(Book 5) Hayden Mackay and The Pride of Haima-Endira

23.3 Grounded in reality

I shrieked feeling a jolt of lightning lancing through my gut. I fell on my knees, when a terrible sensation gripped my insides, as though falling off a steep cliff. And then an explosion of pain blinded me, to have a vision in my mind.

"Money! Land! The entire kingdom finally belongs to me!" Bhupathi Garg cried with joy and laughed viciously.

He dropped a knife aside and held a document up pointing at the signatures. He crouched beside a fourteen-year-old girl and forced her to look at it. She skimmed through it. Her innocent, yet fearful face was blotchy, soaked with sweat and tears. She held her stare into the document, her eyes beginning to enlarge. A look of greed and selfishness crossed her face, mouth slightly parted, an expression that stated a desire to want all of it to herself.

"Look, girl. Look!" Bhupathi seethed. "Only if you had this old woman put her signature years ago, she could have saved herself and me from all the trouble we went through."

There was a whimper and a womanly moan of pain. A bloodied hand came into the picture, wanting to hold the girl by her shoulder. She looked down at the dying woman, breathing steadily and clutching the wrinkly palm with hers. There was something going on in her mind, something beyond one's expectations from a fourteen-year-old.

There was a sudden sound of footsteps coming closer. Bhupathi stood alert and observant. "Someone's coming," he said, "We need to stop him before he takes Premila to the infirmary.  We need to buy a few minutes for her to die peacefully." He sniggered evilly and looked back at the girl. "I will leave you two alone. Feel free to make a last minute memory. Let's go, Varchas."

Two shadows fell on the girl's face and distanced. The door opened and then closed, the sun's rays that had penetrating inside just for a second startled her a little. But keeping her face expressionless, she kept staring at the woman, who was moaning and groaning with pain.

"There's no one inside, you can leave." A man's voice said, which wasn't Bhupathi's.

"Thanks for the information but let me look for myself." It was someone very well known.

The argument continued for a few minutes, and here the girl was done sitting idle and staring at the woman. Still keeping her face expressionless, she leaned a bit and held the knife in both her hands. The woman gasped when she lifted the knife up, with the pointy edge directed at the woman.

"No! No!" the woman croaked, "Nazira, dear..."

The girl being deaf wouldn't have mattered, she wasn't going to listen anyway. Her pretty face turned dangerous, sickeningly filled with lust for money. The woman moaned and cried, and then yelled seeing the razor sharp knife drawing forcefully closer.

"No...!"

The woman shrieked and at once the entire room filled with dead silence. The girl drove the knife into an already dying woman's chest. Blood splattered on to her perfectly sculpted face making her breathe the metallic smell. She pulled the knife and drew it into her heart for the second time. The door suddenly banged open, with a sheen of sunlight falling on her face. Getting alert, she quickly let the knife go and fell on the body of the woman crying. It was a pretend cry. The cry that could melt the hearts of the people who knew how to sympathize, to love, to shower affection.

A man crouched down beside the dead body and put his hand on her head, staring down with disbelief. She was still crying and quickly studied him and his actions. When the man wasn't paying attention at her but at the dead body, a small smile curled on her lips. She knew...Shourya was so going to come in handy.