I carried her.
I lifted Gita from the blood-soaked floor of our room, her body limp and heavy in my arms like something already half-dead. Her head lolled against my chest, her breathing shallow and ragged, each gasp a small, desperate fight. Warm blood poured from her, soaking through my thin shirt in seconds, spreading across my skin like a second, living layer that clung and cooled too fast. The metallic smell filled my nostrils, thick and sickening. I ran.
I ran through the narrow lanes of Puri at night, past flickering chai stalls where men paused mid-sip to stare, past sleeping street dogs that lifted their heads and growled low in their throats, past families sitting on doorsteps who turned their faces toward the man drenched in red, carrying a broken woman like she was the last thing left in his world.
The hospital was three kilometers away. I do not remember the distance in steps or time. I remember only the weight of her. How light she felt now, how terribly small, when just weeks earlier her belly had been round and full of life, stretching against my palm when I placed my hand there at night. Now she curled into me like a frightened child, her fingers clutching weakly at my arm, slipping, losing strength with every stride.
I felt nothing except the cold, hollow fear clawing inside my chest, freezing my lungs, turning my blood to ice.
We crashed through the emergency doors. A nurse screamed. Orderlies rushed forward with a gurney, their hands pulling her away from me with brutal efficiency. A doctor in blue scrubs barked orders about falling blood pressure, fetal distress, operating theater, now. I stumbled backward until my shoulders hit the cold wall. My hands hung useless at my sides, still dripping. My shirt was black with her blood. Someone placed a palm against my chest and spoke words I could not hear over the roaring in my ears.
I waited.
I sat in a hard plastic chair in the dimly lit hallway. The fluorescent tubes overhead hummed like dying insects. Across from me, a woman cradled a sleeping child, rocking slowly, her eyes distant. A janitor pushed his mop across the tiles, and the water near my feet turned a faint, shameful pink. I stared at my own hands. The blood had dried into dark cracks along the lines of my palms, flaking like old paint.
Hours bled away. Time lost all meaning.
Then the doctor came.
He was a short man with a tired gray mustache and eyes that had seen too many endings. He peeled off his surgical gloves as he walked toward me, the latex snapping softly. He did not sit. He stood over me, shoulders slumped with the weight of what he had to say.
"We could not save the child."
The words landed like stones dropped into still water. After that, I heard nothing. Only static. Only the slow, grinding sound of my entire world collapsing inward.
"Your wife is stable. She will recover physically. But emotionally…" He shook his head, slow and final. "She is going to need time."
Time.
What good was time when it had already taken everything worth living for?
Before they took me away, I turned to the doctor, voice hoarse. "Please... I want to see the child."
The senior officer shook his head. "No. You have no rights to that now. You're under arrest."
I looked at him, then at the closed doors of the operating theater. Gita was still inside somewhere, fighting. I swallowed the knot in my throat.
"Tell her... when she wakes... tell her I'm sorry. Tell her to take care of herself. Please take care of Gita."
The policemen exchanged a glance. They didn't answer. They simply led me out into the night.
The jail was cold and merciless.
Two policemen found me in the hospital corridor. They stood over me with hard faces and asked questions I could not force myself to answer. I told them what had happened, the men, the house, the blood. They wrote it down in small notebooks. Then one of them placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and said I had to come with them.
I did not resist. I did not speak. I felt nothing at all.
Four dead men. Self-defense, they called it. But four corpses are still four corpses, and the law does not forgive easily.
The cell was a concrete box. Bare floor, bare walls, a steel door that clanged shut with finality. A thin mattress lay on a rusted iron frame. A toilet squatted in the corner, stained and stinking. A single bulb burned behind a wire cage, never switching off, casting a sickly yellow light that drilled into my skull.
Days passed in silence.
I sat on the mattress with my back pressed against the rough wall, knees drawn up. Food arrived on a steel tray twice a day: cold dal, sticky rice, sometimes a watery vegetable. I ate mechanically, just enough to keep the body alive.
I thought only of Gita. Was she eating? Was she sleeping through the pain? Did she hate me now? Did she blame me for bringing death into our home?
No one came to visit. Not a single soul.
Three days dragged by like years.
Then the guard rattled the keys.
"You're free."
I stared at him through the bars, uncomprehending.
"What?"
"Someone posted bail. Get out."
I stepped out into the blinding sunlight. The glare slapped my face like an open palm. People hurried past on the pavement, eyes averted, as if they could smell the violence still clinging to my skin.
A sleek black Mercedes waited at the curb, engine purring softly, its body polished to a mirror shine that reflected the dirty street. A man in a crisp dark suit stood beside the rear door, expression blank.
"Mr. Das. Kabhir sir wants to meet you."
Kabhir. Suleiman's boss. The real power that moved behind the curtain.
The meeting took place in a glass-and-steel tower that smelled of expensive perfume and fresh money. We rode the elevator to the top floor in silence.
Kabhir sat behind a massive wooden desk, fifty-something, lean and sharp-eyed. A thin smile played on his lips that never touched the rest of his face. He wore a cream-colored kurta, hair salt-and-pepper and slicked back neatly. His gaze moved over me slowly, cataloging the dried blood on my shirt, the hollow shadows under my eyes, the emptiness in my posture.
"Veda. Sit."
I remained standing.
"Why am I free?"
"Because I paid your bail."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to work for me."
A raw laugh scraped out of my throat, painful and ugly.
"Work for you? You sent men to my house. They killed my baby. They—"
"They acted without orders." He shrugged, casual as if discussing the weather. "Suleiman became… enthusiastic. I have dealt with him."
"I don't want to work for you."
I turned to leave.
"You are not just a soldier, Veda."
I stopped.
"I know what you did in Kashmir. I know what you did in the Northeast. I know about the operations that were never written down. The missions that officially never happened. The villages where men walked in and only you walked out."
I did not turn around.
"I know about Agent 21."
My blood turned to ice in my veins.
I turned back slowly, every muscle tight.
Kabhir was smiling that same thin, practiced smile. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a thick brown file, edges worn from handling. He slid it across the polished desk toward me.
I did not open it. I did not need to. I already knew what lived inside those pages: photographs, reports, names of men who vanished from the earth, places erased from every official map, operations so dark the army would disown me if they ever saw daylight.
"The Special Squad," Kabhir said quietly. "You were their best. Twenty-three missions in six years. Every target eliminated. Every operation flawless. They called you the Ghost of the Eastern Front because no one ever saw you coming and no one ever lived to tell."
He leaned back, steepled his fingers.
"Do you know how many people in this country know about Agent 21? Perhaps twelve. The Prime Minister. The Army Chief. Three intelligence directors. And now me."
"How?"
"I pay people well. A man in the records office needed money for his daughter's wedding. He sold me the file for fifty thousand rupees. The best investment I ever made."
He rose from his chair, walked around the desk, and leaned against its edge, arms crossed, studying me like a valuable weapon he had finally acquired.
"You killed seventy-three men in one night in the Kupwara sector. They were hiding deep inside a cave system. You went in alone. You came out covered in their blood. The army gave you a medal that has no official name, then buried the report so deep it might as well not exist."
He picked up the file, flipped it open, and showed grainy black-and-white photographs taken from drones or satellites.
"The Lashkar commander in Sopore. The Hizb leader in Kulgam. The ISI handler in Muzaffarabad. All dead. All by your hand. All erased from every record except this one."
He closed the file and dropped it back onto the desk with a soft thud.
"You are not a soldier anymore, Veda. You are a weapon. The kind that does not officially exist. The kind that can walk into a room full of armed men and walk out alone. The kind that never misses. The kind that never fails."
He returned to his chair and sat down, eyes locked on mine.
"I have a problem. A rival syndicate has been eating away at my territory for two years. They have killed twenty of my men. They have burned three of my warehouses. They think I am weak. They think I will not strike back."
His voice dropped, low and venomous.
"I do not want a war. Wars are loud. Wars bring police and headlines. I want one man. One night. One clear, unforgettable message."
He pointed directly at me.
"I want you. For one month. You kill the men on my list. You make it clean. You make it silent. When it is finished, you walk away. Free. Rich. And I burn this file. No one will ever know Agent 21 existed."
I stared at him, the weight of every ghost I had created pressing down on my shoulders.
"Why me? You have other killers."
"Other killers?" He laughed, a short, dry sound. "I have thugs with guns who can hit a target when they are sober. I do not have a man who once killed seventy-three terrorists in a single night with nothing but a knife and his bare hands. I do not have a man who was trained to do things the world is not allowed to know about."
He opened another drawer and slid a photograph across the desk.
A middle-aged man, bald, with a jagged scar across his left cheek. He sat in a lush garden, smiling, drinking tea, completely at ease.
"Victor Costa. Portuguese. He controls the biggest drug route from Goa to Mumbai. He is the one carving away my territory. He is the one who ordered my men killed. He believes he is untouchable. Fifty bodyguards. He changes houses every week. Three cars, jammers, constant movement."
He tapped the photograph with one finger.
"You find him. You end him. And you end the five men beneath him who think they can take his place. One week. Six men. Then you are done."
I looked at the smiling face in the photo. The man had a daughter somewhere. A wife. A life built on blood and white powder.
"I have killed enough men," I said, voice flat.
"You have killed enough for ten lifetimes. But not yet for Gita."
I froze.
"Gita is still in the hospital. She is stable. She is safe for now. But the police have many questions about what happened in your house. Four dead men. That raises a lot of questions. I can make those questions disappear. I can make sure no one ever asks them again."
He leaned back, that cold smile returning.
I looked at him. At the file on his desk. At the smile that promised everything and meant nothing.
"No."
I turned and walked out. I did not look back.
The hospital again.
The corridors smelled the same. The lights buzzed the same. The air tasted of disinfectant and old pain. I walked straight to the room where they had taken Gita.
It was empty.
The bed was neatly made. The monitors were gone. The room had been scrubbed clean, sanitized, as if no one had ever bled or cried or lost a child there.
I found a young nurse at the station. She had glasses and a weary face.
"Where is Gita Das? The woman brought in three days ago?"
She checked her computer, typed, scrolled.
"She was discharged."
"When?"
"Yesterday morning. Her family came and took her."
Family. Her parents. They had taken her home.
I left the hospital. Walked to the bus stop. Rode the crowded bus to her parents' house near the temple.
The gate was locked. I rang the bell. Waited. Rang again.
An old neighbor woman stepped out from the next house, wearing a faded sari, her white hair pulled back tightly. Her eyes sharpened when she recognized me.
"They are not here."
"Where did they go?"
She studied me for a long moment, face hardening like stone.
"They left yesterday. Took their daughter with them. Did not tell anyone where."
"Did they leave a number? An address?"
She shook her head slowly.
"They said they do not want to see you anymore. They said you brought this tragedy on all of them. On her."
She turned and went back inside, closing her door with quiet finality.
I stood there as the sun sank behind the temple spires. The evening bells began to ring, deep and mournful. I stood outside a locked gate and a closed door with nowhere left to go, the last light bleeding out of the sky.
Home.
Our small room. The walls still peeled in the same pale green patches. The narrow cot waited where it always had. Gita's slippers lay neatly by the door. The yellow lampshade hung crookedly. On the table sat a steel plate with two cold rotis under a cover, untouched since the night everything broke.
I sat on the floor, back against the cot. This was the same cot where my mother had drawn her last breath years ago. The same cot where Gita had held me on nights when the weight of the world felt unbearable.
I sat in the growing dark and did not move.
Hours slipped away.
I walked to the corner shop and used the public phone. I dialed Gita's number.
"The number you are trying to reach is not available."
I tried her mother's number.
"The number you are trying to reach is not available."
Her father's number.
"The number you are trying to reach is not available."
Again. And again. Each mechanical voice drove another nail into my chest.
I put the receiver down and walked back to the empty room. I sat on the floor once more and stared at the cracked wall until my eyes burned.
She was gone. Her family had taken her. They blamed me. And perhaps they were right to do so.
The phone at the corner shop rang.
The shopkeeper shouted my name into the street. I walked over and picked up the receiver with a hand that no longer felt like my own.
"Hello, Veda."
Kabhir's voice was smooth, unhurried, almost gentle.
"I told you. I do not want to work for you."
"I know. But I think you will change your mind."
"I will not."
"Have you seen your wife?"
I said nothing.
"She is not at the hospital. She is not at her parents' house. She is not anywhere you can find her."
My blood turned to ice, a brutal, freezing wave that crashed through every vein.
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?"