Sia slowly began to gain conscious.

Her head was pounding and her mouth was dry. She felt disoriented and dizzy as she tried to sit up. She shook her head to get rid of the dizziness, but it only got worse, until she was forced to lie down on the hard concrete floor again.

A few minutes later, fighting the nausea and dizziness, she pried her eyes open slowly. She could see cemented walls of what seemed to be some kind of a construction site. She couldn’t see much. It was sometime in the evening and the darkness was slowly taking over. There was only a small dim bulb emitting a light adding to the ominous silence.

“Oh good, you are finally awake,” said a familiar voice from somewhere around her.

She sat up slowly, and turned towards the voice, only to see her uncle sitting on a cheap plastic chair, holding a gun in his hands. She couldn’t see him clearly, but she knew that he was going to be unpredictable. Not just due to the circumstances, but also with the drug in his system.

“What do you think you are doing?” she asked, keeping her voice steady.

“What do you think! The only thing you reduced me to do right now. You left me with nothing!” he seethed.

“I don’t know what else you expected from me,” she said. Keeping her eyes towards him, she stood up slowly, her legs wobbly under her. “You raped me repeatedly as a child. You have been doing it to others as well.”

“Shut up!” he shouted, waving the gun towards her.

“It’s the truth. You are a sick person who deserved everything you got,” she said. She knew the truth would goad him. If she was going to be shot dead eventually, she refused to beg for her life. She wanted a confrontation that he had been avoiding.

As expected, he sprang up from the chair.

“Do you think I had an easy life being this way?” he hissed.

“You could have controlled. Or gotten help—”

“Control? Help?” he said, laughing bitterly. “One cannot change the natural instincts that one is born with,” he said with conviction.

“Natural or not. That doesn’t give you the right to force yourself on innocent children. You chose to follow through your urges at the cost of their innocence. My innocence!”

He was quiet for a while. She knew he would have no remorse towards what he had done to her and many other children. As she watched him the expression on his face threw her off.

“My father knew,” he said. He had a faraway look on his face as though he was lost in the past. “I thought he was the best father anyone could have. He was well respected and he taught me everything he knew to be able to run our estate and its people. I was his heir.” He took a deep breath and a look of loathing passed on his face. “But that all changed when he caught me with a younger child for the first time when I was fifteen. He didn’t want to understand my ‘unholy sickness’ as he called it. He whipped me until I bled and until I promised him that I wouldn’t do it again.”

He scoffed bitterly.

“As if it’s something I could control. I could hide it better. But he caught me again when I was twenty.”

His hands clenched around the gun.

“Then, my own father,” he continued, with a pained look on his face. “My own father left me no choice when he cut me off his will because of that discovery.”

Sia’s heart dropped, when she heard that. She had always suspected her uncle to be involved in his father’s early death which was staged as an accident.

“But luckily, he valued family honor more than anything. He didn’t discuss about me to anyone. There were no rumors about me in the village and no one suspected a thing because I was always a gentleman. Especially because I treated women with respect. When it comes to the society, a man’s character is usually measured by that.”

Sia recalled the women who had publicly vouched about his character that helped weaken the child trafficking case against him.

“At first I tried to convince my father that I was an ideal son. That I was an ideal leader. That I was everything that a man needed to be, to be able to lead and manage the vast estate with several families livelihood depending on. But still, the old man made a crazy will cutting me off, stating that only the stated heir who was married with children could inherit the estate.”

He scoffed bitterly again. “My father didn’t think people like me could also marry and sire a child.”

His eyes were filled with rage. “I had to marry. Even though it went against everything I believed in. But at least I married a very young looking sixteen year old, and was able to sire a child within the first year of our marriage. But did that please my father? No. He deliberately went ahead and still cut me off from the will even though I fulfilled his requirements. That very act was enough to cut his life short to snatch my birthright back.”

Sia couldn’t stay quiet. She had to know. She had a gnawing feeling for a while, but she didn’t know whether she could handle the truth.

“Did you kill my mother?” she asked him bluntly.

He remained quiet, and so she asked him again. “Did you kill your own sister?” she demanded.

His face softened, an expression of regret passing through it. “I didn’t want to,” he confessed. “I really loved your mother. She was ten years younger to me and adored me.”

“If you really loved her, you wouldn’t kill her for the sake of money!” she shouted, losing her cool.

“It wasn’t just money. It was my birthright!” he shouted back. “And your mother, who was supposed to be a loving sister, didn’t do a thing to stop our father from cutting me off and declaring her as the heir.”

“Did you...” Sia couldn’t complete the sentence. The very idea was horrific. “Did you touch her like you did to me?”

“No. I didn’t touch my sister,” he replied with an offended look on his face. As though touching his niece was more acceptable.

“So you didn’t touch her, but you just killed her along with her husband and their infant son,” she stated in loathing.

“You should have been there with them too. But unfortunately, you weren’t.” He pointed the gun at her chest. “You have cheated death way too many times. And now, you’ve come back to ruin me.”

His voice wavered as he shook his head erratically. “You succeeded,” he said. “You have ruined the one thing I valued the most. My reputation. My own son who is the only person I love in this world, looked at me with suspicion after I was arrested like a common criminal.”

“You are a criminal!” she declared out loud.

He was the worst kind of criminal that no amount of punishment could atone his crime. “Don’t you regret what you’ve done to all those children and to me?” she demanded. “And on top of that you murdered your own family! Your father! Your sister. Her family!”

“Shut up! I have a gun. I can kill you right away.”

She smiled. She probably looked as crazy as him, smiling when she was staring down the wrong end of the gun.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“You are,” she said. “You think my death will get you some kind of victory? I already won.”

His eyes narrowed in a murderous glare, but she didn’t stop adding, “The only thing that you’ll earn is an even bigger punishment in the jail. Or worse, you’ll earn the time with my husband who will destroy you in the worst way possible.”

She smirked. “You remember my husband, don’t you? Your family protégé. The one your family saved from a murder charge. But alas, what did it get you? A knife in your back,” she taunted.

The old man’s hand trembled, but he kept the gun firmly pointed at her.

“I know that. But what you and your husband don’t know is that he is well justified for betraying me,” he said.

She had a sick feeling again. “Oh?” she asked, nonchalantly.

He laughed, even though it came off as forced. “I have one more victory up my sleeve against your husband. Do you know how his mother died?” he asked.

She was quiet when another suspicion of hers was confirmed. She thought she was being too paranoid about her uncle. Pinning all the cause of deaths to him. But now, she knew that he was a monster inside-out.

“How did Mrs. Sita Chandra die?” she asked.

“She wouldn’t shut up. So I asked one of my loyal servants to shut her up.”

“You murdered Ajay’s mother?”

“I had to. She was an ungrateful bitch! I saved her son from going to jail and gave her a new life to start over. What did I get in turn? Insistent demands to have an investigation against me. She deserved it!”

Sia shook her head. This was no longer about her. It was about Ajay too. And his mother—the sweet, generous woman who didn’t deserve to die for trying to protect an innocent girl.

“You are crazy. You don’t deserve to live. You deserve to die in the worst possible way!” she hissed and lunged.

She drove her elbow into his arm, knocking the gun out of his grip. Driven solely my adrenaline and rage, she didn’t even hesitate when the gun went off. The bullet was fired into the concrete wall. It rebounded and zipped across the floor.

Kicking the gun away, she wrapped her arm across the uncle’s neck in a chokehold. For an old man, he was quite strong. But she was stronger, especially due to her rage. She squeezed as hard as she could without completely crushing his windpipe, and began counting in her head. At ten seconds, he stopped struggling, and by fifteen, he slumped forward.

She was about to let him go when she felt something sharp slicing through her side, making her immobile. She feel forward, stunned and unable to react. Gasping, she ran her hands through the source of pain radiating from her side. She felt something wet.

Her hands came back red.

Raising her head through bleary eyes, she saw a man standing over her with a large knife. Shaking her head slightly, she tried to focus.

It was Manish. Her ex-husband. He was grinning like a maniac, his pupils dilated.

“Oh no. You didn’t win. I’m the winner now,” he raved.

 

No one is harmless.

 

Sia recalled Ajay warning her about Manish.

“Do enlighten me. How are you the winner,” she asked, her voice coming out as a wheeze. Clutching her side, she attempted to roll onto her side and up. It was impossible to do so with a feeling of fiery burning pain dominating her side.

“I’m a winner, because I got even with you,” he said.

“For what?” she asked him. Gasping for air, she held herself, making an attempt to drag herself away from there. It was too hard, so she just lay back down. She didn’t want Manish, who was obviously high on drugs, to stab her to death while she attempted to get onto her feet.

Waving the knife, he began to shout, “You insulted me! You thought I was a loser who isn’t man enough to be your husband. You should have been grateful that I wanted to get back with a whore like you!”

She tried to talk, but she could only gasp as she tried to draw in air.

When she didn’t respond, “Should I show you that I’m still a man?” he hissed, his eyes roving over her greedily.

Still holding the knife in his hand, he began to undo his pants.

Even through the pain, she waited calmly, keeping her blurred vision on him.

Go on, come closer, you loser, she thought. Try and touch me. I’ll stab you so deep in your neck—

Her thought was left incomplete when Manish suddenly disappeared from her vision. It was mostly dark, so she had to squint her eyes to see what was going on.

Manish was tackled to the ground, and someone was beating the shit out of him while straddling his chest.

Shaking her head again to get rid of the blurredness, her gaze focused on the man on top.

Ajay!

She felt immense relief seeing him. But then, looking at the way Ajay was punching Manish, relief turned into something else.

“D-don’t,” she gasped out. She was barely audible. The bloodlust in Ajay was evident. He wasn’t calm and controlled, like he was when he had tackled the judge. Right now, he was like an animal trying to protect its mate. He was out for a kill.

She couldn’t let Ajay do that. He won’t be able to come of out this.

“A-ajay!” she whispered, even as a shooting pain shot up again from her side.

This time, Ajay froze. Then as though in a trance, he blinked a couple of times, before letting go of Manish’s limp body, and rushed towards her. “Sia!”

“I’m fine,” she gasped out. “Let’s just get out of here. Please.”

“The ambulance and police are on the way. I notified them when I started looking for you.”

Ajay held her, taking most of her weight on him. She tried to limp towards the exit, but they stopped when they heard a gunshot sound. In the dim lighting, saw her uncle standing like a bad specter with a gun in his hand.

She shoved Ajay’s hand away from her waist and tried to move in front of him, blocking his body.

“Don’t,” said Ajay. Holding her firmly, he tried to push her down on the ground to safety even as she resisted.

“What a heartwarming sight,” her uncle slurred slightly. “Each of you trying to save the other. I would have appreciated it if you both hadn’t been ungrateful snakes that you are.”

Taking a deep breath, she stood straight, gasping in pain, trying to form the words to stop her uncle from possibly hurting Ajay. “Y-your grudge—” she gasped. “—is with me. Let Ajay go,” she begged.

When it came to Ajay, she was willing to beg and do anything to protect him until her last breath.

“No,” her uncle said with a cruel, manic smile as moved under the light. “But I think I will spare you, my dear.” His smile turned vicious. “Not because you are my family. But only because your tears are better than your blood or life. I want you to live with the knowledge that you were responsible for his death. That he died trying to save your worthless life.”

He moved the gun and pointed it straight towards Ajay’s chest.

Ajay pushed her down and stood in front of her, blocking the path to her uncle. She didn’t have the strength to stand up or struggle against his leg that held her down. “No!” she sobbed, tears running down her eyes, desperately trying to stand up or push Ajay’s leg away.

Ajay didn’t budge. He stood calmly. He turned his head to look down at her. “I love you,” he said tenderly. “Tell Anika that she was the best thing that had happened in our lives, and that I’ll always love her, and be with her, no matter what.”

There was finality in Ajay’s voice. He was saying his goodbye.

The man who told her that he loved everything about her, including her darkness was going to die because of her.

The man she loved more than her own life was going to be killed in cold blood.

The man who was the very reason for her living was going to be gone.

As though he could read her thoughts, “I love you,” he said again. “Don’t ever give up, baby. I know you are strong. And time... it heals everything,” he said softly.

“No!” she whimpered, barely able to move, fighting the darkness that was trying to take over completely. She still tried with everything she had, to push Ajay away.

It wasn’t enough.

“No!” she repeated again and again.

Until there was another loud gunshot, and then total darkness.