Cid Vs The Eye

Chapter 5: Shattered Trust

The Hospital — Dawn's Unforgiving Light

Mumbai General's corridors stretched out under flickering tube lights, each one humming faintly, as if even the electricity in this building was tired. The smell of antiseptic sat thick in the air, undercut by something harder to name — the particular smell of a night that had gone very wrong.

Outside the ICU, the CID team had folded themselves into plastic chairs meant for short visits, not all-night vigils. Nobody had slept. Nobody had really spoken either, not properly — just fragments, half-sentences, silences that stretched longer each time.

ACP Pradyuman paced the width of the corridor like a man who couldn't sit still without his thoughts catching up to him. His uniform, usually pressed to the point of intimidation, hung wrinkled off his frame. His hair, always combed back with military precision, had come loose in places. It wasn't age that had worn him down overnight — it was the specific, crushing weight of having failed to protect someone he thought of as his own.

Through the reinforced glass, Shreya lay still on a hospital bed that seemed to swallow her small frame. Monitors blinked around her — green, blue, amber — the only things in the room that seemed alive. The doctors had called her condition critical, not because of what the bullet or blade had done, but because of what her own mind had done to survive the night — shutting down completely, refusing to surface.

When ACP Pradyuman finally spoke, his voice was flat with exhaustion, but there was steel underneath it.

ACP Pradyuman: "Mayank ko forensic pahuncha diya? Sabko inform kar diya properly? DCP ko, headquarters ko, media team ko?"

Abhijeet looked up, his hands clasped so tightly his knuckles had gone white. His eyes — the ones that could catch a lie from across a room — looked dull now, burned through by something colder than anger.

Abhijeet: "Haan sir. Salunkhe sahab khud body receive kar rahe hain. PR team ready hai media briefing ke liye, lekin abhi tak kuch officially announce nahi kiya. Headquarters mein situation report file ho chuki hai."

The silence that followed felt longer than it was. ACP Pradyuman stopped pacing, his hands opening and closing like he was trying to grip something that kept slipping away.

ACP Pradyuman: "Raat ko bureau mein hua kya hai... Shreya ne Mayank ko maar diya! Aur kyun kiya usne ye... main use kabhi maaf nahi karunga! Kitni baar kaha hai maine, koi bhi personal masla office mein mat laao!"

His voice cracked on the last line — not from weakness, but from something rawer. A father's fury at a world that had let his daughter be hurt while he slept peacefully at home.

Daya rose from his chair slowly, deliberately — the way a man moves when he's already decided something and there's no talking him out of it.

Daya: "Agar Shreya ne Mayank ko maara hai, sir, to main aapko saaf keh raha hun — bilkul sahi kiya usne. Kuch galat nahi kiya. Aur main Shreya ke saath hun, poori tarah. Koi usse haath tak nahi lagayega — chahe DCP ho ya koi aur."

His eyes locked with ACP Pradyuman's, and there wasn't a flicker of hesitation in them.

Abhijeet stood beside him, twenty years of partnership settling behind his words like a wall.

Abhijeet: "Bilkul sahi keh raha hai Daya. Haan sir — DCP Chitrole bhi nahi. Zaroorat padi to hum khud unse baat karenge. Koi Shreya ko pressurise nahi kar sakta."

ACP Pradyuman's face flushed — not because their loyalty surprised him, but because their open defiance told him exactly how badly they'd all failed her.