The man's voice came through the phone like oil sliding over still water.
"Hello, Veda."
I did not answer right away. I listened to the calm rhythm of his breathing and pictured him lounging in that oversized leather chair, legs crossed, a faint smile playing across his lips.
"Where is she?"
"She's with me."
The world stopped turning.
Ice flooded my veins, sharp and merciless.
"You're lying."
"Am I?"
My phone vibrated once.
A single message arrived.
The image loaded slowly, grainy and cruel.
Gita.
She sat slumped against a damp concrete wall inside some dark room. Her cheek was split open, swollen purple and black, blood crusting along the deep gash. Her eyes, the same eyes I had woken up to every morning for years, were wide with raw animal terror. Her pupils had dilated into black voids. Fresh blood stained the collar of her nightdress.
They had beaten her badly.
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER!"
My voice tore out raw and broken. I screamed into the receiver while my free hand crushed the edge of the shop counter until the wood cracked and splintered beneath my fingers. The shopkeeper stumbled backward, palms raised in surrender.
Kabhir laughed. Low. Rich. The laugh of a man who savored every second of another's pain.
"Kill me? Like you killed my four men? Hahaha."
"I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU."
"You took four of mine. Fair is fair. Debts must be paid."
I shook violently. Tears burned hot paths down my face. My breath came in ragged gasps as if the air itself had turned against me.
The phone nearly slipped from my sweat-slick palm. The world narrowed to nothing but the sound of my own drowning lungs.
"By the way," he continued, casual as if discussing the price of fish, "your woman is truly beautiful. We asked her about you. Not a single word. So loyal. Inspiring, really."
"WHERE IS SHE?"
"Are you home right now? Good. Open the freezer."
I moved like a ghost through the darkened kitchen. The old refrigerator hummed weakly. My hand trembled only once as I pulled open the small freezer compartment at the top.
A white styrofoam box waited inside, sealed with clear tape, frost clinging to its sides like a shroud.
I peeled it open.
A single finger rested on a bed of half-melted ice. Pale. Waxy. The nail was painted that soft pink she had chosen last month, the shade she said made her feel pretty. A thin gold ring circled the base, the same ring I had slipped onto her finger two years ago on a quiet evening in Puri.
Gita's finger.
I knew that ring better than my own heartbeat.
Everything inside me stopped.
The street noise outside vanished. The ceiling fan ceased its lazy spin. There was only silence and the cold weight of that small white box in my hands.
"Do you like my gift?" Kabhir asked, voice dripping with delight. "Still fresh, brother. Cut it off just for you."
The box slipped from my fingers and clattered to the floor. The finger rolled out slowly, coming to rest against the leg of the kerosene stove. The gold ring caught the weak light from the window and glinted mockingly.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT!"
I dropped to my knees on the dirty tiles, forehead nearly touching the ground, screaming into the phone until my throat tore.
"Nothing much. Just one month of work. You kill who I tell you to kill. Seventy names. Then you get her back."
My mother's voice echoed faintly in the back of my mind. Never lie, beta. Never cheat.
I stared at the severed finger on the floor. At the pink nail. At the ring that once meant forever.
"I'll do it."
Humans are strange creatures. For love, for their own blood, they will burn the world and smile while doing it.
I killed.
Thirty days. Seventy souls.
During those thirty days I became something else entirely. Something hollow. Something that moved through the city like smoke, silent, precise, without mercy or hesitation. The man who once laughed with Gita on the rooftop died the moment that finger rolled across the kitchen floor. What remained was a shell. Cold. Empty. A machine built only for death.
The first kill was an old man named Murli in Bhubaneswar. Eighty-seven years old, spine bent like a question mark, hands shaking as he clutched a walking stick carved with tiny elephants. He sat on the edge of his cot, staring at an old photograph of a girl in school uniform, perhaps his granddaughter.
He looked up at me when I entered. No shouting. No begging.
"You will burn in hell," he whispered.
I ended him with one clean motion. His body folded neatly onto the thin mattress. Blood soaked into the fabric, dark and spreading. I felt nothing. Not satisfaction. Not guilt. Only the cold absence of everything.
The second was a woman in her forties who washed Kabhir's dirty money through her beauty parlor. Soft hands. Gold bangles that clinked softly when she moved. She offered me tea with a polite smile. I waited until she sat down, then opened her throat while the kettle was still whistling.
The third was a sixteen-year-old boy who ran courier for Kabhir's crew. Nothing more. He still wore his school uniform when I caught him in the alley behind his school. His mother had called him three times that day. I made sure he never answered the fourth.
After that the kills melted together into one long red river.
A man in Kolkata.
An entire family in Cuttack, three generations, because one son had spoken to the police. I stood outside their modest house for nearly an hour, watching the old grandmother light incense on the balcony and murmur prayers. When I finally stepped inside I left no one alive to scream for help.
Every night I returned to an empty room, wiped blood from my hands with rags I later burned, and told myself the same lie. This is for Gita. When it is over we will leave this city. We will be happy again. We will forget.
I lied to a dead man.
Thirty days passed. Seventy lives erased.
The final kill was a minor government clerk in a Kolkata hotel room. I did it quickly and cleanly, then left him floating in the overflowing bathtub with water running pink.
Kabhir called as I walked out into the humid night.
"Congratulations, partner. You've earned your prize. Thanks for the excellent game."
People's lives were nothing but entertainment to him.
"Where is she?"
He gave me the address. An abandoned textile warehouse on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, near the old railway tracks. I was already in a taxi before he finished speaking.
The warehouse smelled of rust, mildew, and old rat shit. A single bare bulb swung from a frayed wire, throwing sickly yellow light across the concrete floor.
One wooden chair stood in the center.
Gita sat tied to it.
She was alive, barely. Her chest rose and fell in shallow mechanical breaths. Zip ties bit deep into her wrists, cutting into flesh. The night suit I had bought her last Diwali was torn and crusted with blood and filth. Her arms bore countless cigarette burns and shallow cuts. Her left leg was broken at an unnatural angle. Her face, her once beautiful face, was a ruin of bruises and swelling. One eye was swollen shut and bandaged. The other stared blankly into nothing.
"Gita..."
The word came out small and broken, like a child's plea.
I dropped to my knees before her. My fingers brushed her cold cheek. She did not flinch. She did not blink. She did not recognize me.
She was empty.
I cut the zip ties. Her arms fell limp like dead weight. When I lifted her she felt like nothing, a bundle of brittle bones wrapped in bruised skin. Her head lolled against my shoulder as I carried her out into the night.
The hospital was the same one we had visited before. Same harsh fluorescent lights. Same stench of antiseptic and slow death.
She never woke up.
Days blurred into nights. I sat beside her bed, holding her hand, watching the ventilator force air into her ruined body. Tubes snaked from her arms. Machines beeped their indifferent rhythm.
The doctor finally came. Gray mustache. Eyes heavy with too many losses.
"Her body cannot take any more. The damage is extensive."
She died on a Thursday.
I was holding her hand when the monitors flatlined. A long piercing tone filled the room. Nurses rushed in. Someone shoved me aside. Someone yanked the curtain around the bed.
I stood in the hallway and watched them fail.
Her hand grew cold in mine.
Then I laughed.
It began as a low tremor deep in my chest, something dark and broken clawing its way out. The sound that escaped my throat was not human. It scraped against the sterile walls like shattered glass. A sad evil laugh, cold as the grave yet dripping with something far worse than madness.
I laughed until I cried. Then I cried until I laughed again, the two twisting together into something grotesque. I sank to my knees in the middle of the hospital corridor, forehead pressed to the cold floor, body shaking with that terrible joyless laughter.
"JAGANNATH!" I screamed at the ceiling, voice cracking like thunder. "ARE YOU STILL WATCHING! YOU TOOK EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING!"
Silence answered. As it always had.
That same night, after the doctors pronounced her dead, I carried Gita's body out of the hospital myself. No one stopped me. No one asked questions. The corridors were quiet and empty at that hour. I wrapped her in a simple white cloth and took her to the banks of the Mahanadi under the cover of darkness.
There was no priest. No relatives gathered around. No one came to offer prayers or even notice the lone man building a small pyre on the muddy shore. It was just me, the river, and the body of the only person I had ever loved.
I laid her down gently on the pile of dry wood and scraps I had gathered. Her face, even in death, still carried the bruises and scars they had given her. I arranged the wood carefully around her with steady hands. Then I poured the kerosene and struck the match.
The flames rose slowly at first, then roared to life, hungry and bright. I sat alone on the muddy bank and watched her burn. The fire consumed her bit by bit. Skin blackened. Flesh melted. Bones cracked in the heat. Smoke curled upward and drifted over the dark river, carrying what was left of her into the sky.
No one came. No one heard the crackle of the flames or the quiet splash of water against the shore. It was a private cremation performed by a man who had already died inside.
As the pyre burned through the night, something inside me burned with it.
Veda died there on that riverbank beside the flames.
The man who had loved her, the man who had once believed in mercy and tomorrow, turned to ash along with her body. What remained kneeling in the dirt was only a cold shell. A soul-less thing with dead eyes and a sad evil smile carved permanently into its face.
When the last ember died and nothing but gray bones and fine ash remained, I gathered what was left of her in a small cloth. I scattered most of it into the flowing river, watching the current take her away forever.
But the guilt and the sadness refused to leave with the ashes.
The next night the emptiness became too heavy to bear in silence. I bought a bottle of cheap whiskey from a shop that never closed. I sat on the rooftop where Gita and I once planned our future, where we had named the child we never had. The liquor burned like fire down my throat. I welcomed the pain, hoping it would drown the guilt that clawed at my chest for every life I had taken and for failing to protect the only thing that mattered.
After the second bottle the burning stopped. After the third there was only a deeper emptiness mixed with crushing guilt.
Somewhere in the sleeping city a temple bell rang.
I stood at the edge of the roof and looked down at the dark street below. One step. One moment of weightlessness. It would be so easy.
But I did not jump.
Not yet.
I turned away from the edge, the sad evil smile still carved into my face through the haze of alcohol and grief. My eyes were dead. My soul was gone. Only cold purpose remained beneath the layers of sadness and guilt.
"Everyone," I whispered into the night wind, voice hoarse from drinking and screaming.
Piece by piece.
I would erase every last soul connected to Kabhir. I would burn his world to ash and laugh that broken laugh while I did it, letting the guilt fuel the fire instead of stopping it.
The man who once loved was dead.
What walked the streets of Bhubaneswar now was something far worse.
Something that felt nothing but cold rage and buried guilt.
Something that smiled while it killed.