Gaurav received a message from Vikram that morning. Suraj Bhupati’s team had discovered the hacking into their corporate system. Currently, an investigation is going on to see which particular company records were compromised.

Even before he hacked into those servers, Gaurav had taken care not to zero in on any particular company. He had combed through all of them. He knew it would take some time before he could get at least one damning transaction that would tie the blood money to the legitimate money.

He was supposed to get back to the system in a few more days, but now, while the investigation is ongoing, he would have to wait.

“I killed someone,” said a soft feminine voice said.

The statement was so unexpected, it took Gaurav a while to respond.

He was sitting outside the cabin on an easy chair. They usually sat outside during the evenings when they returned from their walk. Nina was seated across on his lap. He couldn’t see her face as it was burrowed in his chest. He thought she was sleeping because he had kept her awake most of the night.

“Whom?” he asked.

“Someone who hurt my sister.”

Gaurav kept quiet and waited. If she wanted to tell him the details, she would on her own.

The fact that she offered to tell him already showed the level of trust she had on him.

“I’m telling you this because if you think I’d not want someone like you because you took lives of people who hurt your sister, then it’s far from the truth. You and I, we have more things in common than you think.”

He picked her hand and kissed it. “You don’t have to talk about it, unless you want to,” he said softly.

She took a deep shuddering breath as though she was bracing herself to the pain by recalling memories. Immediately, he felt the overwhelming need to go back in time and erase that part of her past in order to eliminate her pain.

“I want to,” she said. “I want to share more than just my body with you.”

Her statement shook him in a way that he thought wasn’t possible. Because it was making him hope. Hope for a future. And hope that she felt the same way he did about her.

“Tell me,” he said, rubbing her back, for both, comforting her, and also because he needed to touch her.

“I still remember that day very clearly,” she said. “I was seventeen, and my eighteenth birthday was only a week away.

“Despite our upbringing or maybe because of the lack of it, Devi and I thought that monsters were ugly, and that they only lived in the dark, dirty underbelly. But life taught us that sometimes, monsters were beautiful to look at. And they could be charming and persuasive. They wooed you with beautiful words and promises. And they owned big fancy houses and drove big fancy cars, everything that someone who grew up on streets would desire.

“That’s how the monster I killed was. He was handsome, charming and so persuasive that my innocent sister was swept away by his words. She met him for the first time when he and his friends had hired her services for an event. But after that, he continued to visit her at a place she worked during the day.

“It only took him a month to get her to agree for going out with him. He said it was to a friend’s party, and he wanted to take her as a friend so he could introduce her to his friends. Until then, he had been asking her out, but she had refused to meet him alone. Although, my sister liked him, she was still street smart. She knew what would happen if she gave in easily to what he was chasing after. He must have realized that too.”

She took another deep breath. “I like him, too. Whenever I was around when he came to meet her, he was friendly and charming to me. So when my sister told me she was going with him, I was excited for her. I even made her a special dress.

“The night of the party, when she didn’t return home, I simply knew something was wrong.

Her voice pierced his heart. It became distant and dull with no emotion whatsoever. He continued to rub her back softly, trying to ease the ache while she narrated a painful part of her life.

“…by the time I found her, I didn’t recognize her. Her face was swollen, and her entire body was bruised and bleeding. She was gone by the time I found her, but the person who did that to her, was still there. He came at me as well. All his charm and friendliness had disappeared. I saw him for what he was—an animal. So, I killed him. I stabbed him in his neck with a broken glass bottle again and again until he was dead.”

Gaurav’s blood boiled when he heard that the man came at her. He wanted to go back in time and kill that bastard all over again. He wanted to inflict more pain to him than just being stabbed in the neck.

“I dream of that incident often,” she said. “Each time I wake up, there is only one thought that runs through my mind. That I shouldn’t have believed in his charm. I should have gone along with my sister to that party. And even if she didn’t want me to join her, I should have insisted hard until she agreed.”

She looked at him with an agonized look. “Sometimes, in my dreams, I was back in the hotel room. And instead of finding Devi naked and ravaged on the bed, I would actually see my older sister smiling and talking to someone outside in the party. She would then scold me for having come during the late night to accompany her back home. And then, she and I would return to our single-room home and sleep while exchanging funny incidents from the day. There are so many other similar scenarios that play out in my dreams as well. And in each scenario Devi was safe and alive and next to me.

“But those scenarios are often dominated by reality of what actually transpired that night.”

Gaurav wanted to tell her there was nothing she could have done even if she had joined her sister. But he knew guilt. And he had dreamt of various scenarios as well. He dreamt of how his life could have played out with his sister and mother staying alive.

If I hadn’t left home to pursue my dreams…

If I didn’t stand firm on my morals and beliefs…

If I hadn’t been close to my sister and mother…

The list of those ifs was endless.

He didn’t tell Nina to let go of her past. Because he knew it was easier said than done. Instead, he offered her comfort, and then drew comfort from her.

That night, Gaurav came to a decision.

When the time came for him to leave the cabin, he would give Nina all the details of what her husband was caught doing, and keep her in a safe location, until either he or Suraj Bhupati got killed.