My hands still smelled of gunpowder and sweat when I kicked in the rusted door. The smell of metal clung to my skin like memory, like punishment that refused to fade. The facility was empty. And that told me more than any blood trail ever could. Someone had cleaned it with silence. Someone had left just enough chaos to look like an accident.
Burnt paper drifted across the floor in loose spirals, the ash curling like tired ghosts with nowhere else to go. A laptop waited on a half-broken table, screen still open, files blinking into oblivion one by one, deleted, corrupted, unreadable. Not carelessness. Precision laced with urgency. Whoever it was had wiped everything with enough skill to leave no trace of who they were, only a heat-marked coffee cup still warm, left behind as if the universe had spared me one final clue.
My rage didn't erupt. It condensed. A cold knot in my chest, drawing everything inward until I could barely feel the edges of myself. I moved across the room without hesitation, the weight of instinct guiding my feet. A faint red light blinked in the corner, a camera no longer recording, just watching like an eye that had lost its voice.
I crouched by the laptop. My fingers flew over the keys. Fragments flickered. Names surfaced. Some I had worked with. Some I had chased. Some I had buried. Some I had wished never to see again. And others, others I had prayed were never real. But none of them were clear. No full name. No data string. No confirmation. Just echoes.
My vision blurred. My hand trembled. Not with fear. But with the weight of forty-eight hours collapsing in on themselves, folding like a dying star into the hollow where my breath should have been. I tried to breathe. The air didn't come. Not fully. Not fast enough. And then it all gave way. Darkness did not fall, it swallowed.
________________________________________________________
I woke to white. Not the soft kind. The clinical kind. The kind that smells like bleach and filtered air and denial. My ribs ached with every breath. My mouth was scorched dry, sandpaper and salt and something metallic. I didn't need to check. I was alive. The realization didn't comfort me. It annoyed me.
And then I saw him. Giriraj stood by the window. His arms were crossed. His expressions were unreadable. No sarcasm. No commands. No anger sharp enough to slice air. Just stillness. Which, in him, always meant something had fractured beneath the surface.
He didn't wait for me to speak. "You nearly died." The words dropped without ceremony. No softness. No guilt. Just facts.
"Nearly doesn't count," I rasped. My throat felt like broken glass. "Where are we?"
"Safehouse Nine. Medical wing. Rebuilt after the Manipal breach." I tried to sit up, failed, and tried again.
"Bhumi?"
"Untouched. So is Ankita. I had watchers on both. Still do."
Relief moved toward me like a wave. I didn't let it crash. I held it back, as I always did, folded it into a corner of myself that had no room for softness until the mission was done.
"You shouldn't have gone alone," he said, quieter now. But not apologetic.
"You would've stopped me."
"I still should've."
We stared at each other for longer than either of us admitted. Not a challenge. Not surrender. Just years of consequence pressing between us like something sacred neither of us would name.
"And my teammates?" I asked, voice lower now, steadier.
He looked away for the first time, rubbing the back of his neck like it might shake the guilt loose. "Safe. But rattled. You're pushing them too hard. They're trained. But not for this kind of brutality."
"They follow me," I said. Not defensive. Just the truth.
He looked at me again, and something in his eyes shifted. Not softer, but older. Like he had seen this story play out before in someone else's blood.
"They trust you. But they're not you. They don't have your capacity to break and still rebuild the same night. They don't carry death like a second spine."
I didn't respond. I didn't need to. He wasn't wrong. But this wasn't about what they could handle. It was about what I had to.
He waited. Then added, "Mrs. Vibhaani wants to speak with you. She's been asking."
I blinked slowly. My chest tightened with something I hadn't prepared for.
"Maa... she's okay?"
He nodded. "More than okay. She'll be glad to see you alive."
For a moment, my body betrayed me. I let the relief in. Let it wrap around the edge of my spine like warmth that shouldn't be trusted. I closed my eyes for a breath. One.
Then the thoughts came back. Sharper. Faster. The game wasn't done. The war hadn't shifted. Only the coordinates had. I would rest. I would speak to her. But only for a moment. There were still pieces on the board. And someone had just proved they could touch my game without ever leaving a name behind. And that, I would not forgive.
An hour later
The night pressed heavy against the walls of Safehouse 9. I sat still in the hospital bed, staring at the silent phone until the screen dimmed. Then I tapped her name. It rang. Once. Twice. Then came the voice I had shut out for too long.
"Hello?"
I froze for a second. Her tone was sharp, then it cracked.
"Who is this?"
"Maa."
Silence.
Then a soft, stifled sound. Not quite a breath. Not quite a sob.
"Chhayu?"
"Yes."
"Do you even remember you have a mother?" Her voice rose before it broke again. "Or do you only remember when your guilt eats you alive?"
I shut my eyes. "Maa, please..."
"No. Let me speak today." Her voice trembled and rushed all at once. "Three months, Chhayika. Three months without a single call. Not a single message. I thought you were dead. I thought something happened to you and no one even had the decency to tell me."
"I couldn't, Maa, things were..."
"Don't lie to me!" she snapped, then softened again so suddenly it hurt more. "You had a fight with me. That's all. A fight. Over marriage. I was upset, yes, but did I stop being your mother? Did I ever leave you when we fought?"
My throat burned. I gripped the edge of the sheet like it could hold me together.
"Is this how you treat your parents?" she asked, crying now. "You get angry and disappear? You break our hearts in silence?"
"Maa, I wasn't trying to hurt you..."
"Then what were you doing? Punishing me? For caring? For wanting to see you safe, settled, happy?" Her voice cracked again. "You told me you'd call when you were ready. But I never imagined your silence would be this long. It felt like losing you in slow motion."
Tears spilled down my cheeks before I even realized they were rising. I pressed the phone tighter, tried to breathe, failed.
"You are my life, Chhayu," she said, and her voice no longer fought to sound strong. "Not my priority. Not my pride. My life. Do you even understand what it does to a mother to call and not hear her child's voice on the other end?"
I couldn't speak. I couldn't lie. I couldn't even give her the truth.
"If you don't want to see me die, then answer my calls," she whispered. "Damnit, answer them. Even if it's just to say you're fine. Even if it's just to scold me back."
"Maa..." My voice broke, barely a sound.
"I didn't raise you to run away from love. Or to carry everything alone. You're not alone. Not while I'm breathing."
The dam inside me split wide open. I tried to hide it in silence, but she heard it anyway.
"Come home," she said gently, through her tears. "Or let me come to you. I don't care about anything else. I just want to see you once and hold your face and know that my daughter is still there somewhere behind all this pain."
"I love you," I said, the words falling through a cracked voice.
"And I will love you," she replied, "even if you never call me again. But I hope you do. Because this life... this life without you in it is no life at all."
I said nothing after that. I couldn't. And she didn't hang up. She waited.
Waited until I found the strength to say, just once more, "I'm sorry, Maa."
Then the line went quiet. But it never felt like it disconnected.
12 hours later
Giriraj entered like silence after a storm. Not the kind that soothes. The kind that lets you hear everything you've buried. I had barely slept. My wounds had scabbed over, but the war inside had not. The pain was dull now, easy to ignore if I stayed still. I didn't.
He didn't sit. He just stood near the edge of the room, watching me like someone weighing a truth before it lands too hard.
"It's Azhar," he said.
The name didn't cut. It confirmed. I had already known, somewhere beneath the fury and the noise, beneath the old instincts that still remembered his signature like a bruise that never fades. I looked at Giriraj and waited.
"The system was gutted, but not clumsily. The deletions were precise. Designed to look chaotic, but they followed a rhythm. Like someone playing a symphony with fire. The code, the false trails, even the timing — it matches Azhar's earlier patterns."
I said nothing. If he was here after twelve hours of silence, it meant something had gone wrong.
"There was one file," he continued, his voice tighter now. "Only one that didn't belong. Not deleted by the system. Not auto-cleared. Manually removed and wiped clean. Almost too clean. We didn't catch it at first, but something felt off. So I had the cyber team dig again."
He handed me a single sheet of paper. A ghost of a name. A blank outline. A digital scar where something once lived.
I stared at it for a long time before I spoke.
"Do we know what it was?"
"We tried everything. Back-end crawl, packet trace, data residue scan. Whoever took it knew how to burn tracks, but in doing so, they left a shadow. Not even a full one. Just the idea of something missing. Something deliberately pulled out of the story."
I sat up straighter, my pulse quiet but climbing. Not Azhar's style. He didn't care for subtlety.
"The rest of the damage was his," Giriraj said. "But this... this was different. This was someone careful. Someone surgical. Someone who didn't want us to know they were ever in the room."
My eyes narrowed. The memory came back with clarity now — the heat of the coffee, the edge of steam still curling when I entered. Too fresh to have been forgotten.
"The cup," I said, my voice low.
He exhaled and looked away for the first time. The silence between us was no longer just heavy. It was full of regret.
"I didn't check it."
I stared at him.
"There were no prints on the laptop. No skin oils. No pressure traces. I thought the rest was wiped too. But the cup... I dismissed it. I thought maybe it was staged or left behind from another shift. I didn't think it mattered."
His voice didn't break, but something inside it pulled at me.
"Now it's been touched by everyone. Lab. Logistics. One of the aides moved it off the desk. If there was any lip trace, any tongue contact, we lost it. I should have known."
I closed my eyes for a second, the kind of second where your mind rewrites time and you wish your body could follow. I opened them again and saw him still standing there, a man brilliant enough to rewrite cities, standing like he had just let something slip through his fingers that could have rewritten this entire war.
"Then we find another way," I said, softer than before but steadier. "If that file wasn't his... then someone else was in that room. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing."
Giriraj nodded once. A gesture that carried less certainty than usual. But I saw it — the storm rebuilding in his eyes.
"We'll find them," he said.
And I believed him. Not because it was a promise. But because guilt like that never sleeps.
Author's POV
Giriraj stepped out of her room and walked through the hallway like the walls were closing in. The quiet that followed him was not born of fear. It was the kind of silence people carry when they know they've made a mistake that cannot be undone.
He did not pause to speak to anyone. No orders. No nods. No lectures.
His room was dark when he entered. Curtains pulled shut. Lights off. The kind of darkness he did not fear.
He closed the door. Locked it. Then walked to the hidden wall panel and turned on the soundproofing, every mechanical hum falling into a deeper hush.
From the corner drawer, he pulled out the blackline comm. The one that did not exist on any official network.
He waited. Three rings.
Then a voice.
"Yes?"
Giriraj didn't waste time.
"I want all accessible records on tongue-print biometrics. Official, off-record, private trials, military black projects. Anything that includes lip heat signatures or saliva-acid residue from caffeine containers in the last seventy-two hours."
The voice on the line didn't respond at once. Then came a calm reply.
"That's not a short list."
"I'm not looking for short," Giriraj said, eyes fixed on the wall. "I'm looking for whoever erased that file and drank that coffee."
The line went quiet.
And somewhere beyond that silence, the hunt began again.
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Author's note
If you enjoyed the story, a vote would mean a lot.
If something felt off, feel free to comment , I'm always trying to improve.
Compliments and honest criticism are equally welcomed here.
Love you all.💖