KATHA

34 KALKI - SECRETS

Two months later

The deafening gunshot shattered the stillness of the cruel night, its echoes reverberating across my hollow chest where a tempest ravaged my heart. Assaulting whatever was left of me. Time slowed to a crawl as she fell to the ground and shattered my world. My breaths ran hollow as the jagged shards of reality dug into my skin, bleeding into the ground and surrounding me. Blood. Blood. Red. There was so much red. Drowning me. I was drowning.

A laugh echoed in my head. "You thought I wouldn't know ? You were always mine boy. Any woman foolish enough would be taken out. If I can't have you, no one can." I didn't realise when I retrieved my gun at a man trying to get close to her or how I was now a few steps away from where lay the woman I loved more than life itself. She was bleeding.

Blood. Blood. Blood. There was so much blood. Soaking her limp figure red.

It was a pain too profound, too agonizing to bear, and I was left standing there, frozen in time, forever haunted by the memory of the love I had possibly lost in the cold embrace of that moonlit night.

Someone was shaking me. Was it Sharma ? Kiss ? I didn't know. They were shouting something at me. At her.

They were just yelling.

"Kalki !"

"Kalki !"

"Kalki !"

"Kalki !" A familiar voice and a hand on my shoulder hauled me out of my mind. It'd been two months. It'd been two months of complete agony and I still had that bloodstained night playing in my mind like a dark dance of unforgiving, cold, death. It was etched in there like a cruel, unyielding brand. A pain that dug deep into the crevices of my being, wrapping it's long, unrelenting, spectral fingers around my heart. Every memory was as vivid and real as the last.

Every breath felt like I was inhaling shards of glass that pierced through my insides and ran along my bloodstream, cutting through my veins.

"You zoned out again. Easy, Kiki. You need to be strong."

"I'm fine, Kiss. I swear."

"So what have you decided ?"

"About what ?"

"It's not her heart that's beating in her chest, Kiki. She has the right to know. Keeping her in dark for long might--"

"She needs healing, Kiss. It's been just two months, don't you understand ? She's too fragile to be broken by that news. I can bear her hatred." I said, my eyes fixed on the wooden antique of a naked woman on the table by the vase. I knew well that I couldn't bear her hatred. I'd rather stop breathing, but if it meant keeping her safe and healthy, I'd gladly be damned.

"And what do we say if she asks for Sharma again ?" I was surprised I could handle yet another jolt of pain wrecking my body. The mention of Rishikesh Sharma took me back every time. He'd sacrificed a lot that night two months ago. If it weren't for him, I would've lost her forever.

Because my heart didn't match with hers.

"What we've been saying. Make it believable. Do you have another letter left ?"