Flashback – Two Years Ago
Aariz's POV
I've never known a pain like this.
Lying on the cracked earth, blood pooling beneath me, I stared at her- Fatima.
The world spun, and the sharp bite of pain from my shoulder and thigh was the only thing tethering me to reality. But that wasn't what hurt the most. No, the most agonizing pain came from the betrayal—the realization that the woman I had trusted with everything, the one I had poured my heart into, was no longer the woman I had loved.
Two gunshots. Two moments when I thought my life would end. One to my shoulder, the other to my thigh. Each bullet tore through my body, but neither had been aimed at something vital.
I could feel my body giving in to the blood loss, my limbs weakening, but my mind was still screaming. Why?
"Was any of it real?" My voice barely rose above a whisper, hoarse and cracked with the strain of disbelief.
She didn't respond immediately. She stood there, silent, the gun still in her hand. Fatima. She was no longer the woman I had trusted. Her face was unreadable, emotion buried deep beneath the cold mask she wore. Yet, I could still see it—the flicker of hesitation in her eyes.
I staggered forward, struggling to stand despite the agony. My legs buckled beneath me, and I fell to one knee.
"You promised me," I rasped. "You promised this wasn't a game. That we were in this together." I coughed, blood dribbling from the corner of my mouth. "Do you even care about me? Or was I just another part of your mission?"
Her hand tightened on the trigger, her gaze unwavering. The air between us grew heavy, like a thousand unspoken truths hung in the silence.
And then she fired again.
The bullet tore through my leg, a searing pain that brought me to the ground. But this time... this time also, it wasn't aimed at my heart. It wasn't to kill me. I felt the pain, the agony, but I understood it now.
She didn't want to end my life. She wanted to harm me, incapacitate me- punish me- but she didn't want me dead. Not yet.
My breathing was ragged, my head swimming. I looked up at her, disbelief flooding my senses.
She's not going to kill me.
That realization was like a cold wave crashing over me. She was a trained assassin. She knew how to kill. She had done it countless times before. And yet, she hadn't.
Her hesitation... it spoke louder than anything she could have said. It was a small flicker of humanity, a brief moment of doubt in her cold, calculated mind. I could see it now—the conflict in her eyes. She was still operating on her mission, but there was something deeper, something more human buried beneath it all.
"Who are you?" I whispered, struggling to hold on to consciousness. "Fatima... who are you?"
She didn't answer at first. Her eyes flickered, and then she finally spoke, her voice low and steady.
"I never lied about what I felt," she said, her words cutting through the pain and confusion. "Just about who I was."
She didn't look back. She didn't wait for me to respond. The moment was gone. She was already turning away, walking into the dark.
I wanted to scream after her, to ask why- why she had done this to me. But my body wouldn't respond. My strength was slipping away, and all I could do was watch as she walked further and further into the distance.
The woman I had loved was gone.
The woman who had shown me kindness, who had made me believe in something more than the mission... she was gone, replaced by a cold agent who cared only for the task at hand.
But at least... at least, she hadn't killed me. She had wounded me- yes. Left me broken and bleeding on the battlefield. But I wasn't dead.
That small flicker of hope, however brief, was all that remained as the darkness closed in around me.
Giriraj's POV
The night was too quiet for Karachi.
Crouched behind a camouflaged lookout post carved into the edge of a sand bluff, I had eyes on them - her and the boy - one last time.
The soldier who once manned this post was gone. Not my doing. Not directly. But war always leaves vacancies for men like me. And I fill them well.
The old binoculars pressed firm against my brow. A relic from a dead commando, too heavy for civilians, perfect for nights like this. I didn't need audio. I had her body language. I had his eyes. And I had a mouth that moved in perfect sync with syllables I could read like breath on glass.
"Why are you here, Aariz?"
So that's his name on her lips. Aariz. The way she says it - low, strained — tells me more than her whole file ever did.
Her fingers twitch. She's calculating. She's grieving. She's deciding.
"You're not supposed to be here." His answer. Defiant. But pleading. The fool.
They stand like two forces that should never meet - storm and silence. I know what's coming. I told her to cut him off. To disappear. But she - she chose this chaos.
Because he was never supposed to mean anything. But sometimes… I think he might have started to.
The gun raises.
I don't move.
Because I've already seen this in her nightmares.
She fires.
He drops.
And for a second, the world pauses. Then, she crumbles - just a shift of weight, a crack in her spine, a breath that never comes out. Her lips form a silent sob, and I watch her say something to no one.
"I'm sorry."
And something tears inside me.
Not rage. Not quite sorrow.
Just that cold, shapeless ache that says: This pain wasn't meant to be witnessed. But I saw it. And I couldn't unsee it.
How desperately I want to replace my binocular with a rifle with a sniper scope now… seeing the pain in her eyes.
Not to stop her.
To stop the world.
To shoot the moment so it never repeats. So she never has to live this again.
I lower the binoculars.
Aariz bleeds. Chhayika breathes.
And somewhere between them - I remain. The shadow that watches. The one she'll never see.
She walks away. She doesn't look back. Good. She shouldn't see what comes next.
Because I move. Swift. Silent. Calculated. I reach him before his men do - two of them are closing in from the other side, delayed by traffic or fate or both. He's unconscious, barely breathing, blood seeping into the cracked pavement.
I drag his body - careful, precise - through a thicket of trees nearby. A cleaner's job, not a leader's. But tonight, I'm both. I cover the blood trail with loose soil and leaves, wiping the traces with water from a leaky pipe behind the wall. It's not perfect. But it buys her time.
He stirs slightly in my arms - not awake, not gone. Just aware enough to remember the feel of movement, maybe. He won't know it was me. And that's fine.
That's how it's always been. Move before the world notices. Make the cracks invisible. Patch her silence with shadow. And when it bleeds - take the stain.
He was meant to just cover her flaws. And he does it every time — even when it bleeds, even when it breaks him. He's too good at his job… and his feelings for her.
Blood seeps through my gloves. My boots press down the trail he left behind. I rinse what I can under a broken pipe, scrub the rest with dirt. The stains cling. So be it.
I've done this before. I've always done this. Always been the one to fix what she can't see, to keep the quiet air between us clear of chaos, even if it means staining myself. But each time, each new smear of blood, it feels heavier. The weight of this act, of what I'm becoming... it settles deeper inside me.
She doesn't know how many times I've done this. Doesn't ask. Maybe she thinks I just appear, just vanish. Maybe that's easier.
I check his pulse once more. Still steady. Still salvageable. I leave him half-covered in shadow, half in moonlight - the same in-between he's always dragged her into.
I should hate him for it. But the truth is, the more I watch him, the more I hate the part of me that understands him. I hate that part of me that almost... sympathizes. That part of me that knows he's been dragged into her world, just like I have, against our better judgment. I hate that I get it — how the same silence that keeps her safe can trap you in its suffocating grip, until you forget how to breathe without it.
I vanish before the headlights cut the road. Back into the silence she still believes protects her -never guessing how far it has to stretch to hold her.
Present Day — Now
Chhayika's POV
I remember the night I became Fatima Qureshi.
It wasn't my name. It was a mask - a carefully constructed lie, painted with the ashes of another's tragedy. A girl who had lost everything. Who had watched her family burn in a mosque fire set by extremists. Her world ripped apart in an instant. That's who I became. It wasn't hard. We all wear masks, don't we? Especially when the world demands it.
I had studied her story like it was sacred. Her name, her suffering, her survival. I became her with the precision of someone who knew the stakes. It was a performance - one I had no choice but to keep perfect. The lines, the pain in her eyes, the trembling of her voice - it had to be convincing.
And for that, I had to trust him.
Aariz Khan. The man who would see me for who I wasn't, yet still offer a piece of himself in exchange. He had his own demons. A man so torn between duty and conscience, it bled into his every word, every action. He was different from the others. Not a soldier of blind loyalty, but a man who questioned the price of loyalty. A man who respected me. And somewhere, in that respect, I felt the tug of something dangerous.
He was supposed to only be part of this mission. He wasn't supposed to matter. I was here for one thing - information.
I had to make him trust me, and I had to make him tell me everything.
But somewhere between his verses of the Quran and the poetry we exchanged, somewhere between the glances we shared in the quiet of the night, I began to wonder if I had crossed a line.
Had I gone too far?
He wasn't just a tool. Not just a means to an end. He... cared. He cared in a way that made me uncomfortable, made me question my resolve. And that was a dangerous thing. I knew it would be a matter of time before he would ask the questions that would shatter everything.
It was inevitable.
He asked me once - Do you believe in love?
I remember the weight of his words. The sincerity. The genuine desire to know. And for a split second, I wanted to answer him truthfully. I wanted to tell him that love wasn't something I could afford to believe in. Not in my world. Not in the world I had built from the wreckage of a thousand betrayals.
But I didn't.
I couldn't.
Instead, I smiled. I told him I had learned to trust the mission above all else. I had learned to believe in the cause, in the work that would one day bring peace. The things I said were true, but the part that mattered - the part that made him look at me with those eyes, so full of want, of hope - was the lie.
And I hated myself for it.
But in the end, what I hated more was that I couldn't stop myself from becoming attached to him. I couldn't stop feeling his warmth, the way he held me with those gentle hands, how he laughed at the smallest things. How he didn't judge me, even when I couldn't explain everything that was broken inside me.
I should have walked away. I should have left when it was still easy. But the mission... the mission demanded more.
And so I did what I had to do.
I waited until the night was right. The moment when I knew he would speak of the operation, of the plans that would change everything. That was when I had to leave. That was when I had to take the truth I had extracted and vanish, as if I had never been there.
The way he looked at me that night... I knew he would never see me the same again. He would never understand the choice I made.
He still doesn't know that the night I shot him, I cried for the first time in ten years - alone, in the dark.
He would never know that I didn't want to hurt him.
I didn't aim to kill him.
I couldn't.
But I couldn't afford to let him live, either.
So I left him there, bleeding, broken, and asking me all the questions I had no answers for.
Who was I?
What was real?
I could have stayed. I could have told him everything. But it wasn't just the mission. It was fear. Fear that if I stayed, if I let him into my world, I would lose everything I had worked for.
And I couldn't let that happen.
I couldn't let him make me human.
The past has a way of pulling you back. Of bleeding into the present, no matter how hard you try to bury it.
I stand in the darkened study of my Delhi home. Only the blue glow of a monitor flickers across my face, my reflection staring back at me - lined with fatigue, stitched with memories.
On screen: Surveillance footage.
Karachi Port. Last week.
A woman steps out of a cargo zone, ID tagged under the name "Fatima Qureshi."
She has my walk.
My slight limp.
Even the goddamn mole below my jawline.
But she isn't me.
I had known before the interrogation in Istanbul. Before the agent cracked under pressure and admitted someone had revived the "Fatima" legend. Someone had accessed old credentials and crossed into Pakistan-occupied zones under my name.
The lie I buried...
...has clawed its way out of the grave.
And now, it wears my face.
I click pause on the footage.
In the frozen frame, "Fatima" turns toward the camera - almost smirking.
The ghost is moving.
And I will have to follow.
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Author's Note:
This chapter takes us through the tangled perspectives of Aariz, Chhayika, and Giriraj, revealing the hidden layers of their lives and choices. The weight of their decisions and emotions can't be ignored.
What do you think - can Chhayika ever truly escape her past, or is she destined to carry the shadows of those she's tried to protect?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! Your feedback means the world to me.
Thank you for being a part of this journey.
~Kshyatri