The Revenge Games

by M. V. Kasi

  * * *

  Sia’s heart ached for Ajay as he described the death of his father. The love she felt for him was overwhelming.

  “Does my confession make you afraid of me?” he asked her with a vulnerable look in his eyes. “I’ve killed. Once for my mother and the second time for you. I’ll probably kill again if it’s to protect the ones I love.”

  Sia smiled at him softly. “I’m not afraid. Nor do I think less of you in any way. In fact your confession has made me love you even more,” she whispered, holding his face within her palms. “I’m proud that you are so strong and resilient. You fight for everything you believe in. Including us. Especially us. It didn’t matter to you how many times I pushed you away, thinking you and Anika were better off without me.” She smiled and it felt wobbly with emotion. “You just wouldn’t have it. You dragged me back into your life, kicking and screaming” she laughed through tears. “Not just that, you yourself have gone through so much in your childhood, but you never let it define you in a negative way. You used those experiences to become stronger. That’s one of the things I love the most about you.”

  Ajay smiled at her softly. He wiped away the tear that ran down her cheek. She wasn’t even aware that she was crying. “My love and commitment for you aren’t just words either, Sia. I mean it when I say I’ll be with you and our daughter until the end.”

  He turned towards her with a torn look. “I have another confession to make. Growing up, I was always grateful to your uncle’s wife. Because she saved me and my mother. That’s the reason why I attended her funeral as well.”

  “I understand,” she said softly.

  “Then also understand that my utmost priority in my life are— you and Anika,” he reiterated.

  “Mine too,” she said, meaning it. Over the past few hours, she realized that she cannot save the world. She made peace with that fact and wanted to start a new chapter with Ajay and their daughter. She was more than grateful to be offered a second chance.

  She had to let Varun know that she won’t be able to go through rest of their plan. She would let Varun or the law take care of her uncle. It was a proper closure for her. Her uncle losing everything and living with that knowledge or dying at the hands of one of his tormentors.

  “Let’s go get Anika,” said Ajay.

  “I need to call Varun and keep him posted. He must be waiting for my call anxiously.”

  “Alright, I’ll go and get her home. Will you be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Kissing her forehead, he went to the key holder to grab the car keys. He also pulled out the infant car seat from a shelf that he needed for Anika while driving back home.

  Watching him go, she thought of something. Something very simple that she should have done a long time back. She wanted to start over. She wanted to make a true attempt at giving Anika a normal family as much as possible.

  “Ajay...” she began.

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “Can you invite Harsha and Jyotika over?”

  He frowned. “Why?” he asked.

  She smiled tentatively. “No specific reason. I just wanted to meet them and thank them properly. And... and if they don’t mind, I’d like to spend time getting to know them better,” she said.

  His face softened. “Baby, they’d like to get to know you as well. And I promise you they’ll love you like family too.”

  “I hope so. It’s just that I never had any friends or relatives before. So I might screw up in the beginning...”

  He laughed and strode closer to her. “You are worrying too much. You’ll be fine,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Ok. Be right back. Finish your call and get some rest.”

  She nodded and waved him goodbye. When the door closed behind him, she dialed Varun’s phone number. It kept ringing for a long time and went to the automatic answering machine.

  “Varun, call me when you get a chance. I want to talk to you about something important—”

  She was interrupted when she heard the front door bell ring. Her eyes fell on the forgotten car seat on the table next to the front door.

  Grabbing it, and still on the phone call with Varun, she opened the front door to hand it Ajay. Before she could register anything, she was knocked back hard, and a sweet smelling cloth was placed on top of her entire face, blinding her and covering her nose and mouth. She struggled hard, using her elbow to hit back at whoever was holding her in a tight grip.

  The person cursed viciously, and the grip on her loosened. Slowly, her movements became lethargic, until she began to lose conscious. The last sight she saw as the cloth was slowly lowered and before the darkness took over was her uncle watching her with madness filled eyes of a manic.

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  The main door was left open.

  The sick feeling Ajay had felt when Sia didn’t answer her phone intensified. Every menacing thought crossed his mind as he ran inside.

  He was halfway through the ride to Jo’s house when he got a call that Jagadish Naidu had managed to disappear from the police station. Immediately, he had called Sia to warn her and to ask her to get out of the house until he could get her. But Sia’s phone went unanswered.

  “Sia!” he shouted.

  The silence was deafening around him. The only sounds that could be heard were the ones resonating off his body. His breathing got louder as adrenaline began coursing through his body. He threw open each and every room, checking inside even though in his heart he knew it was futile.

  “Sia!” he screamed in each and every room because most of the rooms had been soundproofed.

  He returned to the living room, hunched over with his hands on his knees, hyperventilating to the point where he felt the pain inside his chest. He had checked each and every inch of the house, but there was no trace to be found.

  He ran outside. “Sia!” he shouted, whipping about as though they would suddenly appear out of thin air. He felt his blood turn cold, causing him to shiver and the hairs stand straight on his arms.

  Before he gave it anymore thought, he ran towards the maid’s quarters. Frantically trying to ignore the nervous and fearful feeling he felt inside the pit of his stomach, he focused on the task ahead.

  “Kamala!” he shouted, but there was no reply.

  Pushing the door open, he stepped inside the outhouse.

  His mind raced and his chest heaved at the sight inside.

  Kamala was lying on the floor with her eyes wide open and her throat slit.

  “No. God no,” he whispered as panic began to set in even more until he had no control over his thoughts as they ran wild.

  “God, let her be okay. Please let her be okay,” he kept repeating as he dialed for help.

  When he finished informing the police about his wife missing, he called Harsha.

  “Harsha!”

  “Jay, we’ve been waiting for you. Are you stuck in traffic?”

  “No. I came back home. Sia has been taken.”

  “What? But how? And who?” Harsha asked in shock.

  “I received a call from the police that her uncle has disappeared. I know he has Sia. With those chemicals in his body, I don’t think he could have taken her by himself. Someone is helping him.”

  “I’m on my way Jay—”

  “No Harsha. Don’t come here. I’ve called the police already. My maid has been killed.”

  There was silence. Ajay knew what was going through his friend’s mind. Sia was taken by people that were capable of killing an innocent person. That meant there was a good possibility she could meet with a similar fate.

  “Ajay, listen to me. Don’t do this alone. It’s dangerous—”

  “No. You listen to me Harsha. I want you to make sure Anika and Jo’s family are safe. I also need your help while I go after Sia.”

  “I’m here with Anika and Jo. We are all at Jo’s place right now.”

  “Good.”

  “How can I help, Jay?”

  “Help me
look up Sia’s uncle’s phone numbers. Especially the ones he hasn’t listed on the public records.”

  Meantime, Ajay put Harsha on the speaker and looked at his phone screen. He pulled up the GPS app and tried to trace Sia’s phone. The satellites took a moment to pinpoint the exact location. But frustratingly, they showed that Sia’s phone was only 100 feet from him.

  “Dammit!” he shouted in frustration as he saw the phone lying under a table next to the main door.

  “What is it Jay?”

  “Her phone is at home. Were you able to pull up Jagadish Naidu’s numbers?”

  “Yes I pulled it from our recent file. Give me one minute. I’m sending you the list.”

  “Send them to the police as well. Meantime, I’m going to trace that bastard down to see where the hell has taken her.”

  Twenty frustrating and terrifying minutes later, Ajay got a lead. There were chances that Sia was not at that place, but not having any other choice; he decided to go there first.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Sia slowly began to gain conscious.

  Her head was pounding and her mouth was dry. She felt disoriented and dizzy as she tried to sit up. She shook her head to get rid of the dizziness, but it only got worse, until she was forced to lie down on the hard concrete floor again.

  A few minutes later, fighting the nausea and dizziness, she pried her eyes open slowly. She could see cemented walls of what seemed to be some kind of a construction site. She couldn’t see much. It was sometime in the evening and the darkness was slowly taking over. There was only a small dim bulb emitting a light adding to the ominous silence.

  “Oh good, you are finally awake,” said a familiar voice from somewhere around her.

  She sat up slowly, and turned towards the voice, only to see her uncle sitting on a cheap plastic chair, holding a gun in his hands. She couldn’t see him clearly, but she knew that he was going to be unpredictable. Not just due to the circumstances, but also with the drug in his system.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she asked, keeping her voice steady.

  “What do you think! The only thing you reduced me to do right now. You left me with nothing!” he seethed.

  “I don’t know what else you expected from me,” she said. Keeping her eyes towards him, she stood up slowly, her legs wobbly under her. “You raped me repeatedly as a child. You have been doing it to others as well.”

  “Shut up!” he shouted, waving the gun towards her.

  “It’s the truth. You are a sick person who deserved everything you got,” she said. She knew the truth would goad him. If she was going to be shot dead eventually, she refused to beg for her life. She wanted a confrontation that he had been avoiding.

  As expected, he sprang up from the chair.

  “Do you think I had an easy life being this way?” he hissed.

  “You could have controlled. Or gotten help—”

  “Control? Help?” he said, laughing bitterly. “One cannot change the natural instincts that one is born with,” he said with conviction.

  “Natural or not. That doesn’t give you the right to force yourself on innocent children. You chose to follow through your urges at the cost of their innocence. My innocence!”

  He was quiet for a while. She knew he would have no remorse towards what he had done to her and many other children. As she watched him the expression on his face threw her off.

  “My father knew,” he said. He had a faraway look on his face as though he was lost in the past. “I thought he was the best father anyone could have. He was well respected and he taught me everything he knew to be able to run our estate and its people. I was his heir.” He took a deep breath and a look of loathing passed on his face. “But that all changed when he caught me with a younger child for the first time when I was fifteen. He didn’t want to understand my ‘unholy sickness’ as he called it. He whipped me until I bled and until I promised him that I wouldn’t do it again.”

  He scoffed bitterly.

  “As if it’s something I could control. I could hide it better. But he caught me again when I was twenty.”

  His hands clenched around the gun.

  “Then, my own father,” he continued, with a pained look on his face. “My own father left me no choice when he cut me off his will because of that discovery.”

  Sia’s heart dropped, when she heard that. She had always suspected her uncle to be involved in his father’s early death which was staged as an accident.

  “But luckily, he valued family honor more than anything. He didn’t discuss about me to anyone. There were no rumors about me in the village and no one suspected a thing because I was always a gentleman. Especially because I treated women with respect. When it comes to the society, a man’s character is usually measured by that.”

  Sia recalled the women who had publicly vouched about his character that helped weaken the child trafficking case against him.

  “At first I tried to convince my father that I was an ideal son. That I was an ideal leader. That I was everything that a man needed to be, to be able to lead and manage the vast estate with several families livelihood depending on. But still, the old man made a crazy will cutting me off, stating that only the stated heir who was married with children could inherit the estate.”

  He scoffed bitterly again. “My father didn’t think people like me could also marry and sire a child.”

  His eyes were filled with rage. “I had to marry. Even though it went against everything I believed in. But at least I married a very young looking sixteen year old, and was able to sire a child within the first year of our marriage. But did that please my father? No. He deliberately went ahead and still cut me off from the will even though I fulfilled his requirements. That very act was enough to cut his life short to snatch my birthright back.”

  Sia couldn’t stay quiet. She had to know. She had a gnawing feeling for a while, but she didn’t know whether she could handle the truth.

  “Did you kill my mother?” she asked him bluntly.

  He remained quiet, and so she asked him again. “Did you kill your own sister?” she demanded.

  His face softened, an expression of regret passing through it. “I didn’t want to,” he confessed. “I really loved your mother. She was ten years younger to me and adored me.”

  “If you really loved her, you wouldn’t kill her for the sake of money!” she shouted, losing her cool.

  “It wasn’t just money. It was my birthright!” he shouted back. “And your mother, who was supposed to be a loving sister, didn’t do a thing to stop our father from cutting me off and declaring her as the heir.”

  “Did you...” Sia couldn’t complete the sentence. The very idea was horrific. “Did you touch her like you did to me?”

  “No. I didn’t touch my sister,” he replied with an offended look on his face. As though touching his niece was more acceptable.

  “So you didn’t touch her, but you just killed her along with her husband and their infant son,” she stated in loathing.

  “You should have been there with them too. But unfortunately, you weren’t.” He pointed the gun at her chest. “You have cheated death way too many times. And now, you’ve come back to ruin me.”

  His voice wavered as he shook his head erratically. “You succeeded,” he said. “You have ruined the one thing I valued the most. My reputation. My own son who is the only person I love in this world, looked at me with suspicion after I was arrested like a common criminal.”

  “You are a criminal!” she declared out loud.

  He was the worst kind of criminal that no amount of punishment could atone his crime. “Don’t you regret what you’ve done to all those children and to me?” she demanded. “And on top of that you murdered your own family! Your father! Your sister. Her family!”

  “Shut up! I have a gun. I can kill you right away.”

  She smiled. She probably looked as crazy as him, smiling when she was staring down the wrong end of the gun.
r />   “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  “You are,” she said. “You think my death will get you some kind of victory? I already won.”

  His eyes narrowed in a murderous glare, but she didn’t stop adding, “The only thing that you’ll earn is an even bigger punishment in the jail. Or worse, you’ll earn the time with my husband who will destroy you in the worst way possible.”

  She smirked. “You remember my husband, don’t you? Your family protégé. The one your family saved from a murder charge. But alas, what did it get you? A knife in your back,” she taunted.

  The old man’s hand trembled, but he kept the gun firmly pointed at her.

  “I know that. But what you and your husband don’t know is that he is well justified for betraying me,” he said.

  She had a sick feeling again. “Oh?” she asked, nonchalantly.

  He laughed, even though it came off as forced. “I have one more victory up my sleeve against your husband. Do you know how his mother died?” he asked.

  She was quiet when another suspicion of hers was confirmed. She thought she was being too paranoid about her uncle. Pinning all the cause of deaths to him. But now, she knew that he was a monster inside-out.

  “How did Mrs. Sita Chandra die?” she asked.

  “She wouldn’t shut up. So I asked one of my loyal servants to shut her up.”

  “You murdered Ajay’s mother?”

  “I had to. She was an ungrateful bitch! I saved her son from going to jail and gave her a new life to start over. What did I get in turn? Insistent demands to have an investigation against me. She deserved it!”

  Sia shook her head. This was no longer about her. It was about Ajay too. And his mother—the sweet, generous woman who didn’t deserve to die for trying to protect an innocent girl.

  “You are crazy. You don’t deserve to live. You deserve to die in the worst possible way!” she hissed and lunged.

  She drove her elbow into his arm, knocking the gun out of his grip. Driven solely my adrenaline and rage, she didn’t even hesitate when the gun went off. The bullet was fired into the concrete wall. It rebounded and zipped across the floor.