasn’t had a hit in months. We did a narco test”, Madhura countered sharply.

“Of course. But then, did he also tell you and he hadn’t run away anywhere, instead was sitting at home on a fat pile of cash that I had given to him to shut his mouth? Did he tell that sob story about fear and conscience to you, Ikka ji?”

The last part was said with such acerbic sweetness that it hit Arjun with the ferocity of a nauseating punch to the stomach. 

Shauryaman shouldn’t enjoy the changing colors of horror and anger on their faces as much as he clearly was but then changed his mind immediately— he deserved this much. 

“That only exacerbates your intent and guilt”, she shot back. 

“Does it now? Lets put Mr. Phulkar on the witness stand—”, Shauryaman turned around, his entire demeanour suddenly shifting from casual playboy to extreme gravitas of a foxy lawyer with such rapidity that it was dizzying. 

“Vikram Phulkar, do tell the court what you saw that night?”

Before Arjun or Madhura could object, the young man stammered and started speaking. 

“I..I uh, you and the girl..Soma. You both came out of the car and you jabbed a needle in her arm—”

“Wait. So you clearly saw us both and recognized us. Does that mean you could see our faces? Did I jab a needle in her arm?”

“Yes..I—”

“Think carefully Mr. Phulkar, I jabbed a needle in her arm? I held her back, she struggled? Or was she drunk or drugged? Did she stagger, was she already unconscious? Was she in her full senses? Don’t forget your earlier claim of seeing us both very clearly at around two or three at night? You are a recovering addict, you know how to insert a syringe right?”

Vikram was visibly sweating, trying to remember hard from the look of pinched concentration on his face. Then his features brightened. 

“She gave you her arm and you pierced the needle—”

“What nonsense! You are manipulating him!”, Arjun shouted only for Shauryaman to wave him off with a stern glare. 

“Let me ask questions. Prosecution will have his chance.”

The older man shut up, reddening in humiliation. 

The audience was raptured. It was like someone had switched on a strange movie in front of them and they were transfixed. 

“So, where were we? I inserted a needle in her arm that she didn’t resist, when she was in full faculties?”

The other man nodded hesitantly. A clear look of doubt on his expression but he didn’t verbally counter his claim which was damning enough and by Madhura’s darkening expression, it was clear. 

“Then I stabbed her in the neck with my car keys?”, Shauryaman asked shrewdly. 

“Yes!”

“And you saw it happen with your own eyes? I am stabbing the woman in her neck with my car keys?”

“Yes I saw it!”

“Which side of her neck did I stab?”

Vikram opened his mouth and stopped, a look of baffled panic crossing his face. Shauryaman was staring at him like one would on a particularly disinteresting bug pinned to a board.

“Which side of her neck did I stab Ms. Mittal, Mr. Phulkar? Come on, it is an easy question isn’t it? Since you saw me doing it so clearly..”

“Left..left side.. No no.. right. My right—”

“Which side, Mr. Phulkar? Are you confident in your answer!”

“Left!”

“Is it?”

“Yes.. no..I.. I can’t remember.”

“You can’t remember. Is it because of the hit you took just an hour before you apparently saw us or because the tree in front of your verandah that definitely blocked your line of sight?”

Vikram looked harried and then down at his feet, shrinking in himself. 

Shauryaman shook his head and turned back to face the older lawyer. 

“Your very predictable and unshakable witness, prosecution. My new and improved defense counsel will tear him and his bogus testimony to shreds. I rest my case.”

The quiet in the room was as telling as the furious look crossing both Arjun and Madhura’s faces. They had not anticipated what Shauryaman had done. He wasn’t behaving in his usual detached devil may care way. 

This was not the characteristic maverick billionaire the world knew and derided. 

This was someone else. 

“Don’t forget we still have the false alibi—”, Arjun retorted hotly at last, throwing a disgusted look at Vikram Phulkar who recoiled and shifted back in the shadows. 

“Ahh yes, I concede, that phone call was a hasty decision. But then I could give the court proof where I had been for the entire time that you so helpfully established in the evidence as the probable time of the murder.”

“Oh can you now? Where were you then? Another club? Another woman?”, Arjun spat, crossing his arms against his chest. 

Shauryaman smiled at him blasely. 

“I was at Mr. Sahani’s house. Ask the valet, the attendant who woke up to open the door. Or rather, watch the CCTV footage of his garage.”

“Indeed. And what were you doing at the house of the CEO of your company at two fucking am at night?”, Madhura asked, almost shuddering in repressed wrath. 

“Making up for the six stitches he had got on his face that evening”, he replied, shrugging as if it was a normal thing to do. 

Meenakshi’s sudden gasp tore through Shauryaman’s intentionally imposed statuesque chill immediately. He turned to see the six shades of color that his wife’s pretty countenance had lost instantly. 

She hadn’t once lost her composure, following the drama happening in front, not even when she had been accused as accessory to murder. 

She composed herself instantly but the split second of horror in her luminous eyes bore witness to the fact that she knew imminently how exactly had her husband made up for her punch. 

Shauryaman wanted to reassure her that very second but the words coagulated in his throat and the more pressing concern of the night had him keep mum.  

“None of that matters right now. You will get arrested tonight and you better start praying because this time I will not let you slip away because of a stupid loophole and no amount of Ikka’s good reputation will save you—”, Madhura Banerjee declared caustically. 

Before he could say anything, a new voice shattered the unnerving silence of the hall. 

“No. No more courts and trials and this stupid broken system that punishes innocents and lets the guilty walk free. You don’t deserve to live, not after what you did to my sister.”

The young boy suddenly sprang out of nowhere, the barrel of a gun shaking in his white knuckled grip, pointed straight at Shauryaman. 

“Nikhil! No!”

Mitali Mittal’s warning cry was filled with terror and shock. 

“Shaurya!”

Harshvardhan’s voice shook like a leaf caught in a hurricane, the older man was being held back by Prakhar and Riddhiman in the background. 

At least his father seemed to care. 

Meenakshi had clutched his bicep painfully tight, a tremor of fear and surprise wracking through her usually poised frame, seemed to pass right through his own body. 

But none of that mattered as Shauryaman’s gaze lifted from the barrel in front to the cold gaze of Tony Braganza in the distance. The former mafia boss had been watching the proceedings with great amusement. 

“What are you doing? Nikhil..put the gun down. This is not the way.. He will be arrested”, Arjun was holding his hands up placantingly, trying to soothe the clearly agitated boy even as the seventeen year old refused to budge, or even move his overly bright, furic gaze away from his target. 

“No. He will slip again..these rich types always do. A life for a life, is the correct price. I will not let him get away again! Soma di deserved better!”, Nikhil screamed, gun moving wildly in front as the guests gave way at the sides, moving away from the attack range, gasping in horror. 

“Yes, she deserved better, didn’t she? Better than what you did, Nikhil”, Shauryaman peeled Meenakshi’s fingers away from his arm, patting her knuckles comfortingly and ignored the hissed call of his name and made his way fearlessly towards the boy. 

“What are you doing? Shauyra, get back!”, his wife snarled from the back but he kept walking till he had reached the barrel which was now shaking dangerously close to his chest. 

“Shut up!”, Nikhil yelled, voice shaking just as bad as his hand. 

“Kid, you will hurt yourself. You are holding the handle way too tight. Do you even know how to use that thing? The recoil will snap your bone. You are shaking too damned much.”

“Shut up shut up shut the fuck up. I will fucking shoot, I swear”

“And do what? Kill me? Then go to jail for the rest of your life? You will be tried as an adult, you do know that right? That means, getting locked up in a jail full of criminals. You know what they do to boys like you, there?”

Shauryaman spat so harshly, Nikhil couldn’t help but stagger back a little. But his hold still hadn’t loosened and he was still pointing the gun towards him.

“St..stay back! I am not kidding..I will shoot you—”, the youngest Mittal squeaked. 

Shauryaman smirked and took another step forward and let the barrel rest directly on his chest. His eyes were twin pits of charcoal ash as he bored down in the sweating boy’s face. 

“Then shoot. Do you know how it feels to kill? Can you take it? I don’t think so…”, he gingerly lifted his hand till it reached just near the barrel.

Nikhil was staring quite helplessly at him. The earlier wrath had melted into a heartbreaking confusion. Shauryaman wrapped his hand around the death grip the former had on the handle and slowly started peeling his fingers back. 

“You are no killer, Nikhil Mittal. Trust me, I know. I have stared down the eyes of psychopaths. You do not have what it takes. Leave the murder to professionals and criminals and go take care of the mother you were so eager to leave behind on the provocation of ghosts and empty bravado.”

Nikhil let out a sob and Shauryaman took the gun from his hand deftly and pulled away before the latter could grab it back or worse hurt himself trying to snatch it in a struggle. 

Mittali who had been crying silently till now, leapt towards the boy and dragged him back bodily. Everyone seemed to breathe a simultaneous and collective sigh of relief and Shauryaman could hear his father drop on a seat behind.

Meenakshi stood frozen, her eyes blazing fire and he knew he would pay dearly for this stunt later. 

He only hoped there would be a later. 

Shauryaman inspected the gun and smiled as he noticed the scratched off serial number on the barrel. 

“Do you know who gave you this weapon, Nikhil?”, he asked casually to the still trembling boy. 

Nikhil glared at him but kept mum. 

“Well then, let me guess. A man came to you after school and cornered you, he spoke about how your family deserves justice and how I would walk scott free no matter how many convictions they try to put on me. He told you to be a man and get revenge for your sister and handed you this gun—”

Arjun who had been quiet all this while frowned severely and looked how the remaining color had dropped off Nikhil’s face. 

“How.. how did you know?”, he whispered, shocked. 

“Because I know who sent that man to you to manipulate and turn you into his weapon. It is his signature move. His favourite strategy. The same man who sent a killer after me that day before court. The man who is standing here with us, basking in the flames of the fire which he had set so artfully.”

The pin drop silence in the hall was thick with bewildered perplexity as everyone seemed to try and search for this elusive man or wonder about Shauryaman’s sanity, maybe. 

“Why, Mr. Thatkar, would you ever think that handing a gun to a boy would be a foolproof plan? You are losing your touch…”

Shauryaman drawled, looking straight at the politician who had been watching everything, the edge of his whiskey glass touched to the skin of his jagged smile. 

The gasp which now echoed off the glass encrusted ceiling of the hall was the loudest. 

Adarsh Thatkar, the son of the sitting chief minister of Maharashtra was one of the most powerful men in the entire country and one of the most influential ones as well. 

He was celebrated to have the most spotless career in the murky world of politics amongst all his peers. He had funded NGOs galore, had enough philanthropic pursuits to shame some of the biggest business giants in the world and regularly appeared on ground to work with his party members towards the betterment of the common man. 

The media loved him, the opposition had only good things to say and the community had an almost worshipful stance. It was also rumoured that the only reason it was his father on the seat and not him, was because Adarsh had famously stated that he would never sit on the throne, lest the corruption of absolute power manage to touch him as well. 

No one in the history of the past fifteen years of the ruling party’s reign in the state has been able to put a single scratch on Adarsh Thatkar’s reputation and lived to tell the tale. 

Adarsh sipped on the alcohol from his glass and cocked an eyebrow, almost as if he was impressed at the sheer audacity of this brat accusing him. 

“Mr. Gaur, I truly wonder about your sanity sometimes. Are you sure you didn’t drink too much?”, the older man sniggered. 

Shauryaman smirked and in a sudden move opened the safety that no one had even realised was on throughout the entire exchange with Nikhil Mittal and pointed it straight at Adarsh. 

It was probably the nth time everyone had gasped in horror. 

Adarsh seemed unruffled at being kept on the other end of the barrel. 

“Please, Mr. Gaur. Spare me the theatrics. Like you said to the boy, put it down before you hurt yours—”

But the man couldn’t finish because Shauryaman shot out a whiskey glass kept on the bartop behind Thatkar making the man leap in sheer startlement. A few cries from the guests rang out unfettered. 

Shauryaman’s face was hard now— gone was that mischief playing hide and seek in that glazed eyed stare, that slightly stupid demeanor of a rakish alcoholic trust fund baby had turned into a vicious macabre rage of a viper poised to strike. 

“Shut your trap and come and stand here. I have had enough of your nonsense. Mind you, that was not an accident. I hit the glass on purpose. I can shoot your throat out from his distance just as well.”

There were people shifting in the background and yet no one knew why the hotel security hadn’t come rushing in, even after there was a clear gunshot sound reverberating in the room. 

Money..oh god, money could do such wonders—

Adarsh walked around the floor, the barrel of the gun following him and stepped up to stand in front of Shauryaman who was staring at him like his mere gaze would light the man up in flames. 

“I have waited for so long to do this..you couldn’t imagine. All this drama, sucking up to Braganza, Soma Mittal’s murder, the fucking permit plans, everything just so I could pull you out of the snake hole you had curled inside”, the man rasped, hand remarkably steady. 

Adarsh was staring at him piercingly. 

“I have no idea what you are speaking about..”, he said finally. 

“Of course you don’t. It doesn't matter. I have everything I need to expose your lie to the world—”

“My lie?”

“You are a monster, Adarsh Thatkar. The man behind this mask of piety and goodness and the sheer level of depravity you have your claws in would disgust the fucking devil—”

“You are delusional. What are you—”

“Nandita, my darling, please open your mobile and see the video I just sent you—”, the sudden non sequitur by Shauryaman had thrown everyone out of the loop for a second. 

Nandita Kothari almost jumped out of her skin as she fumbled with her mobile. 

She had barely gone through ten seconds of whatever video she was watching before turning alarmingly green at the gills and stopping it. 

“What! What was that?”

Adarsh snapped, as the editor stared at him in utter incomprehensible nauseating revulsion. The expression on her pretty face had twisted in an ugly disgust. 

“That..was the trailer. Only a fraction of the videos I have. I will make sure it reaches all the right places, don’t you worry about that”, Shauryaman replied, grinning like the devil reincarnated himself. 

“What the fuck are you harping about!”Adarsh snapped, irritated. 

“You thought you were so fucking protected that you lost your vigilance there at the end, didn’t you, Thatkar? All the women you raped? The Nymph— those high end escorts you sold to your highest bidders after promising the women a place in the bollywood tinsel town? The classic hook! The video of their sexual favors that you stored as blackmail to trap them in your hellscape?”

The blood was draining off Adarsh Thatkar’s face as Shauryaman kept going. 

“You thought no one would dare cross you. Not the hotel managers you kept fed, not the police whose pockets you warmed, not the businessmen whose logistics and transport and money channels you used, not the judges and doctors you had scared into compliance, not the fucking innocent women you used and abused and left for dead like yesterday’s trash.”

Shauryaman’s voice hadn’t picked up in volume for even a second and yet the words seemed to bang like the gavel of an empty courtroom in the hall. The pulsating silence was so loud that it was making everyone’s ears bleed.

“Well, guess what, genius. They all betrayed you. The hotel managers and police and businessmen only needed someone who could pay them more. The witnesses only needed someone who would hear them and could protect them. And your so called political partners— fuck, they just needed one fucking chance to jump ship!”

There was a very visible vein pulsing at Adarsh’s temple. The man was bursting with rage and it was painfully obvious. 

“You little fucker! You have no idea whom you are dealing with! I could have you torn to shreds and your corpse hung from the fucking rafters and no one would bat a single eyelash!”, the once smooth politician was gone under the sudden exposure of a base demonic revelation. 

The audience watched spellbound at the ugly transformation of that handsome face. 

“You!”, Shauryaman waved his gun once and laughed aloud, “you are nothing, Adarsh Thatkar. You are fucking finished. Who the hell do you think gave the soundbite about Swandive to the media?”

Nandita looked baffled but before she could intercept, another loud and brash voice boomed in terrible rage from aside.

“You bloody fucker! You let those nosey vultures inside my club!”

Tony Braganza was fuming like a mountain bear, eyes almost red in wrath. 

Shauryaman only gave him a half hearted salute with the gun. 

“You must forgive me, sir. The only way I could get the news about the permit plans to the media was by exposing the club. I knew the dominos would fall till the land corruption cases would start getting unearthed one by one. The several tenders that Mr. Thatkar forced his father to help set up his illegal businesses and as gifts to his very rich friends— that was the only way. And had the land deals not been exposed, how would your own party members agree to a defection?”

Adarsh was so red by now he was almost blue. The last part of his monologue had made the former’s eyes almost forced out of his skull in a ludicrous mercurial shock. 

“What the absolute fuck are you talking about?”, he hissed like a cobra. 

“Oh yes, sorry. That. You seriously didn’t think, I would come after you without breaking the shield of political amnesty and power you enjoy? If that were the case, I would have destroyed you ten years ago. One cannot hope to bludgeon a fortress without smashing through the outer walls.”

“You are lying!”

“Oh am I? Try and call them then, or better yet, switch on the news. I am sure its trending by now—”

Half of the audience already had their mobile phones on, staring at the screens in wide eyed wonder. 

“As of seven thirty this evening, Mr. Madhav Shirke and forty two other members of the ruling party have deserted and are sequestered at a hotel. In these conditions, it is imminent that a mid session election would be due and the opposition leaders might jump at the chance to dismantle the existing government.”

The news anchor was saying as they continuously showed the names of the party members who had defected. The silence of the hall was broken by the smashing sound of Adarsh Thatkar throwing his phone at the wall in uncontrolled anger. 

“You little motherfucking cockslut couldn’t have done something of this stature!”, the older man was spitting in a maddened temper now. 

Shauryaman had removed the gun from his target by now, using it more like a prop than a weapon and only leaned back, a look of absolute chilling calm on his usually expressive features. 

“Oh no, you are right, I don’t have that kind of pull. But, you surely remember, Justice PV Chaudhary? Yes.. the man whose wife you molested and then blackmailed the judge into letting your relatives out of a murder charge?”

He gestured towards his side where a middle aged man was standing with a champagne flute held to his lips. His eyes were flashing murderously at the politician and by the satisfied way he swallowed the bubbly and levelled a half hearted grin at him, everyone knew this was the so proclaimed, Justice Chaudhary. 

If the guests had thought the shocks would have subsided by now, they were clearly mistaken. Adarsh Thatkar had gone stupendously pale all of a sudden. 

It made something warm and satisfying curl in the icy rage that had been burning since at eternity in Shauryaman’s chest. 

“What you didn’t know was Chaudhary ji is very good friends with Madhav Shirke— the man whom your father sidelined in the party to favor his own useless son. All he needed was a man who could light the match so that he could fan the flames.”

And it was very clear who had lit the match in this case. 

“Now either your party members will join Shirke to form the government with the opposition in alliance or their loyalty to a man whose son had embroiled them all in this mess would have them commit political harakiri. What do you think would happen, Thatkar?”

From the look of slowly ascending fear in Adarsh’s face, Shauryaman knew he had hit the nail head on. No one would lie down on the road to save the skin of a man who would be exposed for criminal activities and rather be at the crosshairs of public outrage.

It was hilarious how in this country, the media trials always mattered more than what could be proved at court. 

“You have nowhere to run. Nandita’s channel would release all the videos for the public to see. The opposition party headquarters will receive an anonymous package full of documentary evidence of your corruption and the money you funded into NGOs that only circled back to your own shell companies. By the time the courts call in, you would be scorched alive in public. Your political career is over and your personal life— oh I would make it hell.”

There was a dark look crossing Shauryaman’s face that would have once scared him to even catch a glimpse of in the mirror. 

Now, it was the only truth he had allowed to escape from the tight control he still had on himself. 

His trigger finger had been itching since the past five minutes. 

“You..you wouldn’t dare—”, Adarsh spluttered but there was none of that bluster and arrogance left in his voice. 

“Oh watch me”, Shauryaman snarled and opened his lockscreen and turned it towards him, keeping the gun levelled on his face, once again, “See this? The number of your wife. The woman you supposedly love so much you made a whole monument in the state garden in her name? I have sent that video, Nandita watched just now, to her. I am sure you will need a good divorce lawyer in the upcoming months.”

It was not a shakedown. 

It was a massacre. 

And that was evident by the completely bloodless face of his victim staring gobsmacked and slaughtered without a single scratch on his body. 

Revenge was sweet sweet poison. 

“Hah! I would have actually liked you kid. You have a ruthless streak a mile wide, a kind of deplorable meanness that surpasses some of my best men, but you shouldn’t have used me to get to that buffoon. Now, I will have to kill you—”

It was Tony Braganza whose chilling words finally broke the uncomfortable silence of the room. Shauryaman looked at the unofficial don of Mumbai and just cracked a half smile. It had a strangely unnerving sting to it. 

“Not for the lack of trying, Braganza. It was your man who tried to kill me that day. The police have him and I have it on good authority that he has led him to your pet, Rags Chotan. They are cracking down on the drug kingpin as we speak.”

Braganza’s face was a mask of stone but his eyes were burning magma. 

“You seriously think Chotan will flip on me?”, he challenged with a dangerous hiss. 

“No. He wouldn’t. Not because of loyalty or fear. Because he is dead.”

This time, Tony’s indomitable expression finally cracked. 

“Impossible”, he snarled. 

“It is the truth, Mr. Braganza. Your right hand man is dead and all your allies have been sent irrefutable proof that it was you who had him killed. In your business, I suppose trust is invariably linked to support. No one is going to take the fall for you again.”

“Am I supposed to believe you had Chotan killed?”, the don scoffed in disdain. 

“Not at all. The police killed him in an encounter. I may have greased some pockets but who is to say that is the truth. The DIG had jumped ship with Madhav Shirke and all he needed was a good vacation fund. But I think you deserve to know who it was, who made sure all the workings of your gang and Chotan’s warehouse got leaked to the cops—”

Tony was gnashing his teeth and the scar over his face seemed to throb with every passing second. 

“Maria!”, Shauryaman called and a young blonde woman came out from the opposite end of the hall. 

She was staring hatefully at Tony as the latter’s eyes bulged out of his sockets. 

“This bitch!?”, he screamed. 

“Yes. This bitch whom your friend employed in The Nymph and then gifted to you. This bitch whom you had been using as a showpiece for your depraved fantasies and occasionally let out for your guests to cope a feel? In all the long years of your reign of terror, how does it feel to get defeated because of this bitch, Mr. Braganza?”

Shauryaman would never forget the dead eyed look in Maria Kastnova’s blue eyes when he had smacked her ass that day in the garden all those months ago. He had contacted her shortly after and proposed a plan to spy on the don and in return he would make sure to get her passport back so that she could go back to her home in Ukraine. 

The girl had been in near tears in gratitude and ablaze with her new mission to destroy the monster who had her trapped. 

“I may have focused on Adarsh a little more Braganza but not to worry I hadn’t forgotten you. You are also going to jail for a very long time. Your fraud associated with the properties in the land corruption case and several accounts of murder and human trafficking charges will be added on. Enjoy your time grinding the chakki in Tihar.”

The ensuing calm was a trapped pressure over a powder keg about to blast. Tony’s bodyguards were blocking most of him from the clear line of sight but they seemed posed to start firing at Shauryaman on a moment’s notice. 

One could hear someone swallow in distress. 

“You have crossed your limits, boy. You think a mere prison will hold me back? I will get bail faster than you can blink and then I will kill that bitch first and then I will take my sweet time with you and have you beg for death before I grant it.”

The derision in the old gangster’s eyes was a revolting thing to behold, especially the way he was looking at him like a starving rabid hound does to a piece of meat. 

But Shauryaman only grinned at him. 

“Oh but you are not going to get to the court. Sorry, did I forget to mention that? The money trail of your human trafficking business went through the hawala network. There is irrefutable proof that you have been funding terror organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan for years. You will be charged with the UAPA act. You are never getting bail.”

Tony Braganza blasted with an almighty roar and would have leaped the distance to reach Shauryaman and strangled him to death had there not been sudden arms trapping him and his struggling bodyguards back. 

A sudden influx of plainscloth men no one had even noticed had jumped from the shadows and was dragging a raving Braganza away as he kept shouting curses. 

“I may have forgotten to mention the NIA and IB agents who were shadowing you since the moment you entered the party. I am sure they will treat you nicely if you answer their questions..”, Shauryaman said pretentiously as Braganza was forcefully pinned to the ground by a tall officer. 

“You need to work on that flair for the dramatics, Shaurya”, Akshat Chillar said, shaking his head in exasperation even if there was a little fond smile on his charming face. 

“Sorry, skill issue”, Shauryaman replied with a small quirk of his lips. 

“Why?”

The subdued whisper made Shauryaman face his original perpetrator again. 

The man was standing upright but most of his pride was lying in pieces on the floor. It was a beautiful sight. 

The fisherman finally hooked on his own bait. 

It was poetic almost. 

Why..

One word. 

And yet Shauryaman had guarded the answer jealously close to his decaying heart for ten long years. It was so easy to lay out his machinations bare in front of the world, yet how can he tear out his own regrets and throw them in the light for everyone to judge and stare.

How more can they judge you anyway?

“Kumud”, he said almost reverently. 

“What?”, Adarsh asked quizzically. 

“Kumud Dave”

A sudden crashing sound had Shauryaman turn towards the source and realised he had completely forgotten about the rest of the spectators of the hall. 

Arjun Mehra’s face was chalky white. 

He was staring at Shauryaman like he had seen a ghost. 

Good. 

The ghost of the woman who had haunted him for years should claw out the insides of another man who had failed her so miserably. It was high time for him to share the reckoning that he had been facing alone for the past decade with the man who was just as responsible as everyone else. 

Adarsh’s face had twisted in confusion. 

It made something ugly rear inside Shauryaman’s heart. 

“You don’t remember her…”, he whispered. 

“Who is she? How am I supposed to know her?”, Adarsh asked tiredly. 

“A million dollar question. She was forgotten by everyone. The courts, the perpetrators, the media— lost in the hundreds and thousands of people who never mattered in the grand scheme of things constructed by greedy men like you… and me.”

Shauryaman leaned against the edge of the bar now, needing the strength to stand upright as he laid the final piece bare. He could feel Meenakshi sidle closer to him and for a strange second, wanted nothing more than to hide himself in the crook of her fragrant neck. 

He hadn’t mustered the courage to see her face yet. 

“Let me tell you all a story till we wait for the police at least—”, he began with the flourish of a magician recounting a lost tale from his bag of tricks. 

“Kumud Dave was a young woman lost in the streets of Mumbai like any other working girl of her social class. She lived in the chawls of Parel with her husband. She was nothing extraordinary— not too beautiful, not too smart, nothing much to remember her by. But she had the best, the fucking worst quality of all. She had heart. She was kind. She was kind to everyone, the street dogs in the colony, the tenants sharing her living space like ants inside an anthill, the station master she met every morning, the security guard of the call center she worked for, the plants neglected in the office space of her superiors. She was unfailingly, unflinchingly kind. And brave. So fucking brave that it cost her, her entire life at the end.”

Shauryaman stopped to collect his thoughts and maybe a bit of his breath as well, the sickening ache of remembering those soft features on that round face lined with curly hair and those desperate helpless eyes, begging him— begging for at least one person to understand. 

He could see Arjun’s eyes were blurring with every word he was speaking and it only made that savage satisfaction in his heart crow in dark delight. 

He wanted him to hurt— to hurt just as badly as he had for the past ten fucking years of his miserable existence. 

“You see, Kumud’s only fault was when she accidentally happened upon a conversation on her line because of a rare cross connection that detailed the plan for trafficking girls from her area to a posh locality in Andheri. She thought it was her moral duty as a citizen to report it. She went to her superiors and was shot down. But that didn’t deter her. She went to the police and they harassed her and sent her back. One would think, now she would let it go but no— not kind and brave, Kumud Dave. She went to the one person she thought had more power than the police and would actually help her—”

Shauryaman turned his vision to Adarsh whose face had turned an alarming hue of grey. 

“You.”

“The great Adarsh Thatkar who keeps special office hours to listen to the woes of the common man. Unfortunately for poor foolish Kumud Dave, she had gone straight to the lion’s den. What did you do then, Mr. Thatkar? Do I have to remind you?”, he snarled with every bit of rage that had sedimented inside his heart for years together. 

Adarsh made an aborted movement but didn’t let out a single sound. 

“You raped her. You raped her till she bled and dumped her on the street for the dogs to eat. But Kumud was brave. She crawled to a hospital. And survived that horrible traumatic experience. But unfortunately for her, you had also given her something else. She was pregnant. Her husband, the vicious demonic worthless piece of abusive shit, decided she should abort. But remember, Kumud was kind. She couldn’t bear to kill a life even if that only brought painful memories back. Thus began the torture— the constant abuse both physical and mental. It would have killed anyone but not Kumud who was brave.”

He could clearly hear a sob coming from somewhere and knew that it was Mitali Mittal. The woman had been clutching onto her son quietly with the desperation of a drowning mother clinging to her last remaining child. 

“So Kumud persevered and gave birth to a child. A lovely little girl. She named her Kritika. Kumud’s husband hated both mother and child. He had fallen in with a bad crowd and gathered enough attention for the local ruffian to take him in his gang. One day, drunk out of his mind, the husband let slip that the child belonged to Adarsh Thatkar. What he didn’t know was that the information would crawl up the grapevine to reach Tony Braganza’s ears. Braganza in turn used it as leverage."

The hall was completely silent, only the sounds of Mitali’s sniffles breaking the vacuum like atmosphere. Everyone seemed to hang on to his every word. 

Like he was some messiah directing a herd of sheep towards a blurred paradise. 

It was a sickening twisted parody that made him want to hurl. 

But he carried on because this was a puss filled wound that would never scab over unless all the rotten fluids are pressed out, no matter how much it hurts. 

“One would think the next plan of action would be to get rid of mother and child— right? But no..you, see you are a businessman first and foremost. And so you told Kumud to join The Nymph. She will get paid more than she ever has even collectively in the call center job for one night. Kumud wanted to refuse because who would want to sell their soul to monsters? But remember, Kumud was kind? She had to raise her daughter because her useless alcoholic wastrel of a husband definitely didn’t help. So she agreed. Everything was fine and dandy right? But no, your greed is endless—”

Shauryaman had straightened from his laconic position, his cool voice slowly heating under the broiling pressure of years of careful restraint. 

“You set your sights on her two year old daughter. Your daughter! A toddler barely— but they sell higher, don’t they?”

There was a choked gasp this time closer and he knew it was his wife. That enviable iron control seemed to have faltered finally. 

“No..”

But it was Arjun Mehra’s quiet whisper of horror-stricken denial that had Shauryaman whipping across, the repressed wrath exploding out like a mushroom cloud over dried earth. 

Gone was that amiable look of a basking snake and it was taken over by a hysteric anger that could only be borne from extreme despair. 

“Yes! You didn’t even listen! You fucker holier than thou savior of the masses, didn’t even care to fucking listen to me!”, he spat at his former mentor and watched him shrink back. 

“Don’t…”

Adarsh Thatkar seemed to have finally found his voice, shuddering in lightning anger but to no avail because the dam had crumbled at last and words were spilling out with the force of a furious river, that no manmade power could hope to stop. 

“Shut the fuck up!”, the younger man snarled with such viciousness that Thatkar almost took a step back.

“You employed that good for nothing husband of hers to get the child for you. Your own fucking daughter, you sick fuck. And poor brave Kumud knew she couldn’t match up to a fully grown man’s physical strength and thus could only hope to defend her child in the only way she knew. She killed the kindness in her heart and plotted. She poisoned the monster and then stabbed his dead body over and over again, creating a scene of intense struggle, wrecking the room for a conviction of self defense.”

He had walked down the stairs to reach Adarsh now, loathed to miss the minutest details of alarm and fear on the latter’s face when he was forced to realise that he had lost. That Shauryaman had smashed him down to smithereens and that he will never be able to stand back up again. 

“But Kumud wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room, was she? She only wanted to save herself and her two year old girl. So she hid the fucking poison in her own backyard, buried the hastily wiped empty bottle in the soil. The police didn’t care and didn’t find it. And then came, Mr. Arjun ‘Ikka’ Mehra, the defender of the weak—”

Shauryaman turned to Arjun who had his hands over his face. 

“I admit, I hadn’t cared much for the pro bono cases the firm took on and in particular I didn’t want to spend my evenings on the other side of a holding cell talking to a plain looking boring woman who may have killed her own husband. But I was the intern— it was my fucking job to gather the information. Big fucking mistake—”

Shauryaman couldn’t stop the laugh that came out at the end there. His throat was closing up dangerously with an emotion he dared not express in such raw exposure. 

“Kumud….she used to sing. This low humming that sounded like something straight out of a dream. But it was always quiet, like she was terrified of opening her mouth too much, to put pressure on her lungs— terrified of the world that had destroyed her. But even after everything— the assault and the hellhole her life had become and the murder she committed to save her daughter, the separation from her— Kumud was still kind and brave. She would..”, he swallowed hard, the words peetering out before Shauryaman shook his head and cleared his throat. 

“..she would joke about me having to spend my time in a jail cell and how I was too young to do all this. I used to get irritated at how she looked at me like I was a child she needed to shield. But she..had a way about her. She reminded me of my mother— timid but kind and brave.”

Harshvardhan Gaur let out a single low and strangled sound. Shauryaman could see Nandita recording everything, eyes shuttling between everyone like a tennis ball being thrown about. The news channels are going to have a field day with this. 

“Anyway, I was convinced we could get her out of the bind. Ikka was a maestro in appealing to the court’s sympathy. But it was me—”, this time the hatred was levelled at himself and it was crystal on his chiselled face drawn off blood. 

“It was me who was so blinded by my own ambition, this relentless drive to prove myself to people who never cared much about me, that had me getting too involved in the police investigation and accidentally discovering the fucking bottle. The pieces fell neatly and I knew— it was a premeditated murder— culpable homicide with intent! The court would have never let her go.”

Meenakshi was leaning on the edge of the bartop now, and Shauryaman met her eyes for the first time. Her dark orbs were glistening with an emotion he couldn’t decipher but what he said next— only the judgement flashing in those eyes would matter to him in any way. 

So he had to see it, if only to let the sword dig in deeper. 

“I confronted Kumud. She broke down and spilled everything. I was terrified. Aditya Thatkar.. I knew of you, what you could do, the reach you have. Suddenly the lack of media coverage on the case made sense, the police getting so early to the scene of crime, the refusal of the judge to grant bail— everything made sense. I was terrified that if Kumud got convicted, she wouldn’t live to see the next day. So I did what I thought was best.”

Another filthy truth that he had thought would never see the light of day. 

“I buried the evidence. I broke the bottle and dissolved the pieces”

He waited with bated breath but there was no emotion flashing in his wife’s bright gaze. He swallowed hard and turned away to put his focus back on Adarsh who had his fists balled him in an ugly defiance. 

“What I hadn’t anticipated was your spies following everyone around, including me. I was exposed. All you had to do was sit on your chair and keep pulling the fucking strings. And my boss..”, he looked at Arjun whose face was so starchy white it almost looked translucent. 

“The righteous godly Ikka couldn’t bear to let one misdemeanor slide because his morals were more important than an innocent life. No, his principals mattered so much more than justice. The Purushottam Maryada of the justice system cared so much about the fucking law that he was completely blind to the obvious truth. And deaf to anything I was speaking.”

“Shaurya..I.. I didn’t—”, Arjun began, all that heavy nobility from his tone and that triumphant glow had transformed into a stilted anxious regret that felt like lead on Shauryaman’s tongue. 

“What? Know? You didn’t know? Of course you fucking didn’t know because you refused to fucking listen! I begged you. I shattered my pride and my fucking ego and was literally on my knees—”, his voice broke at the sheer volume with which he had screamed suddenly, shocking the mute spectators into recoiling. 

“I only wanted you to let this one go. One fucking case and then you could have me disbarred. It was not for the fucking job, you fucking moron. I have more money than I know what to do with, I didn’t need the fucking job. I liked being a lawyer, yes, but I didn’t need it. All I needed was for one fucking person to fucking listen!”

Shauryaman’s eyes were wild, resembling a cornered wild creature who was ready to bite anyone even grazing close— whether friend or foe. 

“I told you that the judge wouldn’t listen to reason here. I knew he was fucking paid off. The stupid system you were trying to uphold would never fucking work because no one cares, except you. The system that allows criminals to get scot free on technicalities will never listen to a poor woman who has no political connections or bribe money. But you refused. You got me fucking disbarred and every testimony I had painstakingly gathered was thrown out. And then you very conveniently removed yourself from the case citing mistrial and personal bias excuses and a public defender who was clearly paid by this monster”, he pointed at Adarsh, “took it on.”

“Shauryaman..”

“No. You listen to me. You will have to listen to me. I promised Kumud that she would get out, I promised that she would see her daughter again and water the stupid plants and greet the stupid security guard and feed the stupid street dogs again. I promised her because I had faith in you! They threw her in jail— life imprisonment under section 302. The judge threw the fucking case away. I couldn’t even contest because the fucking bar took my license. And then you took my girlfriend too.”

Shauryaman was heaving by the end of his bitter diatribe. 

He had flayed himself alive only for the truth to get out and by the sour faces twisting in the audience, he knew very well no one was particularly impressed at being revealed in such a way. 

These people have manipulated the very system he was raging against. 

Good. 

Let them sneer. 

He will tear everyone down if need be. 

“You did all of this because of a fucking call girl?”, Adarsh Thatkar blew up suddenly, looking at him like he had grown three heads. Like the very thought of it was completely ludicrous. 

It only made Shauryaman curl his lips in a near violent and malicious amusement. 

“Yes. I did it for a fucking call girl. Because that girl was a human too who had dreams of her own that were squashed under the feet of lecherous greed and lust of men like us. Oh it wasn’t fucking easy. The first three months all I could do was wallow in my own self pity, blind drunk with heartbreak and the sheer fucking humiliation. I didn’t even care for what was happening to Kumud in jail. Or who was taking care of Kritika. I left them alone too. And then one fine day, her grandmother calls up to inform Kumud is dead. The authorities said she committed suicide in her cell.”

Shauryaman turned around and walked back to the bartop and snatched a file from over the ledge and turned the pages open almost violently. 

“You want to know the details of the way she had killed herself?”

Then he turned the file around and they were just blank empty sheets. 

“Oh wait, I can’t show because the fucking autopsy reports were burned down. But I remember the details. I will never forget them as long as I fucking live. Spatial injury to spine between vertebrae L3 to L5, repeated blunt force trauma to the pelvic bone, hemorrhaging from injury to large intestine, both ulna’s snapped clean, blood loss from chunks of meat torn from inner thighs, cranial fracture, thoracic injury at T12, signs of severe damage to the mons pubis—”

Shauryaman would have gone on like a high speed record if Leena Sahani hadn’t shrieked in between. 

“Stop! Stop please.. Please, I can’t..”

“No, listen. You more than anyone, Mrs. Sahani. Because what your illustrious husband does to people he thinks he owns, comes close second—”

“What the—”

“Shut up and let me speak. Do these look like suicide wounds to you? The funniest part was there was no collection of any DNA samples, no signs of external struggle, no eye witnesses, and apparently no outside entry in a women’s jail!”

Shauryaman slammed the gun down on the desk with a cracking force, definitely rattling most people’s teeth. 

“The police wrote a bogus report and if that wasn’t fucking hilarious, someone stole the fucking body from the morgue before her grandmother could even see her face for the last time and dissolved the remains in a vat of acid. I didn’t even have time to collect any evidence”

There was a retching sound from somewhere and most people had turned slightly green at the gills. It was a horrifying macabre and graphic tale that was being recounted with such savage delight that it was almost psychopathic. 

Shauryaman suddenly deflated and crossed his arms against his chest, looking slightly defensive for the first time since he had started telling this horror story. 

“But even that wasn’t the most shocking part. It was when I trailed the melted remains of Kumud’s body into a chemical plant at the outskirts of the city. Imagine my surprise when I dig into the ownership papers and find the name of my company.”

The twists in the tale seemed enough to give everyone a nasty whiplash and if Shauryaman was lucky the guests who had simply gathered to act as the recess for the strange trial of one Adarsh Thatkar, wouldn’t send him their therapy bills. 

“The facility was owned by a subsidiary of Gaur Constructions. I refused to believe it. Till I found the money trail. And discovered every other factory and plant and bridge and industrial area and real estate that we have ever made in the past thirty years have all been used in some illegal activity or the other. And there was only one signature common to all these projects.”

Shauryaman gestured almost brightly at Prakhar Sahani who was slowly turning a ridiculous shade of crimson. 

“Our CEO, Mr. Prakhar Sahani. For years, the man had duped the board and my gullible father and has taken his cut from these illegal land acquisitions and wonky business deals. Ahh, Mr. Braganza, you did tell me that you approached my father and got rebuffed—”, he turned towards the sour-faced gangster who had been neatly handcuffed by Akshat and was trussed up by the plainscloth intelligence officers surrounding him and his men. 

The older man sneered at Shauryaman like a monstrous giant. 

“What you forgot to mention was that you had also approached Prakhar and had brokered a deal with him. Imagine the irony of the fact. I was stumped. I couldn’t go to the police, they would only listen to their political masters, I couldn’t go to the media without any proof— all they know me as is a trust fund brat who has more money than sense. I couldn’t even take help from anyone in my own company— who knew how many were working for Sahani.”

“Lies. I have heard enough of your idiotic self centered bad mouthing, boy. I have protected you for years against the board that tried to kick you off, protected you from your own father’s ire more times than I can count and this is how you repay me. I even forgave your wife’s stupid act, only to get dragged into the mud!”

Prakhar screamed, his handsome features twisting in horrendous rage. He had left Harshvardhan’s side and was approaching Shauryaman confidently, eyes coated in an uncharacteristic slimy derision that had completely transformed the man’s usual serene geniality. 

Exactly what Shauryaman had expected. 

Let the world see the monster behind the man. 

“Protection? Please…I have worked for years to get proof of your deception, Sahani. I wouldn’t hedge a bet against me. Why do you think I made Javed Khosla walk away? Why do you think I threw away the Surat deal and the AMNS deals?”

The older man had stopped midway, a frown twisting severely on his perplexed face. 

“Adani..”, Meenakshi’s voice startled him. 

She had been so utterly silent throughout that he had almost forgotten about her. 

Meenakshi was pinching the bridge of her shapely nose. The realisation seemed to have hit her slow but hard.

“I knew I was missing something. The deals you threw off, they went to the Adani group. I thought it was just a coincidence. But Javed Khosla joined their board after three months of leaving here. It was planned, wasn’t it? Khosla knew about Sahani’s corruption. He had proof, so you turned him. You let him jump ship before it sunk—”

Shauryaman tilted his head in silent acceptance and felt something bright bloom in his chest. He shouldn’t have underestimated his wife’s sharpness. 

The woman has masterminded more acquisitions and takeovers in her career of ten years than the times that he has seen the inside of his own office building. 

Prakhar’s face had gone white in quite a cartoony way. 

“No.. no he..you..”, he stammered. 

Shauryaman smirked at him.

“I did. You are done. The police have the necessary evidence to throw you in jail for a very long time. And don’t think you can come out that easy— I have it on good authority that your bail has been set sky high and all your assets are frozen as of..”, Shauryaman looked at his watch, “..two minutes before. What timing the ED has..”

“What fucking nonsense are you on about?”, Prakhar took out his mobile as had several of the board members who were in attendance. 

Nandita was typing furiously on her mobile screen, looking more animated by the second. 

Harshvardhan had collapsed on a seat and was looking a little gobsmacked and lost, barely able to hold himself upright. 

“It is funny how much one can achieve when people think they lack the brains to do so”, Shauryaman said pleasantly and dropped the hands off his chest and tucked them inside his pockets. 

His fingers had started trembling. But he would not let Prakhar fucking Sahani see it. Never again. 

“You see, when you were borrowing from the market, your debt was increasing which did give our company the tax shield benefit, but unfortunately for you, the benefit of the same debt— the revenue generation should have been more than we were borrowing. All I had to do was inflate the numbers of the revenue generated every quarter.”

Every word was making the board members in attendance appear paler by the next syllable. 

Shauryaman grinned like a shark having scented blood in the water. 

“Gentlemen, you are all bankrupt. Gaur Constructions is finished. The board will have to pay the creditors or else, all of your estates will be taken away, your collateral confiscated and you all could be jailed and fined as well. The corruption charges would stick, I will make sure of it.”

The silence only remained for a precious second before there was an uproar and the few board members started barking in their phones, probably with their lawyers before the market opens tomorrow and their shares crash. 

Only Prakhar Sahani remained almost paralysed with shock. 

“You.. you bankrupted your own company?”, he whispered incredulously. 

“Oh no, I was kicked out, remember? It's not my company anymore. I don’t have to pay anything to the investors. When I contacted the ED, I had made a deal— my father and wife will be excused their dues and in return I will surrender all the documentary evidence needed to sink all of you. It's all very simple, really.”

“It was your father’s company you fool! Your grandfather’s dream— you ruined your own legacy and for what? Petty revenge for someone who didn’t even belong to you?”, Prakhar shouted, spittle flying from his mouth in a crazed panic. 

“Legacy? This viper pit of corruption and hedonistic crime? No, my legacy died with my mother. My legacy was twisted in depravity the moment they made you the boss, you sick, traitorous, murderous, pedophilic rat bastard!”

Shauryaman felt the slowly bubbling grief and agony from the past twenty years of his life surge up in an icy blizzard of rage. 

He could strangle the life out of Prakhar Sahani and not change a shade. 

The deep seated terror of a twelve year old Shauryaman was suddenly lost in the tsunami of vengeful ferocity. 

“You thought you had scared me into silence and maybe for some years you had. I was so fucking terrified that the truth would get my father killed and the company lost that I kept my mouth shut and then Kumud came along. That poor, abused, tortured woman who had no one in the world had more courage than me or you or any fucking person in this useless room can ever dream of. And then I saw the mirage I was trying to protect— the empty vessel that had rusted from inside.”

“You think you have won! I still have videos, you brat. All it takes is one fucking click and the internet is merciless. The fucking media will rip you to shreds”, the older man laughed almost like in a parody of a poorly constructed b grade villain. 

It was slightly sad how unbothered the threat made Shauryaman feel. 

“Do it”, he said simply. 

“What?”

“I said do it. The internet and the media has already labelled me with every twisted title they can conjure up. What do you think those videos will prove? All it will do is add the charge of statutory rape and pedophilia to your already overburdened chargesheet.”

This time, Harshvardhan’s cry of denial was sharp enough for Shauryaman to turn towards him in half alarm and half resignation. 

Riddhiman was holding onto his father with a steady arm, his intelligent eyes burning with a sickening sympathy. 

Harshvardhan’s once proud head was hanging on his chest and Shauryaman felt a stab in his chest for the first time in years. 

He did essentially destroy his father’s company. 

But he wouldn’t regret it. 

He can’t. 

He turned away before Harshvardhan could lift his head and give him that intense stare of disapproval. 

“You killed my mother, Prakhar Sahani. My innocent mother, who had only wanted my father’s affection— you used that vulnerability and abused her and then blackmailed her into doing whatever you wished with her and when she finally broke and took her own life, the vultures tore down her character to suit their TRP ratings. I will never be able to charge you for that but I will make sure you do get your cummapence, one way or another. You. Are. Finished.”

Meenakshi’s presence was a hearth beside him. She had come up to stand beside him and he hadn’t even noticed. Her hand was a steady source of warmth on his cold hand and she was gripping him so tight, like she could single handedly hold his entire body upright if his knees decided to give way. 

Prakhar was floundering and Shauryaman decided he was done with him. 

The police and the courts would do the rest. 

Justice Chaudhary had promised to keep the bastard in jail as long as he could. Till his reputation is completely ruined. Till there is nothing left to salvage— not for either of them. 

Adarsh Thatkar was staring at him with that unnerving look again. 

“I wish I could lock you up for Kumud Dave’s rape and murder but then again, you have destroyed all the evidence. Doesn’t matter— you will go down for everything else. I believe this is what we call, reckoning eh?”

Shauryaman had turned back when Adarsh spoke again, his voice a virulent, almost mirthful whisper. 

“All this….and for what? To get arrested for murder, yourself? Soma Mittal— I assume you used the girl to get information on me and my network and then discarded her like used trash. Our crimes are not going to cancel yours. You will be jailed too, Shauryaman Gaur and that is a separate world. Think your pretty face will survive that?”

Shauryaman looked at him for a long second, mentally going over the consequences of his last act. 

But then, it was all boiling down to this moment, wasn’t it?

Meenakshi’s hand had dropped off his arm and he missed the warmth immediately. 

“I knew the only way any of this would come to the public view would be through a celebrity trial. No one would care about poor Soma Mittal had she been killed by some street thug. A small column in the third page of a local newspaper maybe…nothing more. But Shauryaman Gaur is accused of killing Soma Mittal? Oh that is national news material..isn’t it?”

He met Mitali Mittal’s eyes and saw her red rimmed orbs looking at him with a confused mixture of hate and awe and everything in between. Nikhil Mittal was looking down at his feet. The boy hadn’t made a single peep throughout the unfolding drama. 

Madhura Banerjee looked shell shocked. 

Arjun Mehra was still standing with his face buried beneath his hands. 

Remorse was a beautiful look on his former employer. 

“Mrs. Mittal— did you know your daughter was about to throw herself off the roof of a five star hotel, six months ago?”

Mitali Mittal’s shocked expression gave credence that she indeed, had not known that. 

“I gave her a choice, either she could die like this and her family will forever question what had happened or she could die and take the man who is responsible for her ruin, right with her.”

“What nonsense…”, Madhura began, only for Shauryaman to stop her with a wave of his hand and an irritated look. 

“God, you prosecutors cannot come out of your freaking roles for one goddamned second. Let me speak”

He turned to Mitali not letting Madhura counter him again. 

“Madam, your daughter was a brilliant student but she also had other dreams. The kind that makes young women yearn for the stars in the city of dreams. She wanted to be in films, not as a CA accountant on an office floor. I am sure you weren’t a fan. In such times when parents refuse to support their kids, they look for alternative methods, making themselves vulnerable to the likes of Adarsh Thatkar and Tony Braganza. She was lured into working for The Nymph with the promise of arranging a meet with a famous bollywood producer. Unfortunately she fell into the same trap as Kumud.”

Mitali was shaking her head vigorously, denial clear in her eyes and the tip of her tongue but the sheer grief at losing her daughter had rendered the woman mute, or maybe the level of truth exposed today bore heavy on her mind. 

Whatever it was, Shauryaman took pity on her. 

“Don’t believe me? Fair enough— ask Nikhil. He knew it. Didn’t you?”

The boy looked up at him for once and then looked at his mother, guilt making his lips curl downward. Mitali let out a single cry and almost fell over. It was Madhura who kept her steady with a strong arm and gentle reassurances. 

“You knew what your sister was doing. You also knew it could be dangerous but you let her do it— because that is how she could pay for all your expensive sports equipment and the tuition and coaching fees of the academy you are enrolled in. The scholarship you both told your mother you had received from the State, was fake, wasn’t it?”

Tears were rolling down Nikhil Mittal’s face and Shauryaman wanted to stop if only to spare the kid further grief. But it would be undeserved to let Soma’s fate and her struggle go unsaid when he had in a way used her to expose the entire conspiracy. 

And then, he believed he could make up for it, in a way. 

“That is why Adarsh Thatkar’s man could convince you to come and unload a barrel in me. He used your guilt and twisted it to suit his purpose and you played right into his hands like an idiot.”

Adarsh snarled, his patience finally expiring with a loud bang. 

“Still doesn’t excuse you killing that woman does it? You are going down Gaur, right with the rest of us—”

“You would have killed her anyway, Thatkar. That is why you sent the goons behind her that day, didn’t you?”

“What?”

Madhura’s voice had him turn to her again and he winked at her, a little wickedly. 

“Ahh yes, the footage that you received. I had sent it cut so that it only showed me trying to fight off the miscreants. I am sure our relentless media channels have already unearthed the entire thing. The camera had caught them trying to drag Soma into a car, after all.”

“But why would you— why didn’t you say that at court? And you sent that to Madhura?”

Arjun cried out, taking his face out of his hands finally, a spot of color on that bloodless face was evident from his offended surprise. 

“Why do you keep forgetting that I wanted the trial to be public. I wanted the bread crumbs to reach the media. The defense showing a video wouldn’t get traction— not as much as the prosecution submitting it. It established validity. It's all in the narrative, Ikka. Try to keep up”, Shauryaman completed like he was speaking to someone particularly dumb. 

He had expected Arjun to bristle at the clear slight but the latter seemed to have gone back into his shocked into inaction state. 

“But you killed her! You killed my poor girl! Why! Why oh why! You did so much to avenge that girl— Kumud and you killed Soma? Why?”

Mitali’s cry was raw, the unadulterated grief of a broken mother wailing for respite. 

Shauryaman stared at her calmly. 

“I didn’t kill your daughter, Mrs. Mittal.”

The woman looked inconsolable and she almost tore her own hair out, clutching the disheveled strands in a white knuckled grip. 

“Then who did? Who killed my daughter! Answer me! Someone—”

“No one killed your daughter, madam.”

“What? What are you even saying—”

Shauryaman raised an eyebrow and turned slightly towards the back, stretching his hand above towards the staircase in a strangely pointed way. 

“No one killed your daughter, because she is alive.”

“How violent... .kitten” his velvety voice murmured and the nickname had never sounded more like a taunt than it did at that moment. You cleared your throat, crossing your arms, forcing yourself to meet his smug eyes, because, of course your displeasure amused him. That's what he always did. Make light of situations. But today’s incident was the point where you'd had enough.

“You can't keep taking hits meant for me. It's incredibly-” you groan in frustration, unable to figure out how to express yourself. “-selfish” you finished finally. “Its incredibly selfish”

Your frown deepened as you straightened your spine, furious. “I didn't mean to hit you” you said, forcing yourself to take a deep breath and try to clearly articulate yourself, despite his taunting. “But you need to listen to me. You can’t do this everytime” you said earning a dismissive scoff.

“Do what? Save your life?”

“Then tell me, Miss Hunter. Explain to me, how protecting the girl i love, is selfish” he said finally.

His cocky facade finally wavered the barest amount. “Selfish?” he murmured lowering his head towards you. “Its selfish, to protect you? to take hits meant for you?” you backed away, jaw tensing. The mark on his cheek was a lovely red now.

“Its certainly not as selfless or chivalrous as you think it is” you could see a muscle feather in his jaw, almost unnoticable. you knew he would never raise his voice at you, never be a danger to you but this was a conversation long due, and you didn't care if he got angry.

He began to speak and you could tell he was beginning to get ticked off. You held up a hand. “Do not say it is not selfish. not when you couldn't even dream of understanding what it does to me”.

You felt breathless and the exhaustion from the fight was beginning to catch up to you. Yet you refused to leave this argument unfinished. “Because you're not catching those hits for me. You're doing it for yourself, so that you won't have to see me injured and what is that, if not inconsiderate and selfish?”

You could still see it, the way he'd materialised in front of you in a swirl of red-and-black mist, forming a human shield for you against the Luminivore’s attack. you could still feel the way your heart had raced so hard it might as well have burst out of your chest. You still hear the ringing in your ears as for the briefest of moments he'd sunk to his knees in front of you, how your stomach had threatened to heave up its contents, barely noticing the way his evol had already begun stitching him up, but it had been too slow for your liking, too sluggish. And the fact that he'd dared to be so crassly dismissive of the incident had made your fear turn into anger and your hand had swung of its own volition.

Sylus took in the expression on your face and something in his eyes softened. He began to reach out, as if to comfort you but you pulled away. Oh, how desperately you wanted to be wrapped in his embrace, in his safety, but all that would do is make you forget about this until another fight, another too close of a call. You shook your head.

“I know you care about me. I know your intentions are pure and that you want to see me safe and unharmed, but didn't you think for a moment, that perhaps I wish the same for you? That all I want is for you to be whole and safe and out of harm’s way? That putting yourself in danger to keep me safe may protect me physically, but did you even wonder how my heart might be breaking?”

He murmured your name, eyes roving over your face, his calm demeanour wavering as worry took over his face, brows dipping. You exhaled, breathless and tired to your very bones. “You know a wanderer isnt going to be the end of me” he said quietly, injecting a slight amusement in his voice. “Give me a little more credit, won’t you?”

“That's not the point.” You shook your head not taking the bait. “So what if you heal yourself? Everyone has their limit. How many times, before even you fall? Do you understand how selfish it is? because if you die, death won't happen to you. It'll happen to me. to luke. to kieran. to mephisto. All of us, left standing around, trying to figure out how to live the rest of our lives with a Sylus-shaped chasm in it, only to realise it's not possible.” you exhaled again, shoulders shaking as your emotions threatened to overwhelm me, tears beginning to prick your eyes.

“And the fact that you don't realise that, or that you feel that my feelings don't mean as much as yours, that you think your pain doesn't affect me the way mine does you, is honestly the worst part” you finally duck your head, refusing to cry in front of him.

This time you don't stop him when he reaches out, strong arms wrapping around in a familiar embrace, one that should have comforted you, but only made you cry harder. His clothes still reeked of smoke and gunpowder and the barest hint of the blood that had stained his clothes with the gash that the Luminivore had given him.

“Oh sweetie” was all he said, quiet as if he was looking for words to say. Shocking. It took confessing all your fears and worries, exposing your vulnerabilities to render the great Sylus Qin speechless.

You stood there for a long while, until your breathing calmed and your hiccups stopped and your tears dried up. Only then did he gently cup your face in both his hands as if you were something precious, making you look up at him, thumbs wiping away your tears. His gaze for gentle, apology written across his face. “I didnt realise you were bottling all that up. My poor, sensitive kitten” he said, a gentle tease to attempt to lift your mood.

“Don’t mock me” you mumbled, sniffing as he kissed the top of your head. “I wouldnt dream of it” he looked at you for a moment before sighing. “I really didnt mean to hurt you. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping you safe. I thought doing this one thing might absolve me of my other sins. but I cannot change that I am protective of you.” he said.

“That doesn't mean you must sacrifice yourself like some lamb to the slaughter” you replied earning a soft chuckle. “Lamb? if you'll make allegories, at least be accurate, kitten” he said to which you huffed, getting another gentle kiss to the top of your head in apology.

“I understand what you mean. ill… try not to repeat the same mistake. And I do not discount your feelings, sweetie. I am well aware of how much you care for me, and i cherish the knowledge that you've trusted me with your heart”

You place your palm over his heart, feeling the steady pump beneath your skin. “Then you should do better to preserve it,” you whispered.

He laced his fingers with yours, lifting your hand to kiss the back of it. “I promise, I'll do my best”. you sniff. “I shall hold you to that promise”

You winced, lifting your gaze to the mark still on his cheek. “I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to hit you” you repeat cheeks warming, earning a soft laugh. “With how angry you were and how much you had to say I'm surprised all you did was a slap” he teased, voice low and amused.

“Don't provoke me” you say quietly and he laughs at you again as you duck your head.

"I wouldn't dream of it, o feisty one”

A/n: probably haven't gotten his characteristisation down perfectly yet, but oh well we persevere. All i am is teen wolf references and taylor swift lyrics

“I’ll do it. Not letting you lions spoil my grade,” he said, internally groaning at the sticky mess of a plant the teacher had handed them for the day.

He picked it up by the ends, hastily dropping it into the pot. Did it have to be so slimy?  You cracked out laughing making him snap towards you.

“What’s so funny?” he said, his cheeks turning pink as he saw you bending over in laughter.

“You. You can’t even touch a plant can you?” you said in between laughs as he frowned.

“It’s slimy,” he whined, narrowing his eyes at you as you took over to adding the humus to pot.

“Whatever you say pretty boy.”

Draco removed the coat as the two of you reached the corridors, catching your breath. The heat of the torches felt good against his skin as he looked over to you. You had placed your hand over your stomach, panting. As your eyes caught his, they shone with a wicked gleam. He was certain his own mirrored them. You shook your head wildly, making your hair spray water droplets around.

“Eeeeeesh! Don’t get me dirty now, will you?” Draco said groaning making you smirk at him. Draco raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, yeah?” you said coming closer to him, making his heat beat faster. You took some water in your palm and splashed it on him. Draco made a face at you, which did nothing to hide his grin. You made a face back at him crinkling your nose, making you look adorable.

Draco hissed as you uttered some healing spells on his leg.

“Promfey wouldn’t have made it hurt so much,” he said making you scoff.

“Yeah, it would’ve hurt more seeing the sting only increases the more the time passes by,” you said as Draco looked at you. You were extremely cautious and looked more scared than him, treating him so tenderly. You looked up at him and something in your expression changed. You gave him a small smile.

Draco heard some footsteps as you turned towards him with widened eyes.

“Run,” You said in an undertone taking his hand and running along the corridor.

You continued to write as Draco groaned beside you. Couldn’t you stop, for like a second?

“Y/n,” he said dragging out your name. “Can we do this later, please?”

“Draco, just two more pages and then we can rest,” you said shaking your head.

“No. We’re taking a break now,” he said, snatching away your book, making your eyes widen. You heaved looking at him.

“Okay, what do you wanna do?” you asked as Draco’s face went blank.

“Uh- why don’t you tell me about your boring muggle life?” he said making you roll your eyes. He looked at you, feigning an interested expression so very obviously.

“Fine,” you said, launching into your favourite memories as a child. Draco listened on to you, laughing and smiling. He found himself imagining a younger version of you and liking every second of it. Maybe you weren’t so bad after all.

Draco didn’t know what were louder their footsteps or the giggles. All he knew was that he never quite felt this alive yet. You did that to him, you made him lighter than anyone or anything ever had. He would see your smile and his day would immediately become better. You had his back, he knew you did. He never would have thought he would start liking a muggleborn Gryffindor. He didn’t care about what his parents would think. Not when it came to you. He could not not have you in his life now. You fit in seamlessly and Draco was only too happy to let you.

You turned towards him, pointing towards the room of requirement. He nodded furiously, his face showing a wide grin as you closed your eyes, thinking about what you wanted. Better the room of requirement than Snape catching him out of bed. You took his hands, eyes gleaming, taking him inside.

“Draco?” your voice came making him shudder. Draco quickly wiped away his tears as you sat down beside him cautiously.

“How did you find me?” he said, voice a little rough from all the crying.

“Draco. The lake calms you, you always come here to this tree when you are sad”

Draco just gave you a tight-lipped smile, as you looked straight ahead. You could hear the cicadas from the grass and flies that buzzed around you both. It was a windy day.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” you whispered, not sure what to say. Draco sighed.

“My father wants me to take over his job at the ministry as soon as I leave Hogwarts. I just- I wanted to pursue charms further, maybe in Japan, but father won’t bend. I hate that ministry job.”

“Maybe once you get out of Hogwarts, you could decide for yourself”

“No, you don’t get it Y/n. My life, it’s all planned out without my say in anything. Get top grades, work at the ministry, sit like that, talk like that. It’s suffocating. I’ve become into this monster, the monster my father always wanted me to be. I have two fools for friends and I can’t even run away. I can’t even run away because I’m the only thing that keeps mum going,” Draco didn’t know when tears fell down his cheeks. Your heart thumped in your chest as you brought your hand up to slowly wipe them away. Draco leaned in to your touch.

“You are not a monster Draco. You’re not. If we start judging ourselves so harshly, there would be no saint. It’s okay. You realize that you did wrong things. That’s more than many people do. And,” you took in a deep breath, “I don’t know about you, but I’d consider us friends and close ones at that. So unless I’m one of those fools you better take that statement back.”

Draco let out a laugh, feeling better after your words.

“Okay. I change my statement. I have 3 fools for friends,” he said as you smacked his arm giggling.

Draco entered a huge room with a spacious sofa and a huge bed. The fire was lit and it warmed his skin pleasantly. You removed your over-cloak, as Draco raked at your form. You were perfect.

“See something you like?” you asked, a smug look on your face which made his heart do a little jump.

“Pretty sure she’s the girl I love,” he said, coming towards you making goosebumps erupt on your skin. Draco cupped your face leaning down to kiss you. You sighed, feeling his arms around your waist, pulling you closer as your fingers let themselves loose in his hair. He sucked on your lower lip, biting it a little making you gasp. Draco pressed his lips against your forehead as you both caught your breath.

“Remember the first time we kissed?” Draco said as a smile emerged on your lips.

“Yes I do. You were an idiot.”

Draco was fuming as you sat down beside him.

“How did your date go?” he asked, putting on a sickly sweet smile.

“What date?”

“Your date with Dean”

“I’m not dating Dean?” you said, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, you two looked awfully close for ones who don’t”

You opened your mouth to retort, but closed it thinking.

“What if we were?” you asked instead as Draco’s head snapped towards you.

“He’s not good enough for you.”

“And you are?” you said making him stop.

“I wish I were,” he whispered making you drop the playful mood. You had pulled him closer and kissed him, and then again and again and again.

“Well I was an idiot in love,” Draco said fondly, pressing his lips on yours. He trailed kisses along your jaw, his mouth finding your neck sucking a little there. You sighed, your hands pulling him closer as he un-zipped your dress, making it pool at the floor. Maybe he wasn’t the only idiot.

“Goddamnit you bastard!”

The boy jolted at the sharp curse bitten off by the woman. Her beautiful face was marred with an expression so vitriolic that it made her look demonic. She grabbed the boy’s hand and started pulling him harshly. 

“Ammi! I am sorry please”, the boy whimpered, fear making tears spring to his eyes as he tried digging his heels to restrict the violent dragging motion. 

But his mother was much stronger than him and he hadn’t eaten properly in days and his shoulder was aching with the strain of getting pulled. The evidence of his crime lay spread on the floor in pieces. He hadn’t noticed when the vase had toppled off the table, his sleep deprived body staggering against a sharp corner. 

He hadn’t had time to close his eyes for the past few days. Business had been slow and whatever little his father had managed to scourge had been over by the second week. He had been doing odd jobs in and around after school. 

He was tired. 

He hadn’t seen the table blocking his path. 

He hadn’t seen the vase. 

He didn’t do it on purpose. 

“Ammi— not the right hand, please”, he tried again, beseechingly, squirming desperately to pull off from her vice grip but in vain. He knew what awaited him in the kitchen. He had a test tomorrow. He needed to be able to write. 

But his mother, once enraged, couldn't be reasoned with. 

“You worthless piece of shit! You are not worth the bread you eat, monster child”, the woman barked and tugged at the ten year old and put his hand on the lit stovetop forcefully. 

The boy screamed in pain, feeling his skin burn and tried with all his might to struggle out of his mother’s monstrous hold. But it was a futile endeavour as always. The woman held it over the fire for a few more minutes and then pushed it off like he was a discarded piece of cloth. 

The boy held his hand to his chest, sobbing and then yelped as the woman slapped him so hard, he lost his balance and fell onto the dirty kitchen floor. 

“Stop howling like a wimp”, his mother snarled, those striking pale eyes sharpening like twin blades of steel. She turned off the stove and walked away muttering under her breath— more curses and irritated admonishments. 

“Pata nhi mar kyun nhi jaataa”, he heard her last words before the house was quiet again. 

The boy curled as tightly as he could, cradling his burnt hand against himself trying to stop the cries from erupting out of his boney chest, gasping and choking on his tears. He knew they had no bandages in the house and he had no money to go buy some and he had a test tomorrow, how is going to write like this and his stomach hurt. 

He wished he could die too. 

Rehman startled awake. 

The phantom pain of second degree burns spread like an infection over his right hand and he had to grit his teeth to stop himself from whimpering like an idiot. He kept staring at the ceiling, counting the dark shapes swirling on it, visible from the faint light of the bedside lamp he had forgotten to switch off, till the ache subsided and he could breathe again. 

Ulfat was sleeping peacefully at his side, her lips parted in unconscious bliss, a strand of her mahogany hair fluttering over her beautiful face. 

Rehman lifted the lock away with a light touch, careful to not wake her up. She always looked so ethereal when asleep. Like a dream he had conjured up in his delirium. 

Sometimes, he would stare at her for hours, trying to figure whether his life till now was something real or was he still stuck in that house of horrors, locked away and driven mad and had built up a reality to exist outside his own mind. 

Ulfat, as if sensing her husband’s thoughts, sniffed and then snorted gently in her sleep and turned on the other side, still blissfully dead to the world. Rehman smiled and tucked the blanket securely over her body and leant down to press his lips gently to her silken swathe of hair spilled over the pillow. 

Rehman knew he wasn’t getting any sleep tonight. 

Work it is, then. 

He got up and gingerly walked outside the bedroom, closing the door behind him with a soft nearly inaudible thud. The haveli was deceptively quiet and he peeked inside Uzair’s bedroom, more out of habit than actual concern. His cousin was dead to the world as well, his messy curls visible from beneath the blanket and his snores making a gentle music in his darkened bedroom. 

Satisfied, he closed the door and started towards his study. 

Then he saw the lights coming from under his office door and immediately his senses sharpened as if on default. He picked up a knife from the fruit basket kept on the center table of the hall, thanked his manager for putting actual blades instead of those decorative and blunt knives, and slinked towards the door, one with the shadows. 

Well, his knife won’t be of much use if the intruder had a gun, but he would still have the element of surprise. 

Then before he could open the door and spring inside, body locked in a predator’s attack pose, he heard a very familiar voice filter through the door. 

“Fuck this stupid shit!”

Rehman huffed and straightened, relief and exasperation washing away the tenseness from a few moments ago. He threw the knife back into the fruit basket with a criminally precise aim and swung open the door to his study. 

“Ahh!”

Naieem leaped up from where he had been sitting on Rehman’s chair, what appeared to be his mathematics book in one hand, poised to hit the possible intruder, eyes looking slightly wild under the mass of hair that looked like had been tugged at quite some bit through the past few hours. 

“That wouldn’t work if the person comes in with a gun or even a knife”, Rehman said, deadpanned. 

Naieem deflated and dropped the book on the table. 

“It would have been distracting enough to give me a fighting chance”, he argued, albeit weakly. Rehman could see the boy’s eyes had almost sunken into his face, eyebags looking like bruises. 

“Fair point”, he muttered and stepped towards him, taking a glance down and observing the sheer number of papers covered in Naieem’s chicken scrawl handwriting, mostly filled with numbers. 

“Why are you awake, doing algebra at two thirty in the night?”, he asked finally, having reached the sixteen year old close enough for the marks of stress to look painfully vibrant on his oldest’s face. 

“I have a class test day after tomorrow and it is one third of the grade and I cannot for the life of me complete this assignment and I am so freaking stupid, I want to tear my head off and—”

Naieem was babbling incoherently at this point, eyes looking even more crazed by the second, hands moving through his own curls rapidly when Rehman caught his arm gentle but firm and pulled it down. 

“Stop”, he said, making him snap his mouth shut. 

“Breathe”

“But this assignment—”

“Naieem.”

“What?”

“Did you even have dinner? I didn’t see you at the table tonight.”

The boy looked down a little sheepishly and Rehman sighed, feeling his heart sink a little inside his chest. The boy worked himself to death. He was already a little too smart for his own good and for some godforsaken reason had taken it upon himself to always academically excel like it was some race he had to win. 

Rehman was uncomfortably, incredibly proud of him but his love would always triumph over his pride. 

Idiot boy. 

“Beta, how many times do I have to tell you stop skipping on meals?”, he scolded him and the boy blushed a little chagrined. 

“But baba—”

“No buts. No skipping meals for any reason. I don’t care whether you flunk your test or cannot complete your assignments, you are not ruining your health for anything. Now come along—”, he tugged him firmly outside. 

Naieem grumbled under his breath but followed him out, obediently. 

Rehman switched on the kitchen lights and then went rummaging inside the refrigerator. Naieem climbed up the alcove to sit on the ledge and dangled his legs like an uncouth monkey. Rehman gave him his best disapproving dad stare but the boy just grinned at him, unapologetic. He rolled his eyes and took out a container. 

Naieem was following his movements with curious eyes as he pulled a pan from the drawer and switched on the stove. For a treacherous second his heart jumped inside his chest, that stupid nightmare still clinging to his jagged edges like a ghost refusing to leave and he had the strange desire to fling himself away from the stovetop. 

But he restrained himself and gestured to his son to move away. 

“What are you doing?”, Naieem asked suspiciously, peering into the pan as Rehman dropped the vegetables into it. 

“I am heating the food”, he answered, dropping oil and a few full spices to add a little tadka to the cold vegetable curry. It was a strangely therapeutic process. He had almost forgotten just how many times he had done this for himself and Uzair, years back. 

“You know how to do this?”, his oldest asked incredulously and more than a little cheeky. 

Brat. 

Rehman glared at him playfully, “did you think I grew up with an army of chefs to cook for me whenever I’m hungry?”

“I don’t know. You never tell us anything about how you grew up”

The statement was perhaps spoken too casually for it to be of any consequence. Almost like an afterthought and yet it hit Rehman with the force of a battering ram. His previously unburdened motions were hindered for a split second. The trauma returned to bite into his vulnerable throat like a hungry hyena, howling for blood. 

It was true. He had never said anything about his childhood to his sons. 

How could he?

What could he even say?

Mercifully, as if on cue, a small noise broke the disconcerting quiet, pulling Rehman’s gaze just outside the kitchen. There was no one visible but his razor sharp senses had picked on the other presence easily enough. Or it could have just been a father’s intuition. 

“Looks like we are being watched”, he whispered to Naieem but loud enough for their little spy to hear comfortably well as was evident by the answering giggles coming from the shadows collected at the door. 

Naieem grinned conspiratorily at his father and jumped down from his perch. 

“You are right. Maybe we should investigate”, he was already outside and Rehman gave the simmering pan his attention, smiling as he heard the loud squeak of surprise and the following chuckles and protests coming from outside the kitchen. 

His youngest was still laughing as he was dragged inside by Naieem who was tugging the six year old, by an arm around his little neck. 

“Look what I found!”

“And pray tell, Faizal miyan, why are you awake at this hour? Should I tell your Ammi about your little escapade?”, Rehman asked as the boy tried escaping from his older brother’s playful hold desperately. 

“Abba No! I was shleeping but then I got thirshty and I heard voicesh—”, he lisped in that adorable way he sometimes got when he was half awake. 

Rehman rolled his eyes yet fondness flooded his chest making him go a little breathless as his youngest, finally free of his brother’s hold, stumbled gracelessly but fearlessly towards him, confident that he would hold him if he slipped or tumbled against something. 

Rehman swept him off his feet as he reached close enough to touch and settled the boy at his hip, facing his precious charge away from the stove. What if he gets burnt accidentally? No— he would rather jump in the fire himself. 

Naieem had poured a glass of water by then and was making his little brother drink from it, coming to stand beside Rehman and him, uncomfortably close to the stove for the older man’s liking. He switched it off finally and plated the food, holding Faizal with one arm who was dozing sleepily in the crook of his neck while Naieem regaled him with the woes of tenth standard maths and his teachers’ general cruelty. 

“Eat”, he instructed the boy, ignoring his cheeky hmph as he handed him the plate. 

Naieem would sass him incessantly and sometimes make him want to pull out his own hair but he was also sweetly obedient. His golden child. So unlike his mischief monger of a cousin and his youngest both of whom could make Ulfat and him run around in circles for the entire day. 

“....so I thought I will complete the assignment today—”, Naieem spoke in between shovelling the food inside his mouth and Rehman felt Faizal’s soft snores hit his neck in small waves. 

“Don’t talk while eating sweetheart, you will choke”, he ran his fingers through Naieem’s wavy hair and dropped a kiss on top of his head ignoring his embarrassed yet mild protest. Teenagers and their perpetual disgust of display of any kind of affection. 

At least Faizal still liked getting kisses from his parents. 

Rehman kissed the sleeping child’s cheek, adjusted his arms around his youngest and settled beside his oldest as the latter finished his food. 

The nightmare was far away now, vanishing under the weight of the night, lulling him into a steady sort of peace. Maybe he could go back to sleep again, once he put both the boys into their respective beds and made sure they stayed there, this time around. 

Faizal was dead to the world as he was tucked inside his bed, Rehman stroking the silky strands off that little forehead. 

Naieem, though, took some convincing to go to sleep. 

“The assignment will still be there tomorrow morning. Do not stress yourself because of schoolwork, kiddo. Sleep is important.”

“Ughh dad—”

“Do you want to look like a zombie in front of..what was that girl’s name— Zarina? Uzair was telling me you have a crush on her…”

“DAD! I AM GOING TO SLEEP OH MY GOD—”

Rehman chuckled as the door was slammed quite unceremoniously on his face. 

“Sweet dreams, meri jaan”, Rehman called out despite the closed door, knowing fully well that he could be heard from inside. 

“Good night, baba. I love you but please stop listening to Uzair chachu my god—”

“Ulfat! Have you seen my black kur—”

Rehman stopped short, his words mingling into silence as he entered the kitchen. His wife, contrary to popular opinion, wasn’t the typical homemaker whom you’ll find slaving away in the kitchen. 

Yes, she was mainly responsible for the household but that was just for designating and managing the budget. The day to day activities including the kitchen came under their manager, Parveen Khala’s purview. 

Ulfat only entered the kitchen when she wanted to. When she cooked something on their children’s demands or on the rare occurrence Rehman wished for something, or sometimes when Meher or Uzair were being particularly demanding. 

Ulfat owned a franchise of bookstores, spread across the city. 

She was mainly immersed in her business most of the time. She had always had a burning passion for literature and poetry. When she married and came to the Baloch household, she had had just one request to make to her new husband. 

To let her build one bookstore in the town and look after it. 

But Rehman, usually supernaturally in control of himself, had never quite developed the ability to restrain himself when his family asked for something. And Ulfat defying all expectations, had turned out to be quite the shrewd businesswoman herself. 

“At least let me invest in the franchise? Your bookstores are garnering quite good profits annually. I am not being biased”, Rehman had tried cajoling. 

“No can do, sir. I am not letting your blood money into my business. Stay away—”, Ulfat had responded, playfully swatting and then kissing his frustrated protests away for good measure. 

The bookstores were probably the only business venture of the Dakaits that wasn’t built on blood money or any illegal funds. 

So, the point was, as far as Rehman knew, Ulfat didn’t have time to spare in the kitchen, cooking what appeared to be quite a feast. There was his wife, instead of commanding an army of sous chefs as expected, standing by the stove herself, stirring a suspiciously delicious smelling pot, while looking at what appeared to be a small recipe book. 

There was no one else in the kitchen. The counters and the table were filled with colourful paraphernalia of half cut vegetables, freshly grinded masalas, fragrantly chopped herbs, an odd container or two and various other kitchen utensils.

“Did I miss an anniversary or something?”

Rehman asked almost cautiously, trying to remember any special occasion he had missed, being too absorbed in his work as usual. Ulfat almost dropped the ladle into the pot, startled by her husband’s voice appearing suddenly just beside her ear. 

“Goodness! Rehman! Seriously. How many times have I told you not to startle me when I am working in the kitchen? Phir mujhe chot lg jaegi aur aap pura ghar sar pe utha loge…”

“Sorry..”, Rehman said sheepishly even as his eyes showed blatant curiosity, “But why are you slaving in the kitchen? Do I have to hire more cooks?”

“Its nothing like that. I was just feeling like cooking today…”

Rehman came around Ulfat and peered into the pot and his eyes caught the neat lines of his wife’s handwriting on the recipe book kept on the counter. 

“You just suddenly felt like cooking rogan josh?”, Rehman raised an eyebrow. Ulfat looked sheepish. 

“Why? Can’t I feel like cooking a—”

“A dish that I know you don’t care for much because you find it too rich for your taste?”

“Damnit!”, Ulfat whispered under her breath, “how do you even know that? You know what, I don’t want to know— twenty years of marriage, at this point you probably know the pattern of my breathing—”

“Three small ones, half a second pause and another—”, Rehman answered deadpanned without missing a beat, “but that is not the point. I know Faizal doesn’t even know the name of the dish, Uzair and Meher have gone to the movies and I certainly didn’t ask for it.. So—”

“Can you not give a rest to your detective brain for one second? Everything is not a puzzle you need to solve—”

“To me it is. You know how my mind works, my dear. So you better tell me who has had my queen slaving in the kitchen the entire afternoon?”

“He doesn’t even know I am cooking…”

“Oh it is a he, then? Do I know him? I have to know him…”

“Rehman…”

Rehman smirked as Ulfat groaned, dropping her beautiful head on his shoulder, her messily tied mahogany hair tickling his neck softly. 

“It's for Hamza, isn’t it?”, Rehman asked softly, his fingers already threading through her hair gently. 

“He was just telling me stories of his childhood and mentioned how his Ammi used to cook rogan josh on special occasions and he misses her sometimes and—”,Ulfat's voice was muffled against his kurta. 

“And so you decided to make it tonight for dinner and invite him”, it wasn’t a question so Ulfat didn’t answer. 

The ache spreading through Rehman’s chest was sweet. Sometimes he marvelled at how quickly Ulfat had taken to the young Baloch. At the beginning Rehman had believed his wife had been trying to fill the wound left from their eldest’s absence but then he had felt ashamed of his own reasoning. 

Nothing would fill the gaping chasm Naeeim’s death had left behind in their hearts. 

Rehman will always falter while drawing in air. The easy almost subconscious pattern to his breathing, forever destroyed. Ulfat will always have that slight haunting in her eyes, the everflowing warmth in them chopped off in half. 

But Hamza had made his own place in between them. 

Fitting inside the gaping hole left in Rehman and Ulfat’s souls like a messy, imperfect piece of a jigsaw puzzle which will never fill it completely but stop their hearts from falling out of their chests all the same. 

“Don’t look at me like that”, Ulfat whispered, finally moving her head away from him.

“Like what?”, Rehman whispered equally low. 

“With pity.”

Something fractured in his chest and Rehman pulled Ulfat back in his arms, enveloping her in an embrace just tight enough to hurt pleasantly yet not suffocate her at the same time. 

“Meri jaan… you are my spine, my heart, my strength, the very air in my lungs. The only person I pity is myself. The most powerful man in this part of the country and I can’t even—”

“Hush..”, Ulfat’s hands tightened their grip on his back, her breathing uneven as she pressed a kiss on his chest through the fabric of his kurta, “you have given me everything I will ever need. You… are everything I will ever need.”

His head dropped on top of hers automatically as the simmering noises of the pot and the heady smell of the cooking masalas lingered in the balmy kitchen air. 

“Nevertheless, looks like Faizal and I will get to taste the leftovers, thanks to your darling Hamza—”

Ulfat laughed and the moment lightened immediately. 

“Don’t get high and mighty with me, Sardar. I know perfectly well, the only reason you requested me to cook kheer, was because Hamza and Uzair were cribbing about not getting to the sweets before Donga in Meher’s cousin’s wedding last week.”

Ulfat chuckled and went back to her stirring ignoring her husband’s indignant protests with flourish. 

“Also, your black kurta is in the laundry. I swear you ruin all the cuffs because of the blood—”

And if later that evening, during dinner, Rehman had smiled at Hamza’s delighted compliments to his wife with the softness he had reserved only for his children, no one had been the wiser. 

Through the decades of incessant battles and suffering, if there was one cardinal fact that Rehman Dakait had thoroughly realised, it had to be that waking up to a resurrected consciousness was a far more agonizing process than almost dying. 

Waking up was overrated anyway. 

Every nerve ending in his body was screaming. His entire nervous system was aflame. It hadn’t been a jarring immediate way that he had come to consciousness. 

It had been a slow, long drawn out, incredibly painful saga. 

His mind, cloudy with the nauseating after effects of anaesthesia, had been lucid before his body had fully woken up. He had laid there, eyes closed, trying to make sense of his surroundings, almost paralysed from neck down. And then his fingers had regained sensation and he had been able to move them slightly. 

His extremities had answered after a few moments and it had travelled up his limbs with alacrity. 

But it had been his torso finally gaining the precious touch of life that had almost made him cry.

How embarrassing. 

Rehman had been made aware of every single moment of abuse he had subjected his body to, for almost thirty years in that few minutes. 

His chest a canvas of white hot agony, his abdomen pulsating with a vengeance unforeseen. 

His old scars protested howling. 

The bullet wounds, the lacerations and abrasions, the stabs, the messily done stitches, the bone which had never quite set properly after an incident, the swollen joints, the ligaments going through it over and over again, the regenerated tendons and tissues and the over burdened nerves abused by a steady stream of cigarettes and alcohol. 

In his youth, Rehman Baloch had been reckless to the point of being suicidal. His ferocious ambition had driven his unprepared soul into disastrous ruin. 

At one point, if he had had to fall on a fucking sword to reach the power just at his finger tips, he had done it. His overconfidence in his body’s recuperative abilities had primarily stemmed from the fact that he was perfectly confident no one would care if he did die.  

He was pretty sure he had single handedly given Uzair most of the latter’s blood pressure issues. 

In his defense he had tried controlling his impulses after getting more than an earful from his hysteric young cousin till that latter had been almost in tears, after one time too many of waiting outside the OT not knowing whether his brother would survive or not. 

Marriage had mellowed him more than he cared to admit. 

Ulfat’s pain was one thing Rehman had adamantly refused to accept, no matter the fact that whether he deserved even her concern let alone her devotion, had always been a point of baffled wonder to him. 

Yet now as he lay helplessly drowning in excruciating agony, unable to even breathe let alone scream or cry, Rehman Baloch wondered whether all this power and wealth had been worth it in the end.

All the money in the world hadn’t been able to shield him from the bullets tearing through his gut and then caving his sternum in. 

And all that deferential power and envious influence hadn’t saved him from the way his entire ribcage had fractured as the realisation of betrayal had struck him much before the fists and the bullets. 

Hamza…

How could he have been so blind? So fucking stupid. Such a goddamned rookie idiotic blunder—

‘You know exactly why—’, his own mind answered back, merciless in its clarity. 

“You care too damned much, brat! Feel too damned hard… react too fucking strongly. Your heart will be the fucking end of you.. And when that happens.. You will hear my fucking laugh, even if it comes from the fucking underworld—”

‘Well, Haji, you fucking monster, I can hear your laugh coming from the damned fucking underworld’

Life always did come full circle. 

Rehman must have conveniently forgotten it.

He had snatched his throne through a series of horrifyingly manipulative tactics drenched in betrayals, treacheries and a completely capricious and cruel disregard of everyone else’s life or feelings. 

His legacy was drenched in traitorous bloodshed and littered with shattered pride. 

It was only fitting that his end was soaked in it too. 

But it wasn’t the end, was it? He had to live with this now. Survive the collapse of everything he knew to be true - wade through his own blood and reach an end which seemed too far for reach.

‘But he is my son! My son! I didn’t—’, his broken mangled heart howled still. 

Rehman had felt it scream even then, half blinded in red hot rage and the blood clotting near one eye, hand quaking with a grip so fierce it hurt, barrel pointed at Hamza while he stood in that wretched forest floor. 

Hamza had a gun pointed at him too. His hands had been shaking violently. 

‘Goddamnit kid, steady hands—’, Rehman had almost corrected him, habitually. 

Even if the bullet had been poised to hit him this time. 

If Hamza had thrown the gun away then, and run towards him, Rehman would have still caught him. He would have still protected him. His stupid old heart would have still forgiven him. Even through the blows and the confused anguish and the charred remains of loyalty and love - he would have accepted any fucking reason if it had been just a moment of madness.

But it was a cold premeditated trap, meticulously planned and staged for years. Every smile, every moment of camaraderie or affection, every word, every act of loyalty and devotion had been a carefully crafted lie. A fucking pretense carried out with brutal efficiency. 

Hamza Ali Mazari had done what no one else had been able to do. 

Unravel Rehman Dakait so masterfully, destroy the previously impregnable walls of defence around him with such aplomb that when the time had come, even if there had been a chance of rebuttal, Rehman had faltered, frozen, crumbled. 

Hamza had shot him. 

Hamza had shot him knowing that Rehman never would. He couldn’t shoot the boy. The twenty five year old grown man whose eyes were still painfully young, whose laugh made his entire face glow, who had appeared to love so innocently, yet so deeply.

He couldn’t press the goddamned trigger. He couldn’t steady his infamously rock solid aim. 

Rehman Dakait’s notorious control had failed him completely. 

It had reminded the gangster lord of that one story in a Hindu epic that Ulfat had narrated to him, one evening. About an ill fated warrior, cursed to forget all his skills and his training right at the moment when he had needed it the most. 

The toll of all his sins. 

Exacted in one brutal stroke of fate. 

The second bullet had not hurt as much.

 Maybe his body had already gone into shock and that had numbed most of the pain from the second one shredding through his chest. 

Who was he fooling— he knew perfectly well why it hadn’t hurt as much. 

SP Aslam’s attack was expected. The man had always been maddened in a jealous rage against him. His attack was almost offensive. 

But Hamza… that was his own blood poisoning him. A man he had sheltered like a child for seven long years. Mentored him, guided him, opened up his home to him, let him play with his child, saw him laugh with his wife, roughhouse with his brother… opened up his heart.

And it had all been a game of smoke and mirrors.   

In that single moment, lying in a pool of his own blood, choking, wheezing, struggling to breathe through his shredded insides, his mind had shattered, body had fractured and soul had completely hollowed out. 

‘But he is my son!’

If only his stupid bruised heart would stop screaming for one goddamned second. 

—

Ulfat had fallen asleep with her cheek pressed to his hand, her body curled up in a decidedly uncomfortable position on the chair beside the bed. 

Ulfat…

Rehman’s eyes had searched for her the moment his vision had somewhat cleared off. The stark hospital lights had brought out the ashen pallor of her pulchritudinous face. She looked like she had aged a decade in one night. 

“Ulfat..”, his fingers fluttered weakly against her soft wet cheek. 

The poor woman had undoubtedly cried herself to an exhausted stupor. Her eyes were moving restlessly beneath her papery eyelids, the lower half swollen and reddened. As if she was battling with her nightmares tirelessly. 

Rehman felt his heart, or whatever was left of it, shatter into dust. 

Ulfat had always been his pillar. She was deceptively angelic to look at. But very few people had met the steel and fire behind those playful marble eyes. If he was a mountain, she was a river. She had effectively burrowed through him with a staggering force and he had bent around her obligingly. 

And here she was, a paragon of power, beauty and wit reduced to a husk. 

Again. 

Because of him. 

The guilt would eat him alive if the lingering betrayal wouldn’t. 

Ulfat, Rehman was convinced, was a saint - a messiah sent by some benevolent God who had taken pity on him. 

Her eyes fluttered as the movement of his fingers steadied somewhat. She woke up gently, the exhaustion and grief clear in her sleep drunk gaze. They met him for a second, then widened and she was up with a twang. Like an overstretched bow. 

“Rehman! Oh God! Oh thank god! Oh my god! Nurse… doctor.. someone!”, Ulfat blabbered incoherently, almost falling off her seat as she stood up violently. 

“Easy my love..”, Rehman rasped, his mouth feeling full of cotton wool, his throat parched like the desert and his tongue leaden like sandpaper. 

“Oh god, Rehman.. You need.. Water. I am gonna get ice chips.. Wait…”

Ulfat turned and was about to leave when Rehman used the last burst of his strength and caught her hand. She stilled and turned back to him. His eyes must have said everything his dried throat couldn’t utter yet. 

She sat back down carefully and leaned her forehead to his temple ever so gently. Like the slightest pressure would crush him. 

It took Rehman a minute to realize she was praying under her breath. Weaving gentle gratitude and asking mercy from a ruthless God, feather light against his skin. Her cracked lips moved almost rhythmically. The mild scent of mogra and vanilla seemed to dissipate the strong odour of antiseptic, morphine and blood. 

‘Meri jaan…’

Rehman closed his eyes and breathed. He felt her lips press to the corner of his eyes next. 

Ulfat’s kisses drank away his tears before anyone else could witness that one moment of weakness. 

She always had protected him in her own small yet increasingly impactful ways. 

The doctor swung open the door and Ulfat raised herself immediately. The small quiet in the room broke and Rehman slowly wore the mask of the Bastard King, back again. 

Mutilated and mangled, attached to wires and machines, weak as a kitten physically at least and yet his presence was a live thing blanketing the entire room as it always had. 

The disposition of a warrior and a monarch never did fade, even if Rehman did look like death warmed over. Several times over. 

“Three ribs fractured, two on the left, one on the right, bits of the sternum had pierced one lung, we have platted most of it… breathing troubles might persist. The aortic lining was nicked. One centimeter to the left and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Brute force trauma to the kidneys, one minor hairline fracture on the back of the cranium.. Probably from the fall. There were minor scratches and abrasions and a very nasty case of road rash. I’m worried about the abdomen though. The intestines were a mess.”

Rehman didn’t even blink. Ulfat’s face had paled, a little green at the gills, but her eyes were dry and her lips didn’t quiver. 

It apparently took more than this to break the Leader of the Balochs and his consort. 

“Recovery time?”,Rehman’s voice was still parched. 

“More than you’ll like for sure. But.. Sher-E-Baloch or not, I will advise you to take it easy for a year, at the very least. I don’t want to be up to my elbows inside your body again rearranging your insides as it lies in pieces—”

“Come on Doc… everyone wants.. a piece.. of me…”, Rehman drawled with a smirk, words interspersed with deliberate pauses because of the pain. 

The surgeon sighed and rolled his eyes. He had been tending to the Dakaits for the past two decades and was well versed in Rehman Baloch’s twisted sense of humour which being as rare as it was, only bloomed in the most inopportune and inappropriate of times. 

“God help us all! If he is joking he’ll be fine. Don’t worry Ulfat Bibi.. your husband will be out of my hospital and back on the streets and giving us both grey hair in no time at all—”

Ulfat snorted, “He wishes. I will tie him to the bed if necessary, don’t you worry doctor sahab.”

The smiles lightened the mood somewhat. 

That was before there was a shout from the corridor. A loud smash and then more screaming. Rehman’s instincts roared and if he had had even a fraction of his strength remaining he would have launched himself from the bed. 

But he could only turn his head towards the noise, that also with much difficulty. 

The world was still somewhat syrupy. 

Ulfat had already reached the door by then. The doctor, hot on her heels. 

“Ulfat.. Don’t—”

Rehman tried to warn but his wife had already run out. 

—

“...ucking dare you! You spineless treacherous snake! And here you were yesterday, pretending, after everything that you did!”

Ulfat gasped as Uzair rammed his fist into Hamza’s abdomen in such a powerful uppercut that the younger man slammed into the opposite wall, winded like he had run a marathon. 

“Hamza! No—”, Yalina cried out, struggling in the almost merciless grip Donga had on her arm. 

Meher was leaning against the wall, near the door of the ICU, holding it in a grip so fierce that it was almost as if her knees could no longer support her own weight. Her face was a pasty shade of grey. She had still not changed her clothes from the previous night. 

A few of their men had collected at the end of the corridor and seemed to be guarding the exit. Two nurses and a resident doctor were cowering at a distance. 

Uzair pulled Hamza by his hair next, ruthless yet precise and bashed his face against the same spot where he had fallen just a second prior. The blood bursting out of his temple made Yalina scream and Meher gasp. 

Ulfat was frozen at the door, unable to grasp the scene which was playing like a nightmare in front of her eyes. For a moment, she thought she was still asleep by Rehman’s bed, and was dreaming up this nonsense. 

But Uzair’s next words brought her back to Earth as the lieutenant to the Baloch gang practically spat them out— vitriol, disbelief and a strangely aggrieved anguish clear in his tone, “Mere bhai ke saath dagaabaazi ki tune tune! Rehman Bhai ke saath dagaabaazi! Namakharam salee!”

Dagaabaazi? 

Betrayal? 

What the hell was Uzair babbling?

“Uzair! What the hell are you doing? Hato usse! Aur Donga Yalina ka haath chodo! Kya badtameezi hain ye? Dimag kharab ho gaya hain tum logo ka! Arre chot lg jaegi use, kya kar rhe ho?”

Ulfat pulled Uzair off Hamza with a beastly strength she didn’t even know she possessed. Maybe it was a mother’s instinct overpowering her intuition which had been screaming at her since yesterday night, when she had first seen Hamza after the incident. 

The poor boy had been bleeding like a slaughtered pig and for the life of him couldn’t meet her eyes. Ulfat had known that very moment that something was very wrong but worry for her husband’s condition and seeing the young man she had grown to love like a little brother or rather like her own child, had shadowed her instincts somewhat. 

Now, in the daylight, in the middle of what looked like an impromptu battlefield, they were blaring at her like sirens. 

“Bhabi aap saamne se hatt jaen, aaj main iska qatl kardunga!”, Uzair shouted, his face contorted in agonized rage even if for some reason his hands were shaking, his eyes suspiciously bright. 

“Pagal ho gye ho! Kya bak rahe ho? Hamza, are you okay?”, Ulfat looked at Hamza, then finally noticed how, even as the latter was heaving, was looking everywhere else except at her. 

“Haan ho gya hoon pagal! If you come to know what your darling Hamza has done, it would drive you insane as well—”

Uzair turned around and went and picked up his mobile from where he had thrown it on the floor in rage and held it out to Ulfat. 

The recording was dodgy and the sound was of poor quality but there was no doubt about the identity of the people on the screen. But what shook Ulfat to her core was what they had been discussing. 

It was a five minute long video which clearly showed how the trap was laid. 

Cold, meticulous, brilliant. 

Calculated, precise, cruel. 

“And remember, Baloch. If you betray me, I will kill that pretty wife of yours before I kill you too and Jameel sahab, I will castrate you.”

SP Aslam Chaudhary warned his two co-conspirators, his words turning in Ulfat’s mind relentlessly in a neverending loop as the video ended. 

The mobile slipped from her numb fingers. Shock gripped her throat with one breathless hand and denial surged like a tsunami inside her. It wasn’t possible. It had to be a trick. There had to  be some explanation to this. Anything else. 

She turned to Hamza. 

He was looking at her now. And Ulfat knew it even before she asked, her voice tremulous even if her resolve hardened like a diamond. A long instilled defence mechanism. 

“Is this true? Did you—”, she walked towards him, voice getting lower as her nerves steadied, “Look at me Hamza!”, she barked at him when he had shifted his gaze. It made the other man jump slightly and his eyes met hers finally. 

The truth was a dragon breathing fire into her lungs. 

“Is it true? Did you betray us? Did you plan this? Is the video real?”

Ulfat Baloch could be terrifying in her own right. Something which most people found out much too late and often to their detriment. Her face had turned paper white. Whether in shock or wrath, no one could determine. 

Hamza breathed. 

“Yes.”

One word. One simple monosyllable. And Ulfat felt her world crumble. 

Yalina let out a single sob from somewhere behind, Meher who had slowly inched to come and stand by her, caught her, pulling her away from Donga’s grasp in one fluid move. Uzair let out an inhuman sound - something caught between anger and pain. 

Ulfat felt the ground beneath her feet shift. Years of cautiously built relationships snapped within a split second. Her heart folded into itself like it was catering to the momentum of being kicked carelessly and with cruel disregard. 

She closed her eyes for a second and a scene from one evening came unbidden to memory. 

Ulfat raised her eyebrows. It looked like a bomb had gone off in Rehman’s study. The entire office was covered in sheets, old files, bulky ledgers and what not. The musty smell of papers and alkaline scent of ink mixed with the smoky flavor of cigarettes had filled the air. 

And in the middle of the battlefield, her husband stood, cigarette dangling from his lips, a stack of papers in one hand and what appeared to be a pocketbook in the condition of completely coming apart in another, an adorable frown between his eyes as he peered into both. 

“Has anyone ever told you, your thinking face makes you look annoyingly hot. Especially if you are wearing your glasses?”, Ulfat chuckled while coming inside, carefully avoiding stepping on the papers littered on the floor. 

“Has anyone ever told you, flattery absolutely works on me”, Rehman smirked through the cigarette, a plume of smoke blowing on Ulfat’s face as put the tea cup on the desk and leaned against it.

“What are you even doing?”, she asked. 

“I have been trying to map all our businesses since the beginning. Do you know, we used to sell soap boxes alongside the drugs at one point?”, Rehman frowned as he picked up a ledger, discarding his trusted pocketbook on the desk. 

“Why am I not surprised..”, Ulfat sighed and picked up a paper and mentally appreciated the patience of their accountants who had to decipher her husband’s infamous chicken scrawl, “why the sudden trip down the memory lane?”

“I need to make a blueprint for the upcoming review. I was thinking of recording it all down. It might prove to be helpful for foraying into new ventures.”

“Sounds like a wise plan. Only that I know, you, meri jaan, have a near eidetic memory. So this is definitely not for your benefit or our businesses. You are doing it for someone else—”, Ulfat saw Rehman look down into a book, almost covering his face with it and knew she had hit the nail right on the head. 

“Thinking of retiring already?”

“You wish. I will go insane doing nothing all day and eat your head. Then you’ll kick me out. No no…. I am merely preparing the boys. We lead a dangerous life, my love. We have to be prepared for every situation.”

The situation being his sudden death because of their innumerable rivals’ uncountable plans succeeding, went unsaid. Ulfat hated it when he did that. Trying to spare her from the truth by weaving flowery words. But she understood it all the same. 

But if her husband thought she wouldn’t catch it, he was dead wrong. 

“Wait… did you say boys? As in plural? As in, Uzair and— someone?”

Rehman gave his wife a long suffering look but it was softened with pride and clear affection. 

“As much as I love my little cousin, Uzair will not be able to handle the entire thing alone. He is a terrific enforcer, knows the inner workings of our business and is well connected within our networks but— his diplomatic skills leave a lot to be desired.”

Ulfat's smile was commiserate. She adored her brother in law and his ferocious devotion towards her husband and their family as a whole, but it was true. Uzair Baloch was a fantastic general but put him on the throne alone and it would be a catastrophe. 

Especially for an empire which basically ran on cloak and daggers as much as it did on Rehman’s legendary reign of terror. 

A sudden shout and a giggle brought the couple’s attention to the window. They looked at each other and then went towards the single window in Rehman’s office, which incidentally faced the garden. 

Ulfat peered down and saw them. 

Hamza was running around letting out theatrically high pitched yelps as Faizal chased him with what looked like the wooden sword Rehman had carved for him some days ago. Their eight year old was yelling. 

Yalina and Meher sat on garden chairs, gossiping and peeling what looked like a mountain of oranges. The late afternoon sunlight was hitting their beautiful hair and lighting the gravel path where Uzair stood barking at someone on the phone. 

“Mercy, Shehenshah! I surrender!”, Hamza yelped again, as the wooden sword hit him at the ankles. 

“There is no surrender in battle, evil king! Only death!”, Faizal shouted and hit Hamza with a ferocity which had Rehman winching in sympathy beside her. 

Uzair, unbeknownst to how close they had come to him, turned at the last moment, just as Hamza barreled into him at full speed, Faizal hot on his heels. The two men tumbled down in a tangle of overgrown limbs, suspiciously feminine shrieks and a giggling child atop. 

“Abbe behenchod! Kya kiya!”

“Abbe haramkhor bacche ke saamne gaali nhi!”

“I will tell Abbu you both are saying bad words. Ammi will make you give money to the swear jar.”

Faizal warned his uncles sagely as the two men groaned, letting go of dignity and contended to lie like a pair of lions basking in the sun together. Meher and Yalina’s laughter filtered in the crisp winter air and reached Ulfat from below. 

“Are you sure, these are the men you want to leave your legacy to?”

Ulfat teased her husband. 

“Hush, I am rethinking all my life choices”, Rehman sighed in her hair as he pulled her by the waist to his chest. 

Ulfat’s answering laughter rumbled through both their bodies as she tucked herself contented by her husband’s side and looked down on her strange messy family, heart feeling full. 

“He was about to give you everything anyway…”

Ulfat’s voice was thin. Mortifyingly weak. She didn’t have to look at Hamza to feel the jolt of bewilderment passing through him. 

“He trusted you. You and Uzair were going to get everything divided equally. He wished you both would continue together but he made sure you both would get your rightful share even if you decided to go your separate ways.”

The hallway was quiet. Not even the crickets outside could gather the courage to sing. 

The sheer weight of the truth had sucked the very air in the space around them. 

Ulfat swayed lightly and Hamza raised a hand towards her, almost unconsciously, almost instinctive. 

“Don’t!”, he jerked back like he had been hit. Ulfat breathed and breathed and coughed till she could finally speak through the suppressed scream building in her throat. 

“It would have been all yours anyway, Hamza. You didn’t have to… break his heart too.”

A sob. 

Ulfat didn’t know who let it out. Whether she had broken her control, whether it was Yalina or Meher or Uzair… or maybe it had been Hamza himself. His usually effervescent face was a mask of cracked anguish. 

Like Ulfat’s pain had cut meandering trails of vengeance on his own bloodstained one. 

Old wounds layered underneath the new ones Uzair had given him just now. 

“Bhabi—”, he almost whimpered. 

“Don’t you fucking dare call me that”, she didn’t shout, she didn’t yell. She hissed the words through painfully gritted teeth. Wrath coloring her vision blood red. 

“I trusted you. I let you around my kid. My family. I thought—”, Ulfat turned, words breaking into a pathetic hysteric laughter, her knees wobbled and Meher caught her arm. Ulfat removed her gentle grip and went and sat on the waiting chair kept aside. 

This time her words were soft. Almost whispered in wonder. As if she was marvelling at her own lack of foresight. At the blind faith she had had in Hamza. At the innocent image of a family she had built that one winter afternoon, looking down from her palace. 

“I thought even if Rehman didn’t survive this… yesterday—”, the thought itself was so excruciating she almost gagged on it but powered through, despite the small sound Hamza made like that of a wounded animal.

“...that, even if he died. He wouldn’t have been alone. You would have been there…holding him. He would have gone with someone who loved him… whom he loved, making the process less painful.. I—”

“Bhabi, please breathe—”, Meher’s voice was achingly empathetic. But Ulfat couldn’t stop. Her words were spiraling out of control. Just like her mind. 

“But I was a fool. A naive, hopeful idiot. The only people surrounding him as my husband lay dying had been his enemies… and you…”

“You were the third fucking bullet that no one could see!”

The last words were spat almost viciously as she stood up again, storming towards Hamza. 

A rage contorted Ulfat’s pretty features into an expression no one had ever seen on her face before. Not even when she had lit Rehman’s cigarette before he had gone to murder her son’s murderer. 

Hamza looked terrified for a moment. His body curved inside. Bracing for a staggering impact. And Ulfat didn’t hesitate. She was spitting fire. She was Rehman Dakait’s rage at the moment. Burning everything within sight, uncontrollable, unquenchable, devastating. 

A slap echoed through the corridor like a verdict. 

“Jiss insaan ne tumhe apne seene se lgage rakkha, tumne ussi ke seene mein khanjar khop diya! Maine tumhe apna beta manaa! Faizal ke jaise pyaar kiya tumse! Aur tumne meri zindagi hi cheen li mujhse!”

Tears rolled down Hamza’s face but Ulfat didn’t care.

“You killed Rehman and me and every fucking dream we had seen with you in it! You lying deceiving snake! I will kill you myself—”

Yalina suddenly jumped in between Ulfat and Hamza and caught Ulfat’s raised hand with both of hers. She was crying. Her pretty face was a mess of smeared kajal, splotchy red marks and those curly tresses sticking to her cheeks. 

“Please Bhabi… please… no.. no…please…I beg you…please”

Ulfat heaved, the anger slowly dissipating under such a tidal wave of grief that it nearly stole all her breath away. She stroked Yalina’s wet cheek, the girl still crying incoherently. 

“I had considered you my son and no matter what you have done, I still can’t bring myself to curse you. But show your face around my family again, and I will personally put a bullet in your skull.”

Hamza was looking down, his towering frame cut almost in half, as if asking for his neck to be severed from his body. 

“Bhabi, aap bhai ke saath rahe, isse toh main niptata hun—”, Uzair began, detaching himself from Meher’s tight grasp and walking towards the accused. 

Yalina was still trying to cover her husband’s figure with her painfully smaller body. 

Ulfat was about to say something when another voice stopped Uzair in his tracks. 

“Koi.. kisiko.. nhi niptaega…”

“Bhai!”

“Oh my god—”

“Rehman!”

Ulfat gasped and ran towards her husband who was standing by the door of the ICU.

Standing would be an understatement.

Rehman was leaning against the saline pole he had brought with himself, the IV still inside his vein. There was a heavy coat on his shoulders, over the dressing gown and the doctor was two seconds away from having an aneurysm by the expression of disapproved alarm on his face. 

Rehman's face was so white, everyone was afraid he would faint. The dark circles under his eyes were black craters and his knees shook just a little from the strain of holding himself upright. 

Anyone else would have cut a tragically pathetic figure. 

But not Rehman Baloch. 

His eyes were piercing. Glazed yet awash in that same terrifyingly cunning intelligence that has petrified everyone in Karachi into near subservience. He was wounded, no doubt. 

But he was a Titan, still. 

And his body played no part in the sheer authority which his rasping voice delivered. 

It was brutal and filled in the charged space of the corridor like a live wire. 

This was the Rehman Baloch, Hamza had read about, studied for years before the infiltration and whom the streets whispered about in barely suppressed terror. There was not a single hint of pain in his expression even if everyone knew he had to be in tremendous agony. 

“Sit down, for god’s sake! What are you doing? You’ll rip all your stitches—”, Ulfat stopped talking seeing the look on her husband’s face. She knew it was futile to argue with him at the moment. 

“Hamza.. Ali.. Mazari.”

Hamza flinched violently yet raised his eyes to meet his maker. 

“Is that even… your real name?”

“Yes.”

The answer was whispered. But it rang with truth. Not that anyone in the Baloch household could know how to differentiate between truth and deception, if the current circumstances are considered. 

“If I… ever see….you anywhere near my territories… again.. I will personally…rip out your throat.”

It was a verdict. 

Exile. Permanent banishment. Not death. 

But betrayal to the Balochs have always been certain death. Death in painfully creative ways. Ways that have made greater men quake in their boots and demons shudder underground.

No one who had betrayed Rehman Dakait had been spared. 

Not even his own mother. 

A strange, unbelievable verdict and Yalina almost collapsed on the ground with sheer relief. She was half certain she would be widowed today. 

The men were gaping at their leader, faces blank with numbed shock. Ulfat shivered once but stood by her husband, taking most of his weight on herself without letting it show too obviously. Her face was broken and she had no strength left to hide it. 

“But Bhai! He betrayed us! He betrayed you! He.. he knows everything! All our plans, our routes, our contacts…the moles…. The freaking safety measures in the haveli! We can’t—”, Uzair protested horrified. 

“Last I… remember…. I was still… your boss… or did someone else take the position while I was out!”, Rehman thundered, the strength in his breathless shout palpable in the air. 

The men immediately lowered their heads, deference to their leader, automatic and undisputed. 

Uzair was clearly conflicted but he would not openly go against his brother. And especially not when he could see the toll it was taking on Rehman to even remain standing on his feet, in this condition let alone shout. 

“Bhai….”, Yalina whimpered and Rehman’s mask wavered. If only for a second. 

“And anyone… who….wants to go with him….leave now. Later….if I find anyone… in contact with him…you will face the same punishment….betrayers face.”

Yalina’s face fell and she clutched Hamza’s hand desperately. 

“Kuch bolte kyun nhi tum? Bolo na ye sab jhuth hain! Tell them it's all a lie! Tell them it was staged. Why are you not defending yourself!”

Yalina cried to Hamza, the agony in her voice like poison in the room. 

Meher wanted to reach her desperately, pull her back into their sphere but it was impossible now. She could see the chasm between them. A physical gorge drawn by a single treacherous act that no amount of blood could ever fill. 

“I didn’t want to kill you. At least not… not after—”

Hamza’s first coherent words and they seeped into the air like a prisoner’s last wish. He didn’t complete his sentence and Rehman didn’t ask him to. He coughed once, blood blooming at the corner of his mouth. 

Uzair’s punches had opened the scabs again. 

He turned with much difficulty and found Yalina’s small shoulder below his arm as she supported him. Even after all of this, she was standing with him. 

Hamza couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t even breathe. 

He was numb. 

Like an ice sculpture. 

The men made a path through them for Hamza and Yalina to pass, their faces twisted in betrayed anger and Hamza knew they were holding themselves back with great restraint. Rehman’s words were law in the gang. And that was the only reason he still had his limbs attached to his body. 

Uzair had been easier on him than he had expected. Maybe the shock of his betrayal had broken some of the younger Baloch brother’s infamous strength. 

Hamza heard a small sound and a few gasps behind him and wanted to turn. Every single cell in his body wanted to turn and run and grovel and just beg till his throat hurt, till he could wipe that look from his… from Rehman’s face, from Ulfat’s eyes, from Meher’s countenance, from Uzair’s visage…

But he couldn’t. 

Not yet. Not ever. 

The game hasn’t ended yet. 

And one wrong move could bring the whole thing tumbling down. 

Even if Hamza felt his heart tearing itself into half, as his slow steps took him away from the man who had made him feel like he deserved to be protected, to have a family, to not feel so goddamned alone in the world. 

From the man he was sure now regretted giving Hamza any shred of affection he ever had, intentional or otherwise. 

__________

Rehman felt the world tilt and the edges of his vision go grey as Hamza and Yalina stumbled out of the corridor. 

He had felt the men simmering under the outrage. Uzair's conflicted flare of protective tendencies had surged. The audience’s bafflement was a whole presence in the hallway. 

Yet he couldn’t… he couldn’t do it. 

Couldn’t order the death sentence of a man his heart refused to stop considering as a son, still. 

Couldn’t see the light drain from those brilliant vibrant eyes. 

Couldn’t stop thinking about the strange dream where he had felt Hamza press his face inside his throat and wail like a child who had lost his father. It had enveloped his mind like a heavy milky mist. 

Yet seeing Hamza and Yalina walk away from him, even if it had been on his own orders, had felt like seeing a part of his soul tear itself apart savagely and fly along with them. And try as he might, he couldn’t catch it back. 

Rehman was left with a patchwork of his body and his heart, tattered and stitched and lacking. 

The next time he opened his eyes, it was dark outside and Uzair was curled like an overgrown house cat near his feet, fast asleep in the most uncomfortable position a human body can ever contort itself into. 

Ulfat was nowhere to be seen, much to his disappointment. 

He was sure he would be punished severely for the stunt he had pulled.

Another addition was Faizal. Also asleep. Curled into a ball inside Uzair, clutching his uncle’s kurta like a lifeline. His young face was pale and the tear tracks sliced Rehman’s mangled heart into further bloodied strips.  

He had forgotten about his youngest. 

The poor boy. All the hospital had probably reminded the kid had been the time when his elder brother Naeeim had passed away. 

Naeeim… 

Rehman would be lying if he hadn’t wished to pass on for one moment when he had been battling for his life, prone on the bed, under the surgeon’s scalpel. He would get to meet his firstborn, see his beloved moonchild’s lovely smile one more time and the pain would finally stop. 

But Rehman had never not fought for survival like a feral wild animal. It was bound in his bones. He couldn’t undo years of habitual action in one stroke. No matter the severity of the hurt. Or how badly his heart had broken. 

He couldn’t think of Hamza anymore. 

He shouldn’t. 

He should end that chapter. He didn’t want to know about the whys. He simply didn’t care anymore. 

“Baba!”

Faizal’s eyes were open the next second when Rehman’s gaze found him. 

“Hello darling…”, Rehman whispered. 

Faizal was out of Uzair’s death grasp the next moment, startling his cousin so violently the poor man almost took a tumble on the floor and was in Rehman’s arms the very next moment. 

“Faizal! Baccha, chot lgi hain apke abbu ko, dheere.. Dheere..”, Uzair countered gently as Faizal climbed atop his father, almost desperate. 

“Hush! It's okay Uzair, the day I can’t hold a rambunctious Dakait in my arms is the day I die..”, Rehman consoled while suppressing a cry of pain as Faizal almost elbowed him in the gut. 

“Bhai, you have already aggravated your injuries enough for a day.. No, a month. Please have mercy on my nerves and Bhabi and Doctor sahab and take it easy.”

Rehman grimaced even as he cradled his youngest as tightly as he could to himself, without ripping out his stitches or hurting the trembling boy in his arms. He pressed consoling kisses to Faizal’s mop of hair and hummed slowly. 

It was an old lullabye, Ulfat used to sing to both Naeeim and Faizal when they would fall sick and couldn’t sleep. 

“I thought you would never wake up! I was so scared!”, Faizal cried. 

“Forgive me, my love. I am not leaving you or your mother any time soon…hush hush…”

Rehman sang gently and kept at it till his throat was protesting and Uzair had almost fallen asleep, seated in the chair beside the bed now. Faizal’s soft snuffling sound of sleep broke Uzair from his doze and he woke up straight. 

“You look like shit”, Rehman said, voice low enough to not disturb his finally calm son. 

“Speak for yourself. You look like a truck had gone over you and backed up for good measure”, Uzair responded equally low, a small smile teasing his face after what felt like centuries. 

“Brat”, Rehman said affectionately.

Uzair was quiet. Rehman could see the self flagellation clear on his cousin’s face. 

Well, that won’t do at all. 

“Uzair, whatever you are thinking right now—”, his cousin cut him midsentence. His face blank and eyes staring into the distance. As if tracing every single incident that led to this point. 

“I left you alone with him. I thought.. I will collect the shipment order and by the time you are done with the ribbon cutting—”

“Uzair…”

“Do you know why I left?”, Uzair looked at him suddenly, eyes filling up with self recrimination more than guilt, “I left because I was bored!”

Rehman carefully moved one arm which had been wrapped around Faizal and caught Uzair’s trembling hand. He squeezed it with as much strength as his recovering body would allow. The younger Baloch curled his other hand to rest his forehead on, almost leaning over Rehman’s legs. 

“I was so stupid. If I had been there—”

“Both of us would have been shot. It wasn’t your fault Uzair—”, Rehman said calmly. 

“No! I wouldn’t have let you get shot! I would have fucking killed that motherfucker myself! I know you hesitated—”

Rehman felt his heart jump. Uzair was looking at him, almost ashamed of his own outburst but he didn’t shy away from his words, as was his habit. He would say what is in his mind, whether his older brother liked it or not. 

It was one of the reasons Rehman had kept Uzair as his second in command. 

He didn’t need to surround himself with yes men. 

They were only good foot soldiers. But made terrible partners. 

“You had a gun Bhai, I know. Even if he drove you all off the road, even if you were caught by that jackass Aslam, you still had a gun. I went to the spot. I saw the spot where you were shot… the blood stains..”, he stopped and swallowed once feeling nauseated. 

The amount of blood soaking the earth had made Uzair want to hurl. The hardened general of the Dakait gang and feeling puckish at the scent and sight of blood - should have been a joke. But he was only human too. 

One more squeeze from Rehman’s hand on his and Uzair shook the images away. 

“I saw the shell casings. You didn’t shoot. The gun was just a few centimeters away from your grasp. That means you dropped it when you fell. Hamza… shot you. But you didn’t shoot. Not first or even to retaliate. I have seen you fight Bhai… you never miss and you never hesitate.”

Rehman looked at the ceiling. 

What could he say to Uzair that wasn’t the truth? 

So he told the truth. 

“I couldn’t.”

And wasn’t that just sad. 

There was silence and only Faizal’s rhythmic breathing and the machines attached to Rehman’s body beeping were the only sounds in the chamber.

“You are letting your heart decide. It is dangerous. He knows Faizal’s security pattern Bhai..”

Uzair was talking sense. Rehman knew it. And he was letting his heart make the decisions he should have left to his cold hard judgement that had always led him on the right path. His heart on the other hand has only ever created nuisance. 

“Change the pattern then. Change the routes. Change everything. We were due for a change anyways. Can’t depend on one pattern for too long.”

“You are letting him go without punishment. The men will notice. They will think you have become weak.”

A beat of silence. 

“Maybe I have…”

Rehman didn’t know who was more scared with that admission. Uzair or he himself. 

“Bhai you are scaring me…”

Rehman patted his hand. 

“There is no greater punishment for a man who was ready to die for his mission and then see it fail. Tell me Uzair, why did he come back today even after knowing that I was awake. He could have run. Easily. Disappeared. The men were distracted. Busy. No one was keeping watch. Why come back to the lion’s den?”

The same question had been eating at Uzair, that was pretty evident. 

And no logical answer seemed to come to any of them at the moment.

“I still can’t believe…he betrayed us. Hamza… I would never have imagined it in a thousand years. I still can’t completely…”, Uzair stopped. 

Rehman looked outside the single window in the room. The night was gentle. The moon was a full circle. Almost mocking him and the darkness inside him. 

“Hamza, if Meher or Uzair have put you up to this, know that I can break a man’s wrist in seventeen different ways.”

Rehman didn’t even look up at his supposed attacker, his entire focus on the inventory list in front, lounging on his throne as usual. Hamza, who had been advancing towards his boss, steps as cautiously silent as a cat, bit his lips resigned. 

He sighed and came in front, even if his hands were still suspiciously behind his back. Almost like he was concealing something. 

“I don’t care what Uzair says, you definitely have supernatural powers. No one can hear me come, and by no one, I mean, no fucking one!”

“I couldn’t hear your steps idiot, but Yalina’s perfume is way too strong”, Rehman replied cooly. 

“Goddamnit.”

“By the way, who gave you the brilliant idea of sneaking up on me? Did you want to lose a limb by any chance?”

Hamza grumbled but came and stood in front of the monikered Bastard King. There was an almost hopeful smile on his face. Rehman looked up finally and raised an eyebrow.

“Was I supposed to give you any instructions? I thought Uzair had already divided the work.”

“Ah yes, it is evening Bhai. We are done with work”

“What? Evening already… goddamnit, I lost time, this fucking inventory is a mess. Tell Siyahi to meet me tomorrow when he finds the precious time.”

Rehman stood up wincing and found Hamza still standing in the same position in front. 

“Okay, now I am concerned. What is it?”

Rehman frowned. Did the kid have a fever? Did he forget anything? 

“I… had to give you something. Just, please promise me you wont rip my head off”, Hamza said quickly and thrust what he had hidden behind his back in Rehman’s hands even before the latter could reply. 

“What the—”

Rehman stared at the pack of glass marbles nestled inside his scarred palm. They were a little translucent, a rust color swirling a mesmerizing pattern on each one and they sparkled in the dim yellow lighting of the room. 

But most importantly, they were exactly the same ones Rehman remembered owning as the only thing he had ever bought for himself as a boy. 

They were his first and only toy, he could say. He wasn’t sentimental or nostalgic but he remembered feeling an acute sense of loss when he had been dragged to prison and on returning had found all his possessions gone, along with his precious marbles.

“How..”, Rehman asked - wonder coloring his voice. 

“Don’t be mad.. But I overheard you talking to Faizal last week and I found out this one artisan in Saddar who made custom toys and I just sort of explained to him about the marbles and he said he could make them exactly like this so—”

Hamza was babbling nervously and Rehman knew he should take pity on him and say something but the words were caught in a tight mortifying stone inside his throat. It was with a herculean effort that he swallowed it down. 

“So.. you brought me marbles after accidentally finding an artisan in Saddar?”

“That sounds incredibly suspicious when you frame it like that—”, Hamza muttered cautiously. 

Rehman couldn’t stop his face from doing that complicated thing he knows makes him look fucking stupid. But by the way Hamza suddenly started glowing like the sun itself on seeing his expression, made the small indignity worth it, he supposed. 

Stupid boy. 

And his stupid fucking heart. 

“Well, let's see if I still have it in me or not…”, Rehman said suddenly, giving in to the childish desire inside him and walked out of the room. 

Hamza whooped and sprinted after him like an overgrown puppy. 

“Let me warn you Sardar, I was the undefeated champion in my locality.”

Hamza warned playfully, holding the door of the warehouse open and Rehman just passed by him, a smirk twisting his lips almost mischievously. 

“I am going to wipe the fucking floor with you, son.”

Memories were painful whip lashes against his back. Carving out his flesh one strip at a time. 

Has any of it been real?

His mind was a trap on its own. A gluttonous cage for punishment. 

‘I did this to myself, Uzair. Me and my stupid fucking heart which still can’t stop screaming.’

Rehman thought almost viciously but didn’t have the strength to utter. 

Hamza was sitting on the floor. The cold was seeping through the wall of the sterile hospital corridor into his torn back in waves. His entire body was a mess of bruises and abrasions. His bones were cracking under the weight of his raspy breaths. His usually silky soft hair, now a mass of wild tangled locks matted with gore and filth, fell to cover half his face. 

Pain was a muted companion. 

He was numb. 

There was a small hitch in the air, the sharp intake of breath drawn against a pair of still painfully young lungs. It broke the almost cloying syrupy silence which the hallway had descended into. 

Hamza looked up from where he had been staring at his blood stained fingers. 

Faizal was standing a few feet away. 

His oh so familiar eyes wide like saucers on his little hollowed out face. 

“Hamza bhaiyya—”, his whispery voice cracked open at the last syllable. 

The look on his youthful visage hit Hamza’s broken chest like a fully loaded freight train. Because he had seen this exact expression mirrored to a frighteningly precise degree on a much older face just a few hours ago. 

Rehman Dakait’s younger son had inherited his father’s exact body language and non verbal cues including his expressions to an eerily familiar severity. 

The shock slowly transforming into horrified grief was so achingly similar in Faizal’s molasses brown eyes as had been on his father’s wane blood stained face when the realisation of the exact degree of the treachery enforced against him had been finally revealed, that Hamza couldn’t help but gag on the truth. 

“You are hurt…”, the ten year old whimpered and stumbled towards him, searching for the safety only the circle of a father’s - a brother’s arms could provide. 

Hamza didn’t even have the time to flinch as Faizal threw himself into his chest with the kind of trust only innocent children can have and display. 

He didn’t care about the blood drenching Hamza’s clothes which was now imprinted on his small cheek, and his nimble frame.

His father’s blood. 

Bile rose acerbic, crawling up Hamza’s throat with an unforgiving vengeance. 

He has no right— his hands tightened around the small shaking body clinging to him— he has no fucking right! Hugging the child of the man he— consoling this little boy who was quivering with the heavy weight of terror and still worried about Hamza’s wounds. 

Hamza buried his pulsing face into Faizal’s mop of hair. 

He smelled like Rehman. His shampoo. The scent of cedar and nutmeg. The distant fragrance of citrus and coal tar and petrichor. It had mixed seamlessly with Ulfat’s perfume of pomegranate and jasmine and yet dominated the fainter scents somehow. 

Or maybe that was just Hamza’s sadistic brain torturing him per se. 

Chaudhary Aslam’s screams, the loud sounds of gunfire, crashing wheels against the hot tar of the road, the tang of metal and blood and dust raining heavily on Hamza’s tongue. His leg muscles screaming, men shouting and Rehman Dakait choking on his own blood. 

The hand which had trembled so violently while it had aimed at the Gangster King of Lyari. 

The sneer on the white clad SP’s ugly leering face. 

The feel of Rehman’s blood spilling hot and slippery beneath Hamza’s desperate press of quivering hands. 

Rehman’s face had fractured for a split second. The infuriated fuelling rage on his white blood stained sooty face had suddenly given way to a horrifying stilted betrayed grief. His usually rock solid aim had wavered, his impeccable reflexes drowning under the press of an inexplicable resignation. 

And that was all it had taken. 

Hamza’s hands had shaken. The heated barrel had almost slid off aim at the last second and had hit a tree beside. But he had steadied it in the next moment, his old training resurfacing in  tandem with the primal urge for survival every creature has. 

The way Rehman’s body had jerked back, a thick viscous red bursting out from his abdomen, making him drop his own gun and stagger back a few steps to cater to momentum, hands coming to clutch his stomach, had almost made Hamza throw up on his own shoes. 

But it had been the second shot which had shaken him up the most. 

The entire forest had trembled with the force of it. 

Rehman’s face had lost whatever color had been left, his arms swinging back in a tragic arc as he had dropped back with a grunt, the projectile of the bullet slamming into his chest with virulent rage. 

“NO!”

Hamza didn’t even remember when he had dropped his own revolver, covered the distance separating him from the supine man and had dropped on his knees beside him. His hands had automatically pressed on Rehman’s chest, on the weeping wound gushing out all of the blood remaining inside his heart. 

There had been so much blood. The ground had been soaked with it. Hamza covered completely. The air was so thick with it that it had felt like the taste had settled permanently on the younger man’s tongue. 

Rehman’s mouth had been half open, blood trickling from the corner, almost like the shock had paralyzed him to the ache of the bullets inside his heaving body. His eyes - cloudy, bereft of that brilliant cunning intelligence, that sharp clear gaze completely - wide on that white as a sheet face. 

A strand of his usually neatly gelled back hair, now completely free of product, had fallen almost gently over his forehead. 

The gut wound had been sluggish as it had supposed to have been. 

But the second bullet had ripped through Rehman’s sternum savagely. 

“No! No.. no no NO! What have you done!”, he had turned and screamed at Aslam who had been limping towards them, dragging his rifle with him slowly. 

“What needed to be done. Or did you forget your mission, Baloch?”, the SP had spat at him unrepentant, his face a repulsive display of absolute glee. 

Raw unrestrained panic had overridden every sense of judgement. Every single thought he had nursed jealously, bitter and poisonous in his mind for years had flown right off, at the clear, inanimate yet imminent face of certain death.

Rehman’s breaths had weakened almost to a negligible degree. 

“No.. no please…please.. Not like this…I can’t.. Oh God, I can’t—”

Hamza had pleaded to whoever would care to listen, to fate, to destiny, to the Gods who had stopped listening to him a long time ago, his hand sliding off Rehman, with every excruciating struggle of keeping the rapidly growing pool inside the broken gaping chasm which the latter’s chest had become. 

“The doctors were saying Abbu might not wake up ever again”, Faizal’s shaking words brought Hamza back to the present, back to that stark white hospital corridor and the endless waiting. 

“I am scared Bhaiyya. Will Abbu go to Naeem bhaiyya now? But then I will never be able to see him again! He can’t go! I..”

“Hush hush..little one. Your Abbu is a very strong man. If anyone can defeat death, it will be him. Have faith…”

The words felt rehearsed in his mouth. Foreign. Empty. 

Rotten. 

“Faizal! What are you doi— Oh my god! Hamza bhai! You are bleeding! We need a nurse here! Right now!”

Meher. 

She was kneeling in front of Hamza, hands hovering uselessly in front. Her beautiful face, ever glowing with hidden mirth looked like an ashen canvas. Those vibrant grey eyes always twinkling with mischief were swollen and rimmed with an unforgiving red. 

She looked wrong. 

It was all wrong. 

Meher Baloch was supposed to be bubbly and cheery and make everyone around her laugh helplessly. She was supposed to snip at her husband and joke with Hamza and Faizal and jump around like an energetic firefly. 

“Ye bacchi ekdin phurr karke udd hi jaegi, dekhna—”

Rehman’s voice had been brimming with both his characteristic exasperation and then again with enough fondness to fill the vacuum of space itself while Meher had bustled around him one late afternoon, laughter ringing clear in the Baloch mansion. 

It felt like a different lifetime. 

When everything had been golden and good. Warm and loving. 

When Hamza could forget his cold reality and exist in the space created for him by the people who had taken him in with such tenderness that it had been overwhelming to say the least. 

Instead Meher looked like someone had hollowed her out with the blunt edge of a butter knife. Carelessly and cruelly. Her silky black hair fell limp in a hastily tied braid, a few strands free, not a hint of that perennial delight visible on her face. 

She took Faizal from Hamza with heart breaking care. 

“Bhai, aapko bohot chot lgi hain, marampatti ho jaane ke baad, ghar chale jaana. Yalina has called me at least ten times by now. Uzair will be here in a moment”, she said. 

“I can’t Meher Bi.. I have to— I need to know. I can’t..”, Hamza’s throat dried up as Meher’s tired eyes welled up with unshed tears, yet again. 

“The doctors said it will take at least a few more hours. They had to….”, her voice broke, she tightened her hold on her nephew, almost as if to shield him from the rest of her words, “they had to transfuse another batch and the blood count is still too low…”. 

She closed her eyes for a moment, straightened up and steadied with a strength that was awe inspiring to say the least. 

Hamza had always admired Meher. 

Uzair’s wife of three years and a lawyer of great repute in the city. 

It had been a whirlwind romance straight out of a teenager’s favourite fantasy book for Uzair Baloch and Meher Zarvari. Hamza had never seen Uzair behave so erratically before than he had in Meher’s presence. 

They had clashed like sword blades. And along the way the edges had dulled till the war had turned into a playful duel. 

Then one evening, Uzair had come to the Baloch house, rosy cheeked and bright eyed, smelling of sweet sharbat and frangipanis, collars suspiciously unmade and pulled up and Hamza and the boys had burst into laughter. 

Rehman had come running out to witness the commotion. 

He had taken one look at his red faced younger cousin and had sighed like a great old lion, then looked upwards as if begging for strength and had gone back inside to call up old man Zarvari. 

Meher had fit into their group like she had been specifically made for it. 

Her words sharp enough to cut steel intrigued Rehman enough that they could be often found bantering with such visceral fervour that it would have left anyone else bleeding. Ulfat had taken one look at a five foot one Meher struggling to put Uzair in a headlock and had promptly imprinted on her like a mama duck. 

“That one is mine”, she had informed everyone pointing at a visibly confused Meher and walked away. 

Rehman had just sighed again. 

Hamza had befriended Meher with an ease that had been almost astounding to behold. She was almost his age, only a year younger and went along with him like a house on fire. Almost literally. If there was a fire somewhere in the house, it most probably was the result of something Meher and Hamza had cooked up. 

Always ready to defend Hamza to Rehman and Uzair, trying to unsuccessfully steal Ulfat’s world famous kheer from the kitchens, teaching Faizal to spy on his parents so they could get out of the house for impromptu parties - there was nothing they hadn’t been able to achieve together. 

And here she was, brilliant and beautiful Meher, reduced to a husk of a woman waiting for a news which seemed capable of either making or breaking her. 

All because of him. 

Because despite her playful verbal spats with Rehman, Meher loved her brother in law with a fiery devotion that only a rambunctious daughter can for a father. 

Meher’s relationship with her own father had been a cool estranged familial bond made due to blood. Her father didn’t care for his daughter’s outrageous boldness and Meher had never received the unconditional love that a girl wants from her parents. 

So when Rehman had extended his quiet protective tendencies and silent affection to his little brother’s wife, Meher had soaked it all up like a starving sponge. 

Hamza wanted to curl up into a ball and become invisible. 

But it was impossible with the nurses bustling around him and Meher seated opposite on the waiting chair, Fazial wrapped tightly in her arms, her sky blue dupatta enveloping the kid like a shield of armour. 

Hamza hadn’t even noticed when Uzair had come stumbling through the corridor like a man functioning on nothing but empty air and collapsed beside his wife. His face was a travesty written in barely held grief, fury and a messy agony. 

Uzair Baloch was a simple man. Whatever was in his heart would be clearly visible on his face. And it was evident enough from the dark circles under his reddened eyes that he had not slept the entire night. 

Maybe he was still swamped from managing everything from the nervous gang members to the hassled politicians to the frenzied media. 

Hamza hadn’t even thought about the world collapsing outside the hospital. 

The truth was, he could care less.  

“What a charming sight!”

Hamza stood up immediately, inescapable rage and a small spark of fear darkening his now cleaned face as the new presence in the empty hallway made the hair at the back of his neck stand up. 

How dare he! This greedy manipulative swine!

SP Chaudhary Aslam came almost swaggering inside, two policemen trailing behind their boss, faces twisted in ugly mirth. Hamza’s fists had been itching since the moment Aslam had fired the second bullet. 

He was right on Aslam’s face before he could come close to Meher and Faizal. 

“You shouldn’t have come here”. 

Donga and Basheer, who had been kept on guard, were nowhere in sight. The bastard had most probably arrested them or had them restrained somehow. 

Aslam laughed raucously, his eyes glinting dangerously as he saw Hamza from his toes till up his roots, like he was searching for some invisible blot on him. 

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. I am part of the LTF which is working with the Karachi Police. I need to get statements regarding today’s events.”

“You godforsaken asshole! How fucking dare you! You shot my brother, you blathering, simpering weasel! I will rip your limbs apart with my bare fucking hands—”, 

Uzair had launched himself right at Aslam and would have actually gone through with his claims had it not been for Meher who had left a shocked awakened Fazail to grab her husband’s massive six foot four body. Still she hadn’t been able to get his hands off the SP’s throat. 

“Uzair let him go! It will only make his job easier. Leave! Hamza!”

Hamza immediately understood what Meher was trying to say. In his current mental state, Uzair had gone berserk, completely forgetting how easily Aslam can arrest him on the pretext of assaulting an on duty officer and throw him in jail, or God forbid, try to kill him too. 

“Uzair! Chod! Goddamnit!”

But it was easier said than done. The two policemen accompanying Aslam were also trying to pull the two men apart along with Hamza but to no avail. 

Uzair’s monstrous hold on Aslam’s throat was a dead weight which was nearly impossible to break. Hamza could see the SP’s eyes bulging out, his face turning an alarming shade of bruised purple. 

He would strangle the man to death. 

Hamza wouldn’t lie, it was immensely satisfying to watch, as that had been all he wanted to do since that ill fated day he had met the older man. 

But right now, the consequences would be too great to let Aslam die. At least he had to wait till he could reveal his own part in all of this and Uzair could strangle him to death too. 

It would honestly be a relief. 

Anything else other than this choking suffocating agony lighting a fire inside Hamza’s soul will be a relief. 

Yalina’s pretty face swam in front of his eyes and grief struck him mercilessly across the face like a stinging slap. 

“Uzair! Let him go this instant! And that is an order!”

The voice cut through the commotion like a whip splitting the air open with a resounding crack. The sheer power behind the voice made Uzair drop Aslam immediately. Or maybe it was the long ingrained instinct inside him to obey that voice no matter what. 

Exactly like he followed his brother’s orders. 

Aslam choked and gasped, heaving precious air back in his burning lungs, no doubt. 

Ulfat Baloch was a vision in pearl pink, her long hair tied into a messy bun, some strands falling in almost artful curls framing her chiselled face. 

The color complimented her milk white skin like a sheer satin silk on cream. She was a lotus blooming in the filth. Her presence was so starkly different to the world around her that it had always felt oddly otherworldly to Hamza. 

She walked up to them, her gait lionine, exactly matching her husband’s notoriously arresting walk, eyes dried and crystal sharp. She didn’t demand the deference which automatically suffused in the otherwise pulsating surrounding. 

She commanded it. 

Her face was totally dry and perfectly blank. No hint of an expected anguish or even the aftermath of it was visible on her expression, unlike the rest of them. She moved and the very air in the corridor seemed to make space for her simultaneously. 

It shouldn’t have come across as a surprise to Hamza. 

Ulfat had always baffled him with the sheer strength she hid under delicate hands and luminous eyes. She was the soft light of the oncoming dawn in contrast to Rehman who was the darkest shade of the night. She reared and nurtured while her husband slaughtered and killed. 

And yet they were forged from the same fires. Made of the same steel. Housed the same power and pain and loved with the same violent ferocity which could put the very Gods to shame. 

Ulfat Baloch was an unbending wall, her will equal to starlight and she guided Rehman Dakait and his world like a sun does to the sunflowers. 

SP Aslam and his lackeys were nothing in front of her. 

The policemen immediately stepped aside to let her through, almost as if in a trance themselves. She passed Aslam’s bent form, caustically uncaring about his condition and came and stood turning with her back to Uzair. And to the rest of them. Facing the LTF officers unperturbed. 

Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, her spine ramrod straight and her feet placed with a span of distance perfect for shooting a long range target. She didn’t say a word, didn’t shout or scream or accuse or allege. 

She just stood. 

Eyes hard and empty. 

A sentinel. A guardian. A queen. 

A lioness protecting her pride. 

A mother standing like an impregnable wall in front of her children. 

Hamza could see Rehman in her at that moment. That same fierce protective fire burning in her veins like a hurricane. At that moment, nothing would pass through her and reach any of them. Not words nor bullets. 

And certainly not SP Chaudhary Aslam and his gang. 

Aslam may have realised that as well as he stared at the woman in front. 

“You want a statement? Here it is. Write it down. My husband was returning from a political event with his convoy when he was ambushed by the LTF. He was hunted and shot twice and is now battling for his life behind those doors while the officer who did all of this is standing in front of his wife and family and laughing at their faces.”

Her voice was sharp and tore into Hamza like a barrage of venomous arrows. 

The statement was near perfect except for one tiny detail. A detail that would break Ulfat’s sturdy heart harder than seeing her husband bloodied and fighting for his life ever could.

Aslam as if on cue laughed raspily. Uzair’s fingers had dug into his throat in violent bruises.

“Nice story Ulfat Bibi. Lets see what the media spins out of this. Don’t you worry, I will make sure the perpetrators of his heinous crime are caught post haste—”, his sneering words were almost spat on Ulfat’s face. 

Uzair had almost leaped across and caught Aslam by the throat again but Meher had caught him successfully this time, her eyes razor sharp, revulsion pulsating beneath them as she glared at the Head of the LTF. 

“Get out SP sahab and don’t test a lioness protecting her cubs. She will tear your throat out with her teeth before you can manage to even blink.”

The truth in Ulfat’s voice, more than the ice, made Aslam take a step back even as he smirked at her. 

“Maybe look in your backyard once in a while, Marium-Uz-Zamani. Spiders have been known to eat their mothers after being fed.”

Hamza swallowed the blood filling his mouth with how hard he had bit his tongue. Aslam’s beady eyes had flashed upon him once before he had turned and stormed out, his boys practically fleeing behind their master. 

“Uzair, get Donga and Basheer and secure the house. Meher, take Faizal back. He is exhausted as it is. And Hamza—”

Ulfat had turned to look at him finally, orders slipping past her lips as naturally as it came from Rehman, the exhaustion of holding onto an unbreakable mask finally wearing down her defenses low enough for the agony to peek through. 

But her words stopped in their tracks when her eyes fell on Hamza properly. 

He must really be looking like a sight. 

“Ya Allah, ye kya haal banake rakhha hain, baccha? Gaadi kitni buri tareeke se crash hui thi? Doctor dikhaya kya? Chot toh bandaged hain… dard ho raha hain kahi zyadaa tumhe?”

Ulfat’s gentle hands caressed the wounds on his face and his neck with her usual maternal tenderness. Hamza could feel his heart literally thumping outside his ribcage in a mad scramble to explode, if only that would stop this sickening feeling from erupting out.

He wanted to scrub a layer of his skin off. 

Ulfat was still examining him with concerned eyes. 

Longing hit Hamza so hard it almost made him dizzy. The longing of feeling his mother’s touch, skittering over his forehead in affectionate approval, cupping his face. Memories sparked clear in his muddled mind. 

Memories which then transformed into the ones he had formed in the Baloch household. 

And with it, it brought such an acute flood of shame that it made his eyes sting. 

Hamza had just entered the living room. 

Uzair had taken one look at him and burst out in unashamed laughter. He was laughing so hard he had almost taken a tumble off the chair. 

Rehman, startled out of his inspection of an old file in his hand, had looked up in shock. His piercing eyes peered from above the reading glasses Hamza had never seen the so monikered Sher-E-Baloch wear before and his lips pressed in a line Hamza knew was from an effort of holding back his own amusement for the sake of looking dignified. 

Yet his eyes always gave him away. Or rather the crows feet crinkling just that way, trying to hide behind the glasses yet starkly visible under the golden lighting of the room, spread like mirth on his chiselled face. 

“Yes okay, I know I look funny but—-”, he had begun only for Uzair to start wheezing, tears rolling down his handsome face in tandem. 

“Oh God.. you.. Hehe.. you look like… a baboon who has gotten an electric shock!”, as if picturing his own statement, Uzair fell into another burst of laughter on his own. 

“I know! I tried everything! That stupid Donga made the jeep go through a fucking mountain of sand bags and then the wind picked up and now my hair is a mess.”

Hamza knew he was pouting but he couldn’t help it. His hair had tangled so hard and had been filled with such grit from the sand that try as he might, he could do nothing but tear it all out. 

“Maybe try getting a hair cut?”, Rehman suggested finally when he was sure he could speak without bursting into laughter like his cousin who was still red faced and wheezing. 

“And get murdered by Yalina. No thanks.”

“Your girlfriend is five foot and twenty.”

“You are married Bhai.”

“Touche. Fair point.”

Ulfat as if being magically summoned had just entered the room, “Is someone dying here, who is wheezing like an out of breath seal—”, stopped short and stared at Hamza. 

“Hamza. You look like a cartoon character. On drugs.”

“Thank you, Bhabi.”

Uzair was definitely dying at this point. Rehman had taken pity on him finally and was patting his back as if that would help bring the air back inside his lungs. Ulfat smiled and beckoned him with a gentle hand. 

“Come with me. I’ll straighten it out—”

“Don’t cut it! I—”

“I know baba. Yalina will murder me along with you if I do that. And why should I cut such beautiful hair? Don’t worry. You’ll be back to your handsome self in just a few minutes.”

Hamza had blushed furiously, muttering nonsense under his breath and followed behind Ulfat like an obedient duckling leaving his traitorous friend still croaking on the couch, wishing Uzair would die already. 

“Sit here”, Ulfat had made him sit on the ground while she sat on the chair in the dining room.

She had already brought some things from the kitchen. It was a small bottle of oil, what appeared to be water, another expensive looking cosmetic bottle, a large toothed and a fine toothed comb. 

Thus began the operation. 

Hamza had thought it would be torture, getting his hair pulled this way and that but nothing of that sort happened. Instead he almost fell asleep with Ulfat’s gentle fingers softly untangling his messy stubborn locks, using oil and water almost simultaneously. 

He was blinking awake when the comb untangled the bigger knots and Ulfat used the fine toothed comb to brush his now blissfully free hair more gently than was strictly necessary. Then she poured something incredibly expensive smelling on her hand and then massaged it on the lower half of his hair expertly. 

“There.. All done.”

Hamza looked at the hand mirror Ulfat held in front of him and almost jumped up in shock. His hair had never looked this good before. It was bouncy and shiny and almost felt like silk along his fingers. 

He also saw Rehman leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, spectacles still perched unassuming on his aquiline nose, in the reflection of the mirror. 

The fond affection in his usually blazing eyes was unmistakable and at first Hamza thought it had been directed towards Ulfat. But Rehman removed his gaze the moment Hamza straightened, coming inside almost casually, as if he had just entered and knew immediately. 

He had been looking at Hamza. 

Warmth spread uninvited inside him. 

Ulfat’s hand on his shoulder was a steady blooming anchor. 

“You always did want daughters. It's all coming out now”, Rehman joked teasingly. 

Hamza pouted and Ulfat laughed mellifluous. 

“Bhai…”, Hamza groaned but Rehman didn’t respond. He only patted his head with one scarred heavy hand, taking the opportunity to run his long fingers through his hair once. 

It made Hamza’s eyes sting for no good reason. 

“What makes you think I don’t have daughters? I have two very beautiful ones, okay”, Ulfat said nonchalantly. Rehman raised a perplexed eyebrow. 

“Meher and Yalina. You should see them squabbling over my dresses, jewellery, books, food and absolutely anything they can think of.”

“Hey!”

Meher’s offended voice filtered through from somewhere inside but was almost lost in Rehman's bark of laughter. 

“Yes. Those two remind me well enough, that sometimes, it is good that all your wishes don’t come true.”

“Double Hey!”, Meher yelled again.  

Hamza joined in their laughter now, the sounds of home, familiarity and love weaving around him in a tight warm embrace. 

“I am fine Bhabi.. It looks worse than it is. I just..”, Hamza began, his voice thick and hesitant only for Ulfat to sway for a moment. 

“Bhabi!”, terror lashed anew in his heart and he steadied her with gentle hands. 

“Sorry. My head spun for a moment. I am fine.. Its just that, I realised most of that blood on your shirt is probably Rehman’s…”

Ulfat’s voice broke and for a second her mask cracked and a wife peeked through a queen’s body. Hamza’s guilt was a living breathing fire dragon inside his chest. 

“Yes!”, he wanted to scream, “Yes it is your husband’s blood. The blood I spilled. The blood I was allowed to spill because he trusted me enough not to— I am a cad and a destitute ingrate and you should despise me!”

But he stayed mum, watching Ulfat pull herself together through sheer will and stand up again, spine slightly bent under the weight of her husband’s absence but holding the weight of her own body. 

The night was long and hadn’t ended yet. 

Hamza only wished someone would take mercy on him and knock him out already. 

_____________________

It was almost dawn when the surgeons found the time to breathe and meet them. 

Hamza stood just a little apart. 

“He is going to live. Allah be praised but I have never seen another man fight like that.”

Ulfat broke quietly. Almost collapsing on the ground, steadied only by Uzair’s arms around her. The younger Baloch cousin had refused to leave them here alone. He, in a completely shocking move, caught the surgeon’s hand and pressed his eyes to it in overwhelming gratitude. 

“You don’t know what you have done, Doctor Sahab. You have saved us all. My brother is the beating heart of our family. Without him, we would have all keeled over like dried leaves scattered by the wind.”

His words rang wobbly but impossibly, painfully true and who knew it better than Hamza. 

The surgeon shook his head, a tired smile breaking on his lined face. 

“It was my duty sir. I am only glad I could service the family that has serviced the town for so long. Mind you, it will be a long and painful road to recovery but your brother is the most willful stubborn man I have ever gotten on my table. He will recover. Slowly but surely.”

Ulfat straightened up from her slouch in Uzair’s arms, wiped the corner of her eyes tremulously and clutched her dupatta tight in shaking hands, 

“Can we see him Doctor. Please… just one glance. We won’t disturb him..”

The surgeon nodded. 

“It would be cruel to refuse you Ulfat Bibi, but be careful. Just five minutes and try not to touch him. Too much jostling might rip the stitches.”

Ulfat nodded and walked shakily towards the ICU. 

“Bhai, main chalta hoon phir”, Hamza whispered as Uzair shook slightly where he stood. 

“Yes yes.. I.. you don’t want to see him? I guess we can see through the glass. I don’t want to disturb Bhabi but I am sure she wont mind us taking one look”

Uzair practically dragged Hamza through the corridor. The ICU felt like the gaping jaw of the gates of Hell and the staircase of Heaven at the same time. The storm inside Hamza had stopped but the wreckage it had left behind was immense. 

Does he even deserve to lay his eyes on him?

The door creaked open gently and Hamza and Uzair stepped in. Till the threshold at least. 

Hamza heard Uzair’s faint hitch of breath and could commiserate well enough with the sentiment. 

Rehman looked dead. 

The hospital bed and the various wires attached to his lean frame had drowned him. His face was lax in medically induced sleep, the ever present frown lines on his severe expression had been smoothened away by unconsciousness. 

His usually effervescent face was as pale as the white sheets he was laying over. 

He looked unnervingly small. 

Fragile and swallowed by the world. 

Ulfat was kneeling by his bed, her face pressed into an IV infused hand, the small hitches of her breaths signified her suppressed sobs.

Hamza turned almost violently and stumbled out. His eyes were so blurred he could barely see anything, his heart was hammering so hard he could barely hear Uzair through the incessant ringing in his ears, his chest so tight that he could barely breathe. 

He had almost killed Rehman. 

Murdered the man who had given him a family, sheltered him from the loneliness and dangers of an empty life on the streets, almost kept him clutched to his chest. And he had turned around and stabbed him right there. 

When the blood had been spreading too fast and Hamza had not known what else to do Rehman had raised his fingers to his cheek. 

His hand shaking so violently, it had been a sacrilege. Hamza had expected fury, disbelief, betrayed grief, a last attempt to choke him but Rehman had only caressed the bridge of his cheekbone, eyes horrifyingly soft and resigned. 

“Hamza…”

He had whispered, the voice fractured under the massive boulder of betrayal yet the fondness had been too great, the affection too big, the love too deep for it to have been sucked dry, even through the gut wrenching treachery.  

“No.. Bhai.. no.. I am sorry.. I am.. I didn’t.. This was not supposed to happen. Not like this.. This was.. Please.. Bhai..”, Hamza had cried, his tears dropping on Rehman’s face like a rueful shower. 

Rehman’s hand had dropped then, his eyes shutting close. 

The following stillness had been strangling and had ripped a scream out of his throat finally. Aslam might have said something but it had been lost in the sheer rage of his grief. 

Hamza had buried his face in Rehman Dakait’s cold throat and howled like a child. It had been an ugly, unrestrained, almost a violent display of raw panicked grief and denial. 

A beat of him struggling through his tears and another wail trying to tear out of his chest and Hamza had felt the weak press of a pulse against his wet cheek. 

Death had not claimed his prize yet. 

Maybe the Gods weren’t as deaf as Hamza had thought. 

“Hamza! For God’s sake! Where are you? Uzair Bhaiyya told me not to go out so I stayed put. He said something about work.. You weren’t even picking up my phone. I called Meher so many times, I am sure she would eat my head the next time I see her and— Hamza, say something.”

Yalina’s voice was like a cool shower after a walk through the desert. Hamza’s hand trembled where the mobile was held to one ear. He wanted nothing more than to hold her right now. Her smaller body tucked close to his chest where he could feel her heart beat against him. 

He needed to feel alive. He needed to feel a person breathe against him. 

He needed his wife so damned much it made him want to scream. 

“Hello? Hamza meri awaz aa rhi hain kya? Kahaan ho..”

“Yalina.. Main aa raha hun. Wait for me a little more? I am coming—”, he cut the call before she could reply. 

The sun wasn’t out yet. Even the birds seemed afraid to start singing. He could still hear the heart monitor’s grating sound in his mind, Rehman’s raspy breathing as his heart stopped, his voice calling out to a son who had driven a knife through his back uncaringly and twisted it for good measure and left him bleeding on the ground. 

Hamza, having just come out of the hospital, ran. The streets of Lyari empty in the darkness of the first hour of dawn was a backdrop of despair mirroring his own heart perfectly. 

______________________

Hamza was lying awake, staring at the ceiling fan rotating hypnotizingly abovehead. Yalina was sleeping contentedly curled on top of his chest, her smaller body rising up and down with each breath. 

It would have been adorable if the violent nauseating guilt building within him hadn’t tossed his insides around like a raft caught in a thunderstorm. 

Memories were encroaching on his mind in a mesh of bittersweet pain. 

He had tried to tell himself that it was deserved. The deceit, necessary. The betrayal, justified. But his heart rebelled so hard against his mind that it made him feel sick to his core. 

When he had agreed to the mission, he had expected Rehman Dakait to be exactly how everyone knew him to be - a ruthless merciless bloodthirsty warlord who would sell his firstborn for a better deal.

He was supposed to have infiltrated the gang, gotten close to their all powerful leader and manipulated him to his own ruin. A violent death had been just an added bonus.

He should’ve known better than to have trusted SP Chaudhary Aslam and his poisonously sweet manipulative words. 

But he also shouldn’t have gotten attached. 

That was a cardinal mistake for a mole. 

But who would’ve thought how his life, after coming in close proximity to the Balochi mafia, would have altered so dramatically from what he had expected.  

Rehman Dakait had been an enigma. A complete disaster for a pattern analyst. A violently unpredictable man. He had thrown all of Hamza’s carefully crafted notions about him into the wind with that Devilish charm and that cigarette dangling smirk with reckless abandon. 

Yes, the man was dangerous. Yes he was also a bloodthirsty psychopath. 

But what the cautiously maintained files of the ISI hadn’t mentioned was that he was also a protector. The people of Lyari feared him because of his absolute control over the city but they also respected him because he did what no politician or policeman had ever done for them. 

He cleared the streets. Opened hospitals and schools and wellness centers. He stopped property dealers from cheating the poor people out of their houses. He had hammered down on petty crime like never seen before. 

He helped anyone who would throw their hands in front of him regardless of blood, ethnicity and origins. 

And the thing which had taken Hamza totally aback was that he cared. 

The Bastard King of Lyari and the chosen King of the Balochs - he actually cared. 

Cared almost too much. 

He cared about the children studying in the schools he built. He cared about the people getting free treatment in his built hospitals. He cared about his family. He even cared about the boys in his gang. 

He cared so much that it had ultimately turned out to be the architect of his own ruin. 

No one had told Hamza about the dangers of being cared for by a man who could very well crush you beneath his boot like you were nothing but an insignificant insect. 

No one had warned him about how it would feel to have Rehman Dakait’s large hand on top of his head. Grounding, steady, almost a touch playful but guided, directing, protective and most importantly, loved. 

He had taken one look at Hamza and decided that he would be part of his family. 

It had not happened all at once. It had been a slow measured process. But it had been inevitable. He had believed Rehman to be exactly like Aslam had told him. 

Cold and aloof. And that is how he had been at first. 

After Naieem’s death, he had worked himself to his bones. 

At first Hamza had thought the man simply hadn’t cared enough. It had been a sobering chilling thought. A man who could murder his own mother. Why would he care about his son?

But then once Hamza had to come late at night to the Baloch mansion to get a file, Uzair had predictably forgotten about it and he had passed by a room searching for it and had almost given himself whiplash. 

Rehman had been sitting on the bed, the usually proud line of his back bowed like a mountain had been kept on top of him, his hands were clutching what could have been a scrap of fabric, or an infant’s clothes. 

He was trembling. His breathing was uneven and heavy. Silent convulsions wracking his powerful frame almost mercilessly. 

Hamza had walked out discreetly and almost in a trance. 

That had been the first crack in his armour and after that it had just slowly and steadily unravelled till he had no shield left to cover his exposed vulnerable parts. 

He remembered that one night he had been raging sick.  

Hamza had felt the first stirrings of fever in the morning. But it had been light enough to ignore. By midday, he had cursed himself thoroughly. The fever had been slowly climbing till he could hear nothing but his own heart beat and the sun overhead was giving him a migraine. 

Nausea and pain had covered him head to toe and he was sure he was seeing three copies of Uzair as the latter kept striding in front with his too-long legs. 

“Are you feeling quite alright?”, the ever vigilant Donga had asked and Hamza had nodded. 

A mere fever won’t stop him from doing his work. 

By evening, he was almost delirious with it and pretty sure by the way Rehman was looking at him, looking pretty shitty as well. It had been one year he had worked in the gang and Rehman had spoken directly to him exactly six times. 

And one time had resulted in Babu Dakait’s unfortunate end and such a violent vengeance that it would go down in the history of Pakistan as one of the most gruesome public executions possible.

“Hamza, you look like one can boil an egg on your head”, Rehman had drawled almost bored, finally bringing Uzair’s attention to him. 

“I am fine, Bhai. Just a flush—”, and he staggered only to be caught by the hand in Rehman’s vice-like grip. God but the man was deceptively strong. 

“Yeah, no. I will be the judge of that. Sit down before you fall down, idiot.”

Hamza doesn’t remember much after that, except faint voices and oddly gentle touches. One moment of clarity had been a mortifying second, his fever had spiked so high he had almost called for his father. His absent philandering father who was most probably dead in a ditch somewhere. 

The touch on his forehead had suddenly softened impossibly. 

Then fingers had gone through his sweat soaked curls almost affectionately and he doesn’t recall much of anything else except a very faint whisper of something like ‘idiot’. 

The next morning had brought with it Uzair and Donga’s gentle teasing, the most delicious khichdi he had ever tasted and an off day in what had felt like forever. 

Rehman hadn’t come by but the next morning he said smirked at him when he had been present in the meeting, bright eyed and bushy tailed. 

He remembered long nights of work, watching Rehman command a room by his mere presence, his sharp business acumen untangling the messy ropes of a vast empire almost hilariously easily. 

He remembered his dumb questions being answered with an astounding amount of patience even if it usually was interspersed with an ‘idiot’ more often than not. 

But coming from Rehman, the word had always sounded more like an endearment than anything. 

Hamza had almost forgotten how good it felt being protected by someone else for a change. He had been alive for so long without any defenses, without anyone to even think about his safety in any situation. The Balochs, he had learnt, had protection woven in their souls. 

They always protected their own with an unforeseen ferocity. 

And to Hamza it was almost a surreal experience. 

Yet, even with their reputation, he had never heard of a gang leader protecting a lowly gang member who was not even his own blood at the cost of his own safety. 

Rehman had moved like a shadow demon. So impossibly fast that he had been almost invisible to the naked eye. 

Hamza had been so sure that the room was empty that he had not checked the upper level before entering. 

A rookie mistake. 

“Bhai, looks like they ran—”

His words had barely finished materializing when a gunshot had rung clear in the room. Hamza had by default braced for impact knowing he would be too slow to move in time but no bullet had hit him. 

Rehman looked at the slash made by the bullet across his left arm, almost with a bored intensity, as it hit the doorframe behind

“And to think I wore one of my better kurta’s today.” 

The attacker hadn’t been able to make a single noise before he had been taken down viciously fast. Rehman had barely flinched. Yet Hamza had felt the slight jerk like a kick to his own chest. He had still been standing gaping like a prized fool when Rehman had cuffed him upside his head like Hamza had seen him do to Uzair on many occasions. 

“How many times do I have to teach you fools to check the upper level before barging in like a rhinoceros. Idiot. You could have died.”

“Bhai..”

“What? Why are you standing like a statue? Woh behaya Javed khud toh chalke nhi aayega. Uthake laa, jaa!”

Later Hamza had approached Rehman cautiously. The latter had a bandage wrapped neatly around his left bicep. 

“Why did you step in front? Aapko lag gyi.. Agar thoda aur right me hota toh? Seene me lag jaati goli”, he tried keeping his voice steady but it wavered nonetheless. He couldn’t even attribute the shake to his acting. 

Rehman had looked him dead in the eye while answering as casually as if he were discussing the weather. 

“Main samne nhi aataa toh tujhe goli lag jaati. Aur seene pe hi lgti.”

“Toh lgne dete. Mera kya hain.. Ek aur mil jaega. Aapko kuch ho jataa toh?”

Rehman looked at him strangely for some seconds then abruptly turned away, picking up a tumbler for pouring the whiskey from the bottle kept at the table. 

“Ghar jaa Hamza. Bohot raat ho gyi hain. Uzair ko bhej dena jate waqt. Javed ka business sab ulat pulat hoke rakkha hain. I’ll have to straighten it.”

The non sequitur totally threw Hamza in a loop but what could he do. He turned and started to walk away. Rehman’s voice stopped him by the door. 

“Next time if you do something so colossally stupid I will let you get shot. Get that through your thick head. Itna baal ugaake rakhha hain, kuch buddhi ghussti bhi hain sir mein ke nhi kya pataa…”

Hamza had no idea when he had been integrated into the Dakait family. One day he was hauling arms into the back of trucks and the next day he was seated at the dinner table fielding a million questions from Faizal as Ulfat looked on indulgently. 

“You are so tall Hamza Bhaiyya!”, Faizal had said - his childish curiosity softening Hamza’s heart. 

“Yes. You will also get tall if you eat your vegetables”, he had said trying to sound sagely. 

“Chachu is tall too.”

Uzair had beamed as if he had been personally rewarded by the President, “Haan, tere Hamza bhaiyya se bhi zyadaa lamba hun. I used to eat all my veggies”. Hamza had given him the stink eye. 

“Baba, you are not as tall as them. Did you not eat all your vegetables?”, Faizal asked innocently enough. 

Rehman, who had been eating while checking something on his mobile, looked up to stare at his youngest, unimpressed. 

Ulfat had giggled helplessly before she could stop herself. Rehman had given her such a heated look that it had made Hamza blush and stare at his plate, forgetting his own delight at Faizal’s question. 

“Beta, God balances out His gifts equally between people. When He asked me what I wanted, I took intelligence from his offerings compensating for my height. Your chachas on the other hand seem to have precious little in that department.”

“Bhai! Come on—”, Uzair’s grumbling was lost in Hamza’s helpless snorting, Ulfat’s pearlescent laughter and Faizal’s childish giggles. 

It was only later that Hamza had realised that Rehman had addressed him as Faizal’s uncle as well. His name had come in the same line as Uzair’s and no one had seemed surprised at that. 

He had felt warm for days after. 

The memories were like a bioscope of choice reels, running in front of Hamza’s sleep deprived eyes like an incessant merciless barrage. It was a torture as much as a relief if only temporary. 

Hamza remembered that evening as clear as if it had happened just yesterday. 

He had messed up big time. He knew he was biting off more than he could chew. SP Aslam had been hankering down on him for some time and he had to give the other man something. So he had sacrificed a big shipment for some brownie points with the LTF head. 

But the ensuing mess it had created in Rehman’s plans had made the latter mercurial with volcanic fury. The Baloch leader had ripped them all to literal shreds. It had been a one sided verbal massacre. 

The ability Rehman Dakait had, to make anyone feel miniscule in comparison to him despite their actual size, should be studied in criminology classes. 

Hamza was sure at one point of time, Donga had been this close to actual tears. 

Hamza and Uzair hadn’t been spared from their leader’s wrath any more than the rest. They were his left and right arms, literally, his top lieutenants and thus most of the accountability always fell on their shoulders. 

And thus, so did the ensuing blame. 

“I swear to God, if you hadn’t been my brother, I would have slit you nose to navel and left you to bleed somewhere!”, Rehman had thundered and Hamza had restrained himself from actually cowering in the face of such unadulterated rage. 

“Now get out of my sight you fatherless bastard! Don’t show me your face before I can breathe without wanting to tear your worthless head off your shoulders.”

Hamza had actually felt Rehman’s unthinkingly cruel words being carved into his chest like a brand. Everyone in the gang knew about how his father had abandoned him and his mother and older brother to destitute poverty and fled with a woman half his age. 

It will always be a sore point in his life, no matter how young he was then and how older he would grow with time. 

He had practically fled from the throne room then, afraid that he might do something like try to punch Rehman or worse, burst into tears. 

He remembered hearing scratches of Uzair’s subdued unhappy tone. Something along the lines of, “shouldn’t have said that Bhai.. you know what happen…”.

Hamza had tuned it out and walked home, heart strangely twisted in tight coils. 

What did it matter what an illegitimate bastard child of a gangster said about him? People he actually cared about had said worse things to him. He didn’t care about what Rehman fucking Baloch thought of him. 

At this point Hamza wasn’t sure when he had started lying to himself.

It had been the middle of the night when Hamza had woken up abruptly from a relatively undisturbed sleep when he had felt a presence near his head. His survival instincts should have blared red at this point. An apex predator lounging almost soundlessly, so close to his bare vulnerable throat. 

But the body was a strangely intuitive learner. 

Hamza knew he wasn’t in any danger. 

In fact it was more a blanket of safety he had felt falling over him. 

And his olfactory senses had already alerted him to the identity of the shadow. That smell of expensive tobacco, old papers, petrichor and cedar spice. 

Rehman could be deceptively quiet when he wanted. Another reason that had made him such a deadly opponent. He was like a cobra hiding in the grass. Can lie still for hours before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. 

But right now, he was more like a lion watching his cub sleep. 

Odd but protective. 

The words from some hours ago came back to Hamza and he almost snapped at Rehman to get out and let him be miserable in peace. He held back his tongue though. 

“Uth gayaa?’, the words were gravelly soft. 

“Hmm”, Hamza replied equally low. 

The shadow shifted in the dark. An uncharacteristic nervous energy in his movement. Hamza kept lying still on the bed. Waiting. Trying to figure out what would happen next. It was in vain cause he couldn’t have predicted, Rehman actually sitting down at the edge of the bed, his hand hovering over Hamza’s head. 

It was almost like he was waiting for permission to touch him. 

Which was a ridiculous thought because why would Rehman Dakait need anyone’s permission to do anything. But his hand was still suspended in the air, close enough to touch but far enough to not as well. 

Hamza leaned against it slightly and Rehman finally placed it fully on top of his supine head. 

His fingers automatically started running through Hamza’s hair. It was like he knew the exact paths on his scalp that would make Hamza want to purr in satisfaction. It was humiliating. To be this exposed to someone else. 

Especially to a person who can wield your greatest weaknesses like his sharpest blades. 

But Hamza couldn’t deny that the ache which had taken root inside his chest had slowly lifted with each gentle caress on his head by that oh so familiar scarred hand. 

“Gussa hain abh bhi?”, Rehman’s words were soft and broke Hamza from his mini nap with a jolt. 

“Nhi.. I wasn’t angry”, he said truthfully. 

“You were upset”, Rehman said. A statement. Not a question. Hamza didn’t refute it. Knowing a lie will be caught anyway. 

A heavy sigh. 

“Zyaadaa bol gyaa main. Nhi bolna chaahiye thaa. Maaf kardein?”

Hamza caught the hand still caressing his head gently. 

“Aapko mujhse maafi maangne ki zaroorat nhi Bhai. Aap Bhai hain.. Daant sakte hain, haq hain aapka. Aur sahi hi toh kahan aapne. Bass uss baat ka saayaan mere zehn se utaar hi nhi rha. Woh.. mere Abbu dikhte kaise the, wahi yaad nhi aataa aajkal..”, Hamza tried chuckling but his voice broke. 

Rehman’s hand had stilled but only for a second, then it started moving again, not breaking a single rhythm which was comforting in its own right. 

“One who cannot appreciate what he has been given in life is not a man who is worth anyone’s pain.”

Rehman’s voice was a steady presence. A balm against the puss oozing laceration on Hamza’s chest. An injury so deep it had overshadowed his entire childhood. Or whatever had been left of it. 

But it was Rehman’s next words which Hamza now thinking retrospectively realised had ruined everything the young man had known in his entire life, to be. All his practised defenses had been torn down by a simple few words. 

“Aur maine galat kahaan tha. You can never be fatherless. Not as long as I am alive.”

The words curled like painful vines in Hamza’s chest wrenching a sudden mortifying sob from his lips and he turned immediately to hide his face, burying half his torso into Rehman’s lap. He clutched the worn out Pathani in tight desperate fists and convulsed silently. 

The motion of the hand inside his hair didn’t stop. 

Hamza didn't know when sleep had claimed him. And more importantly, he couldn’t be sure whether or not he had dreamt the dry press of cracked lips on his forehead.

Hamza felt fatigued tears roll down the sides of his face as the clock ticked to show midday. He was so tired he felt like he could sleep for a decade. Suddenly his phone rang, breaking his depressed musings cuttingly. 

He picked it up immediately, so that Yalina wasn’t disturbed. The poor woman had been awake for him waiting and tensed almost the entire night. 

No one had even told her about Rehman yet. 

She was almost like the baby of the family. Just before Faizal, if anything. It was evident Ulfat had tried to protect the girl she had started to love like her own, from the painful wait they had all suffered through the night. 

But Yalina was nothing if not a warrior and a firebrand in her own right. Hamza knew there would be hell to pay, once she did come to know about what had happened yesterday. 

Will she ever be able to forgive him for this betrayal?

What was even the point, when he himself could never be able to do so?

Uzair’s voice was refreshingly jubilant, “Hamze! Bhai uth gye! Jaldi aajaa. By the grace of Allah, he is awake. Come fast”, the call cut. 

Hamza stared up at the ceiling again. 

Time to face the music. 

The sun was beating down on the residents of Lyari, mercilessly. The day was sweltering and the dust of the foul smelling streets had covered everyone in a thin layer of scratchy refuse.

But Uzair Baloch seemed unperturbed.

His face, a mask of perfect eery calm, red splattered in a macabre tattoo on his left cheek and smeared across his forehead like a symbol of pride. His clothes were drenched in blood, his fingers stained so deep that it would probably never come out. There were bits of bone stuck in the unruly curls of his soiled hair.

He was a nightmare materialized in a demonic form.

The snivelling man being dragged by his collar at his heels, was still begging pathetically. His face was so brutally beat down that he was almost unrecognizable to most people. But anyone who has lived in Lyari for more than two months could identify him blindfolded.

Arshad Pappu whimpered in pain as Uzair dropped him carelessly when he reached the centre of the square.

"Please....please... leave me.. spa..re me. I didn't do anything!!!!", the disfigured gangster almost wailed in despair and terror.

Uzair's eyes flashed manically. Murder clear in his ice cold gaze. And for the first time his calm inanimate expression twisted in a horrifying parody of the usually jocular smiling handsome man that he was.

"Spare you?", he whispered once, brandished the butcher's blade. Almost caressing it's edge like a lover stroking his beloved's naked waist.

"Spare you!!!", Uzair shouted next, almost startling the assembling crowd jarringly. Basheer, Ismail and the boys were standing guard like sentinels, their blood soaked faces drawn tight and ghostly against the nervously teetering crowd.

He bend down and picked up his victim's collar again, forcing him to look at the ruthless fate waiting for him in Uzair's bloodshot eyes.

"Do you have any idea of what you have done???", he shook Arshad's collar violently.

A sudden hospital corridor. Hamza's tears and two bloods, dried and drying, clinging to every inch of both their skins. The struggle to keep his heart from literally exploding into pieces. The empty air in the senseless grief of the throng of strangers outside. The sirens of the police and the media channels prickling incessantly.

His brother's face messed up almost beyond recognition - they hadn't yet managed to clean the blood. The virulent tapestry of violent starbursts of bruises staring accusingly at Uzair from his limp frame. Whatever was visible of the skin unmarred by blood or any scarring and bruising had turned ashen.

The mortuary. The harsh hospital lights. The superimposed haunting ghost of his older nephew staring at him from the darkened corners of the room. Eyes so much like his father's, staring remorseful and blaming.

Rehman's hand falling limply from the steel slab they had kept him over. His oh so familiar fingers, long and loose, bereft. The ever present magnetic aura of his soul was gone. The heavy pressing weight of his person that had always felt like a protective blanket around Uzair had been rudely snatched away.

And the blizzard that had frozen him after had been merciless.

Suffocating, gagging and then wheezing in anguish, unable to let lose the scream trapped inside his throat. The pain choking him like barbed wires around his throat, his entire chest, squeezing the life out of him. Then staggering and almost falling over his older brother's dead body.

Hamza's arms stabling him somewhat, Basheer trying to lift him up from the ground where he had crumbled, finally managing to hold his weight and make his knees stop trembling under the dead weight of his broken spine.

Uzair had lifted himself up and clutched his brother's ice cold hand, hanging from the edge. He had tried pressing his own warmth into it with his face, his burning eyes, his quivering lips, but to no avail. Try as he might he couldn't will Rehman back to life.

His grief had been useless.

"Arshad Pappu...", Hamza had uttered desolate, his words a churning mantra in Uzair's ears, "they were waiting for us, Uzair. The SP and his dogs. Pappu couldn't even be bothered to show his face, that coward-"

Arshad Pappu - Finally, a direction for the tsunami of Uzair's rage and in turn his pain to follow.

First Arshad, then the SP and every last bit of that fiendish taskforce. Uzair would kill them all. He would tear their limbs off one by one and bleed them dry and then burn their husks on display for their families to see.

It had at least helped him brave through seeing his beloved sister in law, the very strength reflecting in Rehman's visage break down in front of his eyes, as she saw the hollowed out brutalized shell of the man who had once been her husband.

Ulfat hadn't exploded like they had expected, as she once had, on Naieem's death. She had seen Rehman's body, let out a single gasp, a whimper, her beautiful eyes had rolled up and she had simply fainted.

Uzair had caught her at the last moment, his broken chest splitting open a bit further on seeing the rest of whatever flickering of life was left, drain out of his sister in law's once vibrant gaze completely.

The light ever burning in her hazel orbs had gone out with a cruel flick.

For the next few days, as Ulfat lay listless and raging in the claws of a grief stricken fever, Uzair had prayed and prayed and prayed like he had never before. He had been certain at one point, seeing the doctors' helpless faces, that he would have to bury his sister in law with his brother too. He had roamed the silent halls of the house Rehman had made with his wife and his kids, like an unwanted spectre, begging any sort of reprieve from this endless chasm of darkness.

Feeding Faizal, carrying him to bed, shaking with him while they pretended to sleep, as Faizal curled up tight into his chest, trying to stop himself from bawling alongside his young nephew as he muttered tremulous, gentle but ultimately empty consolations in his soft hair.

Faizal smelled like Rehman.

The scent of petrichor and the faint whiff of rosewater - not the iron tang of rusted metal and gunpowder or that comforting fragrance of bitter tobacco and old papers.

Ulfat as usual defied all expectations and rose up, sweating, fever broken on the fifth day, eyes empty but clear. She had done all her raging, begging, bargaining and screaming in her fever driven delirium. She bundled up her crying son to herself and stared at Uzair. There was not a hint of that perennial warmth and love remaining in her eyes.

There was only a yawning darkness. Like a person forcibly returned from the grave. And a hint of newly awakened bloodlust.

"I want his head on a platter."

She had said. Calm. Unconcerned.

And Uzair knew he had lost his sister in law.

Rehman's Ulfat had died with her husband. This was just a phantom of her presence, holding on for her younger son's sake. A mother - not a person anymore.

Just a title.

Arshad's continuous snivelling brought Uzair back to the present. Back to the cloying scent of blood and the tangerine flavour of revenge sitting heavy on his leaden tongue.

"Do you have any idea what you have taken from me?", Uzair yelled again. He had to make this fool understand. He had to make someone understand.

The words had tied into unforgiving knots inside his aching chest. He has been hollowed out like a papaya skin whose insides have been scooped up completely.

"Tumne sirf mere bhai ko nhi maraa. Tumne mujhse mere rehbar ko cheen liya! Mere guroor, mere wajood, mere khuda the woh!"

The proclamation was hysteric and opened up a dam Uzair had kept locked since the past decade.

"You broke my spine! Ripped it out of me while I wasn't even looking", he shook the other man so hard one could hear his broken teeth clacking, "You! You aren't even worth licking the dust off his feet let alone touch a single hair on his head! You spineless worthless weasel! I should have killed you the moment you colluded with that jackass of a SP that day!"

Uzair snarled and threw the man right back on the ground with as much force as he could muster. Arshad didn't even get time to groan before he was being barrelled by punches.

Every punch was punctuated by Uzair's words.

"He was my big brother! My father! I worshipped the ground he walked on! You took that from me! You murdered him and half of me as well! I didnt even get to say goodbye! He died and I wasn't there! And you want me to spare you!"

Every hit was followed by a new spray of blood.

How much blood did a person have in their body anyway?

The same question had lingered in his mind, when he had seen Rehman battered for the first time that horrifying night, all those years ago.

That night which suddenly flashed in Uzair's mind - almost like a mocking taunt. Reminding him of all the ways he has failed the man he loved the most in his life and all the ways the latter has always protected him - seen and unseen.

It almost felt like a different lifetime.

-----------------

Poverty as a concept was still fairly new to Uzair. The death of his parents and Haji Laloo's men clearing off all their assets and money had left him with literally nothing except the clothes on his back and a burning need for revenge.

And an older cousin who for some reason had unilaterally decided that Uzair should come and live with him.

Now Uzair had always been a little starstruck of Rehman, who wouldn't when they saw a teenager with such a magnetic aura that even the elders deferred to him. So he had accepted the proposal easily enough.

It would only be later that Uzair would marvel how Rehman had made it sound that living with him was an option Uzair had chosen himself instead of the only option he had left if he didn't want to die on the streets from starvation and disease.

But the problem was that Rehman Dakait, the illicit bastard son of Babu Dakait was also, not as well off as he would have liked to be. And taking in another mouth to feed seemed rather irresponsible of the seventeen year old. He had also spent two years in prison for killing his own mother. And Uzair was half certain, Rehman worked in a gang.

It wasn't a very healthy proposition to stay with a person like him for a ten year old.

But who even cared about orphaned, invisible, ordinary, malnourished, bones peeking, Fate's least favourite children like Uzair and Rehman.

Anyway, so Uzair was staying with his older cousin for the moment. In his mind, it was but a temporary arrangement and he would move out as soon as he could find another place to stay.

The only caveat to his brilliant plan was that for getting a separate place, he needed money and for getting money, he needed to work and his dear stubborn cousin, for some god forsaken reason, had gotten it inside his supposedly smart head, that Uzair should go to school instead.

"But how will I earn money, if I go to school and don't go to work?", Uzair had whined for the thirtieth time since the morning.

Rehman who was busy tying his shoelaces, raised an eyebrow at the petulance in his younger cousin's tone.

"How will you work without learning how to work that only happens when one does go to school?", he asked calmly.

"You haven't been to school since the past two years, I know. How are you working then?", Uzair countered smartly.

Rehman smirked, a hint of a canine and a dimple on his left cheek.

"Shut up and go to school, you witty brat. I don't need to go to school because I am older than you and you will listen to me-"

"But whyyyy---"

"Because I am older than you. Now go and be a good boy. Here's your tiffin", he stuffed the half rusted steel box inside the worn out second hand school bag and cuffed a grumbling Uzair upside his head.

Suddenly a honking sound broke the familiar sounds of their small one room flat. Rehman pointed Uzair to sit down and went outside, tugging on his patchy ash blue kurta, almost nervously.

Uzair, always ready to disobey his older brother, peeped outside from the window curiously. He saw a big black car at the front of the squalor that was the building that their rented room was in. Rehman opened the door of the car and a big burly man stepped out.

Uzair's eyes widened. He knew this man. He would recognize this man anywhere. The screams of his mother still rang in his ears at night. The way they dragged his father out - the finality of the door shutting behind them. The loud bang following it. The sneering glee on the giant's ugly face.

This was Haji Laloo.

Sudden terror gripped Uzair. What if he dragged off Rehman with him too? He couldn't let that happen. Rehman was the only person left in the world who gave a damn about him.

They were supposed to go to the docks in the evening.

Rehman had promised to finish reading his Urdu lesson with him tonight.

He can't... he can't----

Uzair was about to storm downstairs and forcibly drag his brother upstairs if possible or become a human shield in front of him when he noticed the giant gangster's hand resting on Rehman's bony shoulder.

He didn't seem to threaten him. He was leaning in a way which suggested easy familiarity. Uzair's mind churned. He knew his older cousin worked for a gang. He had seen Rehman come back home with shadows underneath his eyes and unexplained bandaged wounds on many an occasion. There would be voices of strange men at odd hours in the night from outside the building, his brother's comforting cadence being one of them.

It was all a lie then!

It was a carefully crafted plan to hold Uzair hostage!

Rehman was working for Haji Laloo.

Betrayal pierced like stinging tears in Uzair's eyes and he furiously wiped them off. He couldn't afford to be weak now. Everyone around him was a lying cheating selfish bastard. What if Rehman catches him like this and realises that his cover is blown?

Would he give Uzair up to his master to tear into shreds like a stray cad?

They were supposed to read his Urdu lesson together...

Uzair hatched a plan. Rehman had not yet returned. Dusk had broken on the horizon painting the Lyari sky into shades of vibrant purple and orange.

His father had always been fond of the saying, 'Offence is the best defence'.

Uzair would kill Haji Laloo. And then he would run away. Away from this smelly damp one room flat and the half filling meals and the tattered second hand school books and overused clothes falling apart at the seams being stitched by unperfect hands again and again.

The Urdu lesson was boring anyways.

It was much later that Uzair would realised how stupid his plan had actually been. Where would he have gone? How would he have even gotten past the first round of guards to even reach Haji Laloo, let alone kill him? He hasnt killed a fly before this, how would he kill a man?

He was caught even before he could slink in the narrow gates of Laloo's three storied mansion. The men grasping at his lean arms had the hold of a pair of mountain trolls and the figures to match their personality. Their tobacco stained foul laughter and meaty grasps pulled Uzair inside as he flailed uselessly between them.

"And what was the plan, you little Baloch snake?", Laloo leared from his throne.

"I'll kill you!", Uzair screamed.

The men just burst into raucous laughter. Humiliation was burnt into tears fighting to escape him even as the guards holding him between them, tightened their grips impossibly painfully on his impoverished biceps.

"Bring the whip. Let's have some fun!", Laloo smirked and his men cheered as what looked more like a horror story than a bullwhip appeared in one of the men's hands.

The whip was a leather monstrosity, scarred and tough, smelling of an entire tannery, one side lined with what appeared to be small metal spikes. It would tear through skin and muscle faster than any normal whip.

Uzair felt the first stirrings of fear.

They would kill him.

Maybe he would get to see his mother then and the constant hunger burning inside his stomach would finally rest.

They threw him in the middle of the cement floor and forcefully made him kneel. He was slapped mercilessly for his resistance till he finally acquiesced. Better to get it over with. He knew when he was beat. The whip cracked in the air, cutting across the jeering mirth of his demonic spectators and came down with a frightening agonizing vengeance.

It hit flesh with a sharp thud.

But no pain blossomed on his back as Uzair had expected. But the whip had hit something. There was a strange silence in the aftermath and he opened his tightly screwed eyes only to see a wall of light blue and dark hair and long arms around his small body.

Rehman grunted so faintly it was hardly audible.

Uzair tried looking upwards at his cousin's face but he was pressed too tightly against his bony chest to escape. There was a strange unforeseen desperation in Rehman's embrace. It spoke of a mute terror and a fierce edge of helplessness.

"What is the meaning of this? Rehman, get off him this instant!", Haji Laloo roared like a lion denied his prey.

"He is a child. He didn't know any better", Rehman said through gritted teeth.

"I said move. I won't ask again", Laloo growled.

"He will die...", Rehman struggled for a moment and then spoke with the effort of pulling teeth, a word Uzair and everyone present knew he despised with a wild abandon, "please."

Haji Laloo seemed to consider something. The giant stalked in front of the two boys kneeling at his feet and felt the beginning of that pleasurable hit of sadism he enjoyed so greatly.

"You said he will behave if I let you take him in. That was the only reason I didn't let my boys have a taste before I sent him to his parents--", his voice was a whisper. A malevolent hissing of a snake.

Uzair felt his body freeze. He was still enveloped in his older brother's heat, almost violently shielded from the gangster lord's sickening vision. The ten year old might not have been able to grasp the true meaning of Laloo's words but he knew it was something remarkably unpleasant by the tightening of Rehman's arms.

"He didn't know. I will tell him. Let him go. He is just.. a kid", there was a distinct note of pleading in Rehman's otherwise stoic voice now.

Uzair felt sick.

Rehman never pleaded. Never begged. He always commanded.

"I might... considering you have proven yourself to be quite useful to me. But...I had already promised my boys a show, tonight. What to do about that then, kid? Haji Laloo doesn't break his word--"

Rehman sighed deeply and Uzair understood what was about to happen before the words were even out.

"They can have me instead. I will last longer than a starving ten year old anyway‐"

"No!"

"Uzair shut the fuck up! You have done enough already!", Rehman snapped sharply and Uzair couldn't help the shame flooding his body like a tidal wave.

"Good boy, I'll let your cousin watch..", Laloo said, saccharine sweet, almost magnanimously.

"But--"

"No buts boy. I can still change my mind. Now let go and let my men have their promised fun."

Rehman forcefully pushed Uzair away from himself, almost flinging him at the side as far as possible. Uzair skidded off and scrambled back till he hit the wall. There was a brilliant line of fresh dark blood blooming through the torn line on the back of Rehman's blue kurta.

The hit he had taken.

The hit meant for Uzair.

Uzair Baloch would never forget that night as long as he lived.

They had whipped Rehman till he couldn't sit up, till the blood pooling around his body had transformed into a stream, till the silent acceptance of pain had turned into small audible grunts which then had turned into whimpers and tight groans and finally screams, till Uzair's voice was hoarse from crying, till Rehman's back was a messy canvas of ribbons and rivulets of maroon and torn pieces of flesh.

At last the monster had had his fill and had carelessly thrown a stack of money on Rehman's upturned body.

"Get your back checked out. I want you first thing in the morning at the docks, tomorrow. My latest shipment is going to land there"

Then he had stared lasciviously at Uzair's sobbing form and licked his lips. As if he could taste his fear, his guilt, his pain from the very air itself.

"And remember little Baloch. The next time you try something foolish, I will pluck your brother's eyes out and feed it to you before I tear your stomach open and rip them out again."

Uzair had just flinched violently like a coward and sat trembling till Laloo and his men had cleared off. Then he had half run and half scrambled to where Rehman laid half delirious with blood loss and pain.

"Bhai.. bhai.. wake up. Please.. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry..... please I am sorry....please— ", Uzair had cried and cried and cried.

He would've done just about anything to make Rehman open his eyes at that moment. The chill of the night had seeped in through Uzair's knees on the icy stained cemented floor. He kept begging.

He would happily stay in that storeroom for the rest of his life, go to school without complaints, never ask for second helpings of the precious little tasteless rice and vegetables they managed to scourge, even do his homework on time, never grumble about his stained faded clothes, never cry for his parents in his sleep.

If only Rehman would open his eyes, get up and yell at Uzair for all the trouble he has caused him. But his cousin was blacked out from the blood loss and Uzair didn't know what to do.

It had been a kind auto driver who had found them and taken Rehman to the hospital.

Uzair had refused to go home or eat or even clean his brother's blood off his body till Rehman's eyes had finally fluttered open. His gaze was cloudy for a second, head full of cotton wool due to the anaesthesia and his back a mass of layered agony. They had kept him on his stomach on the paltry excuse of a bed in the emergency.

"Bhai..", Uzair had whispered fearfully, his little hands trying to encircle his brother's bigger one but failing.

"Uzair... did they.. do anything to you? After I.. after I.. did he touch you?"

Rehman's words were confusing, his tone fractured from screaming and dehydrated from blood loss. But there was still a hint of fear in his voice.

"No. He.. went away. Said something about the docks and shipment-"

Rehman's eyes cleared off immediately like a light had been switched on, and he struggled to get up.

"Bhai, kya kar rhe ho? Stitches hain.. khul jaengi.. you can't even get up, let alone go to work."

"I have to Uzair. Haji Laloo, as you have seen, is not a very forgiving man. Nor remotely reasonable."

Rehman stood up, knees trembling violently, took a moment and then slowly straightened up. Uzair was in awe of his brother's strength. The man was a machine. A machine of unparalleled strength and reserve.

Then Rehman finally seemed to notice him, sitting crumpled into a ball on the chair, clothes still stained with Rehman's blood.

"Why are you still here?", Rehman frowned, "You have school in an hour. I told you--"

"Why did you take me in?"

This was the first time Uzair had cut Rehman's words in the middle. The ensuing silence pressed into the room like a boulder.

Rehman's dark eyes softened, and he sat on the bed, hiding his wince even if he couldn't hide the greenish tint of nausea on his face. He patted beside him with a gentle hand beckoning Uzair, who climbed up the bed to sit in the space beside.

His brother's large hand ran through his dried crusty curls with a tenderness, which brought tears to his swollen eyes.

"Mujhe maaf karde. Maine baat chupai tujhse. Par mere paas aur koi rastaa nhi tha. Lyari me sabse khatarnak gang abhi do hi hain, Haji Laloo aur Babu Dakait. Mujhe kisi ek mein toh janaa tha zinda rehne keliye. Haji ne Chachajaan ko maar diya aur tujhe bhi maar deta agar----"

"Agar aap ne mujhe nhi liya hota", Uzair completed for him.

Rehman nodded slowly. Uzair settled closer to Rehman and leaned against him carefully. The bandages wrapped around him made his bony lean frame look more fragile than ever.

"I'm sorry. I was reckless and you--"

"Learn from your mistakes Uzair. We need to be smart about this. Diving headfirst into danger impulsively or because of ego will get us all killed in a second."

Rehman tugged at his smaller form closer to himself and leaned his own head against his smaller one, bending down to accommodate the difference in their height, which must have been quite painful with his injuries.

But the seventeen year old didn't even flinch.

"Ab hum kya karein?"

Uzair asked, feeling like a little bird being pushed under the massive wings of a hawk. As if he was being protected by the harsh winds outside.

Rehman breathed above his head, ruffling his hair.

"We lay low and watch. We prepare and wait for the right moment. We strike when the iron is hot and we build our own empire."

There was a strange fatedness to Rehman's quiet declaration. The ever-present exhaustion in his tone was bellied by a wildfire of ambition and the thirst for revenge.

"We stick together. Always."

Uzair felt Rehman's dried cracked lips press feather light on top of his head, more a blessing than a kiss and felt the certainty of those words dig roots inside his bones like the universal truth - Undefeated, eternal and destined.

"Always", he echoed after his brother.

-------------------

You promised me. You said 'always together' brother and you left me adrift in this ocean alone. Like an anchorless boat stuck in a cyclone.

"You will never know what you have taken from me", Uzair sneered into Arshad's face and stood up, dragged the other man up by his collar yet again, the blade now raised above his own head.

The blow was swift. Fluid. Unhurried yet lightening fast.

Just like Rehman had taught him.

Arshad Pappu's last words were lost midway as his head flew off the side. His decapitated body fell on the ground listless. The men didn't cheer. This wasn't triumph. This was retribution.

The fire inside Uzair was quenched. But the drought left behind took root like the desert itself - his heart a barren prarie. A wasteland of his dreams.

The sun was overhead and Lyari was still dusty and blood soaked.

Uzair closed his eyes and tried remembering how his brother sounded talking about building an empire out of blood and bones in these very lanes.

He couldn't recall the exact cadence of Rehman's tone, try as he might. It escaped him like he was trying to catch clouds with a net.