15
Kimi
Present day
Present day
Bidding farewell to Joy, Nic, and Nikki was the strangest experience. It had been all of a couple of hours since Kimi had first met them and still she felt this quiet sense of loss. Meeting them had sparked something inside her, something she could only describe as potential, this little beat of joy at the possibility of a new friendship, and now she had to put it away until she saw them again.
For some reason Kimi had always believed that she would have a hard time sharing Rahul with the world. But she had completely misunderstood her own isolation and bought into everyone else’s opinion of her life. Being isolated didn’t mean that your world revolved around you. Isolation was characterized by craving, by the insatiable need for contact and an almost constant reminder of your own insufficiency. Contrary to what people believed about her, she didn’t believe that she was the center of her universe. She was in fact someone whose entire existence focused on wanting a universe she could be part of.
Maybe that’s why she had let Rahul become her entire universe, and wanted nothing more than to be a satellite and revolve around him. What an idiot she had been. No wonder he didn’t want her. She wouldn’t want someone that needy and parasitic either.
But as Dr. Girija, who had been Kimi’s doctor for as long as she could remember, loved to say, Kimi was proof that every mistake could be fixed. Her doctor never seemed to address the fact that each fix had come with yet another mistake, but that wasn’t the point now, was it?
Maybe she had finally succeeded in her quest to disconnect from Rahul, because she had expected to feel lost, even jealous, seeing Rahul with his friends. Instead it had given her an entirely unexpected sense of wholeness. Was this how the world worked and stayed together? Where one person connected with another and those connections intertwined and snapped more and more people into place? There was something beautiful about the idea: this circular, interlaced fabric of the world, which until now she had been left out of. And today three people who loved one another and who obviously loved Rahul had taken her in and made her part of that tapestry.
The good-bye had teared Rahul up. Not on the outside, naturally. He was Rahul, after all. His tears always stayed on the inside. It was something Kimi had seen him do countless number of times with her but never with anyone else. Until now. When Joy had body-hugged him, arms and legs and all, he had held Joy tight, and she had felt all his choking up in her own throat.
Nikhil and Nikki had both assured her everything was going to be okay. Nikhil had even tried to convince her that she and Rahul should go to Chicago with them. Asif Khan couldn’t reach any of them in Chicago.
Even if getting an American visa hadn’t been the long drawn-out process that made this impossible, running off to America would solve nothing. She would find no answers there. Her answers lay somewhere else entirely, and she needed them so she could start afresh and leave her old encumbered satellite self behind once and for all.
When she’d left home that morning she’d had a goal, and a plan to achieve it. So, her plan had been derailed, as plans often are, so what? Her goal hadn’t changed and now she had a new plan. Problem was she needed Rahul to go along with it. Thankfully, she had a plan for that too. That should be her middle name: Kimaya Hasa-Plan Patil.
She threw a quick look at him as he navigated Maney’s wife’s car through Mumbai’s unfailingly choked up traffic. Looking at him for extended periods of time was too much of a throwback to her good old satellite days, and she would much rather not revert to those, thank you very much.
As usual, he looked deep in thought and tortured by something. Fair enough—there was currently much to be tortured about.
Even though it was a quick look, he caught her before she looked away. “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” he said to her turned-away head, a blast of emotion slipping through all that restraint in his voice.
“How does it matter where we’re going?” she wanted to say. But she couldn’t say it without sounding like a pathetic little bird that had been caught in a net moments before its first flight. So she mirrored him and stayed silent.
“We’re going to a police safe house in Colaba,” he said more evenly. Then he took one of those deep calming breaths and threw her a conciliatory look. “You should be, you know, safe there.” Was that the hint of a smile in his voice? Was Stonewall Savant attempting to resuscitate his long dead humor?
Was he crazy? She might have moved on, but she wasn’t far enough away from all those stupid dreams she had dreamed for attempts at banter. There would be no sliding into playfulness, not when she needed to stay away from all the slippery slopes that led straight to where he had no interest in going. Not when she knew the pain of being kicked to the curb by him. Once was quite enough, thank you very much.
Plus, the idea of heading to a safe house needed a little more time inside her head before it would feel, you know, safe there.
Fortunately, his phone buzzed, and they were saved from any more asinine attempts at making this ridiculous situation seem in any way normal.
“Yes, Maney,” he barked and then followed it up with a furious, “What the fuck?” and a quick “Sorry” thrown in her direction.
She waved it away.
He emitted some sub-human-decibel growls into the phone. Maney must know him very well, because he seemed to understand the growled code.
“Okay. Great job. Thank you,” he said before hanging up, and she hung on to his kind, albeit gruff, tone to keep from being terrified of what was going to come out of his mouth next.
“The safe house location has been compromised,” he snapped, sounding like such a cop.
What did that even mean?
Before she could ask, he went on. “Maney has intel that someone leaked the location of the safe house. We can no longer use it. And we still don’t have any leads on where Asif is. Whatever is left of Asif’s gang, they’re lying low. We can’t find a single bastard anywhere.”
Fantastic. “So where do we go to be safe now that there’s no safe house to be safe in?” She was proud of how breezy she sounded in the face of his neat little recap that essentially meant that a psychopath might drive up any minute and empty some bullets into her.
He looked over her shoulder at the window she’d pictured being shattered by bullets just as a pedestrian ran across the street in front of the car. Rahul slammed on the brake, reaching out with one hand to hold her back as she jerked forward against the seat belt. For once she was glad her heart didn’t know when to speed up because, hello! his hand was splayed across her chest!
He pulled it away with super-cop speed, apologized, and then clasped the steering so tight his knuckles looked like they might pop their sockets. Then just as fast he gained his calm again and eased the car back into motion. Well, “motion” was pushing it, because this was Mumbai, and traffic and movement didn’t often meet.
She knew his silences and this one meant the gray matter was in overdrive. DCP Savant was in case-cracking mode.
“We can’t go to The Mansion,” he said finally, in the tone he had used when they solved the Times crossword puzzle together. He always called her home that. Never “your home.” Always “The Mansion.”
“Why can’t we go to The Mansion?” Yes, she stressed the words, because sometimes being juvenile actually made you feel better.
“Because Asif Khan called Kirit-sir and threatened to come after you. The Mansion is out.”
“How about your office, then?” she asked, falling into their puzzle-solving two-step.
“Too many people there who could leak our location.”
He meant her location, naturally. She was the hunted, after all, not him. And it was really pissing her off.
“Listen, Rahul,” she said, knowing it was a bit silly to say that when she knew he was already listening, rather intently at that. “I thought you needed to find Asif Khan.”
His thick brows furrowed as though he knew he wasn’t going to like where this conversation was about to go. “Um, yes, except I need to focus on making sure you’re safe first. The rest of the force is hunting Khan down. We’ll find him.”
She turned in her seat and looked at his hands on the wheel. At some point she was going to have to stop avoiding his eyes. “Why are you the one charged with being my bodyguard?”
He didn’t answer, but his pursed lips told her exactly what he thought of the question.
“Did Papa force you?”
“He didn’t have to force me, Kimi.”
She squeezed her hands in her lap. “Right.” The Great United Front of KAKA. How could she forget? “What if I refuse? What if I don’t want you protecting me? What if I asked for a different officer to be my bodyguard?”
“It wouldn’t matter. I’m the one who’s doing it.”
Of course. “So I don’t get a say?”
He had the gall to sound apologetic, and she wanted to shake him. “Not in this. No.”
She laughed and it tasted bitter in her mouth. “Yes, it’s a truly unique situation, isn’t it? Papa and you making all the decisions.”
The traffic light turned red, but they hadn’t moved for a while. This felt remarkably like the conversation they were having. He did another very cop-like sweep of the traffic before trying to catch her eye again. But she couldn’t bring herself to look away from that red light. “I should have killed the bastard. If I had done my job right, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But until we find him, this is how it has to be. I’m sorry.”
Finally, she met his eyes, and an explosion of horns went off all around them as the light turned green.
“Isn’t ‘detective’ part of your job description?” she bit out. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find out why he’s after me? Why he came after me in the first place?”
“I told you it has to do with Kirit-sir not being able to end the investigation and save the bastard’s arse. It has to do with the case becoming too important to me.”
Of course, it was all about his guilt. Always his damn guilt. Rahul in all his heroic glory wanting to take on all the blame, and missing the point.
“I don’t think it’s that simple.” Despite her resolve to stay detached, her tone rolled up all her bitterness.
He made everything worse by looking past her anger at what she was trying to say. “What do you mean?”
Okay, here went nothing. Or everything. “Whatever he’s after me for has to do with my heart, not with the fact that Papa couldn’t stop your investigation.”
Yet again the crawling traffic came to a standstill, and he turned all the focus in those eyes on her. “Your heart?”
His tone made her want to squeeze her eyes shut. But she kept them wide open. “Yes, I need to track down where my heart came from. That is what will tell us what Asif is hiding.”
“Dammit, Kimi.” He glared at her, as though he had suddenly figured out some sort of nefarious scheme. “This is about finding your donor again? Come on! Kirit-sir has already told you the donation was anonymous.”
“What kind of cop are you that you believe anything can actually be anonymous?” Another cacophony of horns rose around them, but he didn’t move and she didn’t look away. The traffic was packed tight around them like leeches on a wound. There was really nowhere to go. “I have to go to Hong Kong and trace my heart back to its donor.” All on its own, her hand rubbed her chest. His eyes picked out the action that had become such a habit she usually didn’t even notice it.
Naturally, she noticed now, because he noticed. She stilled her hand. “If you have any intention of convincing me to let you guard me with this psycho on the loose, you’re going to have to do this my way and help me.”
Miraculously, the cars in front of them started moving and he looked back at the road, his dark-tar eyes so intense, she knew exactly how this was going to go.
“Help you how, exactly?”
“You found me at the airport.” He had to have wondered where she was headed. “Go with me to Hong Kong and help me trace the donor.”
“You know that’s not possible, Kimi. I can’t do that.”
“Why?” She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t move forward with her life, really move forward, until she put this to rest. But it felt too much like groveling, too much like exposing her heart again. “I’ll postpone my ticket to tomorrow, but I am going. You can’t protect me once I leave. If you go with me, you’re doing your duty and keeping me safe and moving forward with your investigation, because—and you have to trust me on this—this will lead us to the bottom of Asif’s plan.”
He threw her another one of those gauging looks and she knew exactly what was going through his head. It had always made her feel powerful, reading him this way. Now it made her awfully sad.
“Do you have any proof at all?” he asked, flicking away her sadness and filling her with hundred-proof anger.
“Hold on, let me think about that.” She stared off into the distance and did a slow blink. “Oh yes, the man held a gun to my belly and told me to find out where my heart came from.” Her glare told him exactly how long he’d have to wait for any more proof than that. “You don’t think that’s proof enough?”
“He’s a sociopath. He messes with people’s heads.” But he knew she had a point. She could see it in the tightening of his jaw. “Even if I wanted to I’d never get authorization. Kirit-sir has already refused. I’ll lose my job. And don’t say you’ll get your papa to take care of it.”
“I would never say that!”
He narrowed his eyes at the road.
Unbelievable! He was bringing that little piece of their history up? “That’s not what I had meant. I still can’t believe you would accuse me of saying that. I know this job is yours because you’ve earned every bit of it. I know how much you deserve it, how good you are at it. How can you forget that I was the one who always knew?”
He looked at her again, but he wouldn’t have that conversation. Not now, not ever. Good. No trips down memory lane for them. “Listen to your cop’s intuition, Rahul. You know what I’m saying is correct.”
“This is important to me,” she almost added when he didn’t respond. Instead she said, “This is vital to the case, don’t you see?”
He still didn’t respond. But he cut across four lanes of traffic and made a U-turn.