4. THE WATCHER
You can smell danger when you’ve lived inside it.
The dim fluorescent light.
The cheap cologne.
The lingering stare.
The silence after the door clicks shut.
The voice behind silence.
The scream behind laugh.
Those things never leave you. They become a part of how you breathe, how you walk, how you prepare for the worst before it happens, how you see, live and act in this world.
That’s why when the man at the bar surrounded by loud music and drunk party animals brushed the waitress’s arm and she flinched, I was prepared.
Not because I cared.
Not because I wanted to play savior.
But because patterns never lie.
I stayed at my corner table near storeroom where all the black things take place, fingers curled loosely around my wine glass. I watched him laugh too loudly, lean too close, cliché compliments to the waitress, playing every dirty naive tricks on her. His attention was on the trembling girl and my attention was on him than the red drink in front of me.
Ten minutes later, he followed her into the storeroom.
I counted to fifty.
Seated.
Waited.
Listened.
They didn’t come out.
So I moved.
I slipped in the darkness of storeroom. After walking in that dimly lit room stacked with varieties wine and beer glasses, gold platted plates and other bar supplies. I caught glimpse of them through one of the stacked emptied sake bottle.
Her face was pale, hair messed, eyes wet, tearful, but untouched. He wall slammed her locking her both hands with his single hand hovering his other hand all over her.
Her resistance was that of a child.
And he was a menace....
And then I saw a single drop of tear left her left eye. I remembered how my boss tried to pressurized me to be his side chick.
Unknowingly, on my reflex I hot the record button on my phone, but forgot to silence it and made a 'click' sound that echoed in this eerie room.
They froze, I froze too.
Taking the chance, waitress kicked the man's thigh and ran away from the room and I ducked down behind the sake counter.
The man groaned in pain, then the room went eerily silent.
I looked up carefully and he was not there.
Then within a second I felt someone's presence behind my back.
He was quick, so too l.
I immediately took the sake bottle slammed it on that man's head. Blood splattered everywhere. His head, his black shirt, golden watch and on my face and purple evening dress. Then I stabbed the broken bottle to his upper abdomen. Just enough to rupture something. Not enough to kill him on the spot.
He would collapse later. Maybe in an hour, maybe less.
He will be rescued by the staff.
She was safe.
For tonight.
I never killed anyone.
I humiliate them.
And never more than needed.
Fear was usually enough. Ruin was sometimes required. Death? Rarely.
But one night, I made a mistake.
Different locations, different targets but same situation.
But this time....
I made a mistake.
He wasn’t evil.
He was bad — careless, predatory, the type that thought fear made him powerful.
But evil? No.
And evil is what deserved death.
He deserved shame. Fear. Scars he could never explain.
Not the slow, internal bleed I left him with.
After the girl left, that man found me.
In a spur of moment I slashed him deep than I had expected...
When the blood came out gushing than normal.
He collapsed motionless, barely breathing.
I froze!
Not from guilt.
From clarity.
This wasn’t justice anymore.
It wasn’t control.
It was emotional.
It was hunger.
Something in me — that cold, silent thing born the night Vijay humiliated me in the red dress — had grown sharper. Hungrier. And for the first time, I wasn’t sure I was the one holding the reins.
I pulled out my phone. Dialed three numbers. Paused.
If I called, the cops would come. The ambulance. Paperwork. Questions I couldn’t answer.
But if I didn’t call—
he’d die.
Maybe he deserved it. Maybe not.
For the very first time fear took over Kaira.
My thumb hovered.
And then—
“Put that down.”
The voice was calm. Male. Low, steady, practiced.
I turned.
A man stood at the storeroom door.
Sharp suit. Clean shoes. Calm eyes. The kind of presence that doesn’t belong in places like this.
What cut through me wasn’t the suit.
It was his words.
“You don’t want cops sniffing here, Kamna or Kaira.”
My breath caught.
How does he know me?
Old me and...
The name I had stolen from a dead orphan girl.
The name I bled into until it became mine.
The name no one should’ve known.
“Who are you?” My voice came out colder than I felt.
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he handed me a towel. White. Clean.
“There’s a car waiting.”, he said. “Come with me. Now.”
Every instinct screamed at me to run.
Run, vanish, change cities like I always did when things got too close.
But his voice wasn’t threatening.
He didn’t touch me.
He didn’t even step closer.
He just watched.
I tried acting indifferent and threw the towel at him.
He didn’t yell....but something about the way he watched made me follow.
The car was black. Unmarked. The kind that blends in while looking expensive if you stare too long.
Inside, silence.
He handed me water, a clean T-shirt, even switched on the heater.
No questions. No small talk.
Until we reached a dim apartment, windows shuttered.
I stopped midway.
"He is doing fine to be a alive.", he said walking ahead and turning the knob of his house.
His house was lifeless. Walls too bare to be lived in. They had trapped aura. (Soothing.)
I stood across a table holding my bloodbath clothes.
Then he dropped a file on the table.
My face.
My aliases.
My hostel records.
Blood hits the floor.
Even a grainy photo of me in that red dress on the night my world shattered.
Photo of me sitting next to real Kaira. The day when Kamna became Kaira.
Clothes slipped from my hand.
“You’ve been sloppy.”, he said quietly.
“That man tonight? He was bait. Cops have been watching him for months. You walked into their net.”
My jaw tightened. “And you? What are you? Some vigilante? Some creep with too much free time? Or a messiah?”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t rise to the insult.
Instead, he looked at me. Really looked.
For a long time.
Not like a cop.
Not like a man assessing a woman.
Like someone who understood. Whe felt the same pain as I did with hint of much darkness.
“I was there too.”, he said finally. “Same school. Same broken system.”
I laughed — bitter, sharp. “What, you expect me to believe you’re another scholarship ghost?”
He didn’t answer. Not with words.
He pulled out a picture.
Ragini.
Her eyes stared back at me from the faded print. The girl whose post I had found years ago. The girl who vanished. The girl who screamed and was silenced.
“She mattered to me.”, he said. His voice cracked, just barely. “More than I knew back then. Vijay ruined her. The school erased her. But I remember.”
The rage inside me snapped alive. Electric. Burning. The emotional sensation of guilt gone! Carelessness, gone! Overconfidence, gone!!
“Why are you telling me this?”
His answer was quiet. Precise.
“Because I’ve been watching you for years. And I think you’re the weapon I need.”
Weapon?
Not woman.
Not human.
But a weapon.
Something in me — the same hunger that had nearly killed the man at the bar — uncoiled.
“And what?”, I asked, folding my arms. “We team up like some dark crusade? You with the brains, me with the blood?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“I have reach.”, he said. “Connections. Money. Access to things you can’t get alone. You have fire. Fearlessness. Precision. Together, we can do what neither of us could do alone.”
“Which is?”, I asked,
“Burn the whole rotten temple to the ground. Start with Vijay. End with everyone who built him.”
I should’ve laughed.
I should’ve walked out.
Instead, I sat in silence.
Because deep inside…
something smiled.
For the first time in years, I wasn’t alone.
The conversation stretched for hours.
He told me his name — or what I think was his name. Harish.
A legacy kid, like the rest of them. Rich father. Connections. But not like Vijay.
He was a ghost too, but in a different way.
The kind that could slip into parties and disappear from records.
He told me he’d loved Ragini. Quietly. From afar. He hadn’t been brave enough then. Hadn’t spoken up when she vanished. Guilt had eaten him alive since.
And now, he said, he was done being silent.
“Why me?” I asked again.
“There are others. Victims. Survivors. Why not them?”
“Because they’re still scared,” he said. “You’re not.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Fear had left me years ago. What lived inside me now was colder. Sharper. A machine that didn’t stop moving.
He showed me documents. Bank transfers. School records. Proof that Vijay wasn’t just a spoiled heir but part of something larger — a network of families covering for each other.
They weren’t protecting Vijay because he was special.
They were protecting him because protecting him protected all of them.
"His family business?", I asked.
Harish nodded.
Every scandal, every girl, every ruined life was just another page they erased.
And if I wanted my revenge to mean anything, I couldn’t just take Vijay down.
I had to take them all.
But the truth was harder.
I didn’t trust Harish.
Not fully.
He had power. Reach. Secrets I didn’t. And people with that kind of power always wanted something.
The question wasn’t if he would betray me.
It was when?
Still, when he asked me to join him, I couldn’t say no.
Because for the first time since the night of the red humiliation, I felt something that wasn’t pain.
Purpose.
And even if he was lying, even if he planned to use me…
I could use him first.
I stayed that night in his safehouse. Not because I trusted him, but because running wasn’t an option anymore. Too many eyes had seen me. Too many doors were closing.
Police were searching for that man's female murderer.
And as I lay awake on the soft mattress, staring at the ceiling, I whispered Ragini’s name into the dark.
This time, I wasn’t whispering goodbye.
This time, it was a promise.
