A Distant Heart by Sonali Dev (10)

10

Kimi
Present day

 

Kimi’s ears were still ringing. But she didn’t know if it was from the bomb that could have taken her butt right off her body or from the anger that someone had done that. To her, to Rahul, to that poor man who could have been killed if Rahul didn’t possess that super-cop DNA that had made him sense danger and shout for the man to get away from the car.

Rahul! Just the thought of him was not doing good things for her anger levels. Rahul, who thought it was okay to lie to her, to turn away from her, to refuse to help her, and now somehow thought it was okay to throw himself in the path of bullets for her! As if that were in any way a thing she could ever live with! Every time she thought she couldn’t be angrier with him, he proved her wrong.

And now, after acting like her human armor and sweeping her away from a bloody (she couldn’t believe she was even thinking the word) bomb!, he sat there in stony silence taking her to God knows where. Well, he wasn’t the only one who could do silence.

She wrapped her arms around herself. But she hated having to go inside herself, hated that old feeling of not having any control over anything but her mind.

“Don’t do that,” he said, deciding to break his silence just when she had decided that she didn’t need him to, and knowing exactly what she was feeling. The man made her so very tired. “I found you. You’re safe now. I won’t let him touch you again.”

She glared at him. “You’re the one who let him escape.” He was also the one who had taken away her first chance at freedom. “Don’t try and be a hero about this.”

He was about to respond, but of course his phone buzzed, and he held up a finger and spoke into the Bluetooth device sticking out of his ear. “Nikhil. Where are you and Nikki? Where’s Joy? Sorry about the voice messages.”

He listened. Apparently, Rahul had left this person messages about Asif Khan’s escape too. She thought about the message he had left her.

Yeah, this wasn’t quite what she had been expecting that to be about.

“Okay, stay in a public place. Yes, the food court is good. I’ll send someone to take you home, and I’ll see you there in half an hour.”

More silence.

“Yes. She’s with me. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

He disconnected the phone, then made a call to send someone over to the mall to take the people he had been speaking with home.

Then he turned to her. “Do you mind going to Andheri first? I need to take care of this.”

She shrugged. “Why am I here, Rahul? And don’t say, ‘Because Asif escaped.’ I want the real reason.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. “Because he threatened to come after you. And I’m going to kill him before he gets anywhere near you.”

“Why?”

He gave her a look from behind those aviators that she was glad she couldn’t see.

“Don’t flatter yourself, I’m not trying to get you to profess your love for me.” Doing it once was stupid enough. “You’ve made it abundantly clear how you feel. What I meant was: Why is Asif coming after me? I’ve only seen the man once in my life. Why is he so interested in me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.” Had he always lied to her about everything so easily? Or was it that everyone lied out in the world and it was just another thing she needed to learn to navigate? “Does it have anything to do with Papa?”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel, making the thick muscles in his forearms jump to life under his folded-up shirtsleeves. “I only just found out about this. But Kirit-sir told me that last year Asif Khan started blackmailing him to get him to drop our organ-black-market investigation.”

“The one you were involved in with . . . with that doctor?” Kimi tried not to think about that day when she’d seen them together. Possibly the worst day of her life.

“Jen was a really good friend, Kimi, that’s all,” he said with far too much gentleness, as though she were a jealous puppy who needed a head pat.

“I thought I was your only friend, Rahul.” Another lie he had told her over and over again. But saying it made her feel like that jealous puppy again, one that was fast developing a pathetic whine. “It doesn’t matter. So, the fact that Khan came after me has to do with your investigation with Jen Joshi?”

He changed gears and turned toward the overpass. He was avoiding smaller, more crowded streets. “Jen was running the medical clinic in Dharavi and trying to set up an organ donor registry. People on the registry started to disappear. That’s when she came to me. But we couldn’t find bodies, and these were undocumented slum dwellers so we had no case. She couldn’t let it go. She kept digging. Finally we found out that someone was stealing organs from people on the registry and killing them off. And Asif was the man running the operation.”

“I know. This was all in the newspapers. Asif Khan is a bastard. But why is he coming after me now? When you already have the evidence to put him away and he should be fleeing the country to save himself? What do I have to do with any of this?”

“I’m not entirely sure. My best guess is that he has some sort of vendetta against Kirit-sir for not stopping the investigation. Irony is, Kirit-sir did try to stop me.”

“Papa tried to stop you from investigating an organ-theft ring?” That sounded entirely unlike her father.

“He believed the ring was already dismantled.”

“Then why didn’t you stop?”

“Because he was wrong. It wasn’t dismantled. It was worse than ever. Asif apparently had the backing of someone very powerful.”

“And you don’t know who that is?”

He shook his head. “Whoever it was is a ruthless bastard. I was just speaking to Nikhil Joshi, that’s Jen’s husband. We’re headed to see Nikhil and his girlfriend, Nikki Sinha. The bastard who was protecting Asif Khan blackmailed Nikki and sent her after Nikhil to steal the evidence Jen had collected and hidden.”

It sounded like the plot of a crime thriller gone wrong. “So, Nikki’s the woman who was sent to steal the evidence from Nikhil and now she’s his girlfriend?”

“Yes, they’re together. It’s strange. It’s like they have this connection. They’re such a family, you know.”

She knew. Inexplicable connection she understood.

Rahul’s gaze lingered on her for a second too long and she had to look away, because sometimes an inexplicable connection wasn’t enough. “How did you know to find me at the airport?”

He withdrew behind so many walls so fast he might as well have disappeared from her sight.

Had he always been this good at shutting her out? Had she really been naïve enough not to notice? “If you’re planning to lie, I’d rather you didn’t answer,” she said, affecting enough aloofness to give him a run for his money.

They pulled into the parking lot of a cluster of gray low-rise buildings with clothes flapping on clotheslines strung across balconies like cheery flags determined to not notice the dreariness.

“Give me your phone.” He held out his hand.

Fat chance. He was delusional if he thought her puppy-dog-ness was this complete.

He sighed and deigned to offer an explanation. “It can be traced.” He removed his own phone from his pocket, it was in two pieces. “I’ve disconnected mine too. The one I’m using is a ghost phone. Completely untraceable. We can’t let anyone know where we are. Not until Khan is in the morgue.”

She handed him her phone and watched as he pulled it apart, removing the SIM card and battery, and placed all three pieces in a high-tech metallic plastic bag that he pulled from his pocket, along with the pieces of his own phone. Then he placed it all in the glove box.

“You were tracking my phone?”

Without answering, he swept a gaze across the surroundings and pulled out his gun. Sliding the magazine out, he checked it, then clicked it back in place with strong, sure hands. It was the first time she’d seen him handle his gun. It was the scariest thing she’d ever laid eyes on, but also hot as hell. Those damn aviators still covered his eyes, but she knew the exact moment when he caught her following his movements.

She would not allow warmth to suffuse her cheeks. She would be cool and sophisticated and focus on the fact that he had tracked her phone!

“It wasn’t me,” he said before getting out of the car and then jogging around the front to let her out. “I wasn’t the one who was tracking you.”