"Hello, Veda."
His voice was smooth, unhurried. I could hear him breathing, could imagine him sitting in that big leather chair, smiling.
"Where is she?"
"She's with me."
The world stopped.
Cold.
Ice in my veins.
"You're lying."
"Am I?"
---
My phone buzzed.
A message.
A picture.
Gita.
In a dark room.
The photo was grainy, taken from above. Gita was sitting on a concrete floor, her back against a wall. Her face was turned toward the camera, and her cheek was swollen, purple, split open along the cheekbone. There was blood on her collar. Her eyes—I knew those eyes—were wide, fixed, the pupils blown with fear.
Bleeding.
Someone had hit her.
Her face swollen.
Her eyes—
Fear.
Pure fear.
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?!"
My voice cracked. I was screaming into the phone, my free hand gripping the counter so hard the wood splintered. The shopkeeper backed away, his hands up.
Kabhir laughed.
It was a low, rich sound, the laugh of a man who enjoys his work.
"Kill me? Like you killed my four men? Hahaha."
"I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU—"
"You killed four of my people. So it's bad for me to not do anything, you know? You don't know? Always pay back what you owe..."
I was shaking.
Crying.
Screaming.
I didn't know anymore.
The phone slipped in my hand. My vision blurred. I could hear my own breath, ragged, too fast, like I was drowning.
"By the way," he said, casual, like discussing weather, "your woman is so beautiful. Lol. We even asked her about you. She didn't say a word. So loyal. Ahhh."
"WHERE IS SHE?"
"Tell me—are you at your house right now?"
I froze.
"Open the freezer."
---
I walked to the kitchen.
The kitchen was dark. The kerosene stove was where we'd left it. The wooden block on the counter held only two knives now. I opened the freezer—the small compartment at the top of our old refrigerator, the one that barely worked.
A white box inside.
Small.
Cold.
It was a styrofoam box, the kind they use in fish markets, sealed with clear tape. Frost clung to the outside. My hand hovered over it for a long moment.
I opened it.
A finger.
Human.
It lay on a bed of melting ice, pale, the skin waxy. The nail was painted a soft pink—the color Gita had bought last month, the one she said made her feel pretty. A thin gold ring circled the third finger, the one I'd put on her hand two years ago.
Gita's finger.
I recognized her ring.
Still on it.
---
My breathing stopped.
My heart stopped.
Everything stopped.
The world went silent. The street noise outside vanished. The ceiling fan stopped turning. I was standing in my kitchen, holding a styrofoam box, and there was nothing else.
"Do you..." Kabhir's voice was happy, gleeful, "...like my gift? The finger is still fresh, dude."
I couldn't speak.
Couldn't move.
Couldn't think.
The box slipped from my hand, hit the floor. The finger rolled out, came to rest against the leg of the stove, the ring glinting in the weak light from the window.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?!" I finally screamed.
My voice tore out of me, raw, ruined. I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, the receiver pressed to my ear, tears running down my face, and I didn't care who saw, who heard, who knew.
"Nothing. Just one month job. You need to kill some people."
My mother's words.
Never lie, beta. Never cheat.
I looked at the finger on the floor. The ring. The pink nail.
"I'll do it."
---
Once I read a book. Someone said: humans are strange creatures. For love, for their own people, for their loved ones, they can even kill.
They weren't wrong.
I killed.
Thirty days. Seventy kills. That was the deal.
I didn't ask questions. I didn't learn names. I just moved through the city like a shadow, doing what I was trained to do. What I was made to do.
---
The first kill was an old man in Bhubaneswar. His name was Murli. Eighty-seven years old. His spine was curved, his hands trembled. He used a walking stick carved with elephants.
I walked into his room. The door was unlocked. He was sitting on the edge of his cot, a photograph in his hands. A girl in a school uniform. His granddaughter, maybe.
He looked at me. Didn't shout. Didn't beg. Just looked.
"You will burn in hell," he whispered.
I killed him. One movement. Quick. His body folded onto the cot. Blood soaked into the thin mattress.
I felt nothing.
---
The second was a woman in her forties. She laundered money through a beauty parlor. She had soft hands and wore gold bangles that clinked when she moved. She offered me tea when I walked in. I waited until she sat down.
The third was a boy of sixteen. He ran courier for Kabhir's men. Nothing more. He had a mother who called him three times a day.
I killed him in an alley behind his school. He was still wearing his uniform.
---
The kills blurred together after that. A man in Kolkata. A family in Cuttack—three generations under one roof, because Kabhir said one of the sons had talked to the police. I stood outside for an hour, watching the grandmother light incense on the balcony.
When I walked in, I didn't leave anyone to call for help.
---
Every day, a new name. Every night, blood on my hands.
I told myself it was for Gita. I told myself, sitting in empty rooms, wiping my hands with rags I burned afterward. I told myself, walking home at dawn, the city waking up around me, the chai stalls opening, children going to school.
I told myself everything would be okay. We'd start a new life. We'd be happy. We'd forget.
I lied.
---
Thirty days passed. Seventy men and women. Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. People with names I didn't bother to learn. People with lives I ended because a man in a cream kurta told me to.
The last kill was in Kolkata. A minor functionary who had signed the wrong papers. I did it in a hotel room, quick, clean. Left him in the bathtub with the water running.
Kabhir called as I was walking out.
"Congratulations, partner. You win your prize. Thanks for playing with me."
People's lives are just games to him.
"Where is she?"
He gave me an address. A warehouse on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, near the railway tracks. I was in a taxi before he finished speaking.
---
The Warehouse
The building was an old textile mill, abandoned for years. Windows boarded. Walls stained with rust and mildew. Inside, the air was thick with dust and the smell of rat droppings. A single bare bulb hung from a wire, casting yellow light on the concrete floor.
Empty.
One chair. A wooden chair in the center of the room.
Gita sat in it.
She was alive. Her chest rose and fell. Her hands were tied to the arms with plastic zip ties, the edges digging into her wrists. Her clothes were the same ones she'd been wearing that night—the night suit I'd bought her last Diwali. Now stained. Torn.
They had done things to her. Things I won't name. Her arms were covered in marks. Cuts ran along her forearms. Her left leg was bent at an angle that legs don't bend. Her face was swollen, bruised. One eye was closed, the socket bandaged.
The other eye stared at nothing.
"Gita..."
My voice came out like a child's. Small. Lost.
I fell to my knees. Reached out. Touched her face. Her skin was cool, dry.
She didn't react. Didn't move. Didn't blink.
Just sat there. Empty.
Like me.
I cut the zip ties with the knife I still carried. Her arms fell limp. I lifted her from the chair—she weighed nothing. A bundle of bones wrapped in skin. Her head lolled against my shoulder.
I carried her out.
---
The Hospital Again
Days passed. The same hospital. The same fluorescent lights. The same smell of antiseptic and fear.
She didn't wake.
Her body lay in the bed, tubes running from her arms. Machines breathed for her. I sat beside her for hours, holding her hand, watching her chest rise and fall with the rhythm of the ventilator.
The doctor came. Gray mustache. Tired eyes.
"Her body can't handle it anymore. The damage is too extensive."
---
She died on a Thursday.
I was holding her hand when it happened. The machines began to beep—a long, flat note. Nurses rushed in. Someone pushed me aside. Someone shouted. Someone pulled a curtain.
I stood in the hallway and watched them try to bring her back.
Her hand went cold in mine.
---
I laughed.
It started as a tremor in my chest, a pressure building behind my ribs. Then it came out—a sound that wasn't quite human. A laugh that scraped the walls.
Then I cried.
The laughter broke apart into something else. Something wet and ragged. I was on my knees in the hospital hallway, my forehead pressed to the cold floor, and I couldn't stop.
Then I laughed again. Laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.
"JAGANNATH!" I screamed at the ceiling. The god I had prayed to since childhood. The god whose temple I had walked past every day in Puri. "ARE YOU STILL WATCHING?! YOU TOOK EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING!"
No answer.
There never is.
---
That night, I drank for the first time. A bottle of whiskey from a shop that was still open at two in the morning. I sat on the roof of our building. The same roof where I'd sat with Gita. The same balcony where we'd named our child.
The liquid burned going down. I wanted it to burn. After the first bottle, there was nothing. After the second, less than nothing.
From somewhere in the city, a temple bell rang. The same bells that had marked time my whole life.
I stood at the edge of the roof. Looked down at the street. It would be easy. One step. One moment of falling.
But I couldn't. Not yet.
Not before I erased everyone connected to Kabhir.
The words came out quiet. Cold. Final.
"Everyone."
---
Piece by piece.
That night, a monster was born.