by MV Kasi
MUCH LATER, SHE lay in an exhausted heap while she watched Gaurav sliding out of bed to go inside an attached bathroom.
She knew they were putting an important discussion off. And she also knew that once Gaurav came out of the bathroom, she would begin to broach the subject, and then their reality would crash in again.
Regret pierced her at the thought of bursting the bubble they had formed while getting lost in each other’s arms last night.
Sighing, Nina reached for her phone to check the time. She frowned when she realized that her phone was switched off.
She turned it on and was taken aback by the number of missed calls from Radha.
Nina frowned. She knew Radha must have figured out that she wasn’t at the spa and was meeting with Gaurav.
Nina returned the call.
Radha’s phone rang, but it wasn’t answered.
It wasn’t that early. Radha usually woke up by six in the morning.
While Nina waited for the call to be answered, she heard the bathroom door open and then a strong arm wrapped around her midriff, holding her snug to a naked and blatantly aroused male body. “Come back to bed,” Gaurav’s husky voice instructed into her ear.
A shiver passed through her and wanted to obey him, but she knew that Radha and Suraj must be worried about her.
Her breath hitched and a small moan escaped her when she felt Gaurav’s fingers pinching her aroused nipples while he rubbed his arousal against her back.
“Nina!” Radha’s voice sounded frantic on the phone.
Nina’s body jerked in alarm and took a step away. “What’s wrong, Radha?”
“Suraj was arrested late last night. It’s a mad house with media and investors. They are looking for you, too.”
“What! Where is he right now?”
Radha gave the address of the police station.
“I’m coming right away.” Nina ended the call and hurriedly hunted for her clothes that were lying around the room. “Suraj was arrested last night. Shit I should have been there. My bloody phone turned off right when—” She broke off.
Her eyes fell on Gaurav and he was watching her with his closed-off look.
Her heart began to thud and a sick dread spread inside her stomach. “You knew,” she whispered.
He didn’t say anything.
“You knew what would happen and you deliberately texted me, asking me to meet you yesterday.”
“I’ve never lied to you about my intentions, Nina. I told you right from the beginning that I intend to destroy and kill Suraj Bhupati.”
“Is that what last night was?” she asked. “You intend to go to him while he’s vulnerable, and rub it in his face that you were fucking his wife last night while his reputation was being shredded publicly?” She looked around at the ceiling and other corners of the room. “Should I be expecting to see a leaked sex video of you and me from last night going viral? That would definitely ruin Suraj’s reputation.”
Gaurav’s eyes flared. He closed the distance between them and held her arms. “You know damn well that I love you. If given a chance, I want to build a life with you. Last night wasn’t because I was getting back at him. I was keeping you away from getting arrested.”
She shook her head and tried to get out of his hold, but he didn’t allow her to. “What do you think would happen, Gaurav?” she asked. “You would destroy and kill your enemy and then marry his widow, who you think would magically live happily ever after with her husband’s murderer?”
“Are you asking me to choose between avenging my sister and mother’s deaths and building a life with you?” he asked quietly.
“No! All I’m saying is give Suraj a chance to prove whether or not he’s speaking the truth! We’ll both find the truth together. Don’t hurt him before even he has a chance.”
Gaurav didn’t respond.
Nina’s shoulders slumped in defeat and also despair. This time when she pulled away, Gaurav let her go.
She felt weary and defeated and bone tired of their hopeless situation.
She put her dress back on and took a deep shuddering breath. “I’m in love with you, Gaurav,” she said. “But I also love my husband. Not the same way I love you, but it is still love. I cannot knowingly let anyone harm the person I love.”
He didn’t say anything.
She picked up her small purse and went out of the room.
He followed behind her. “Let me take you there.”
“No. I’m going to the police station. Radha will know you were my kidnapper and alert everyone. And if my father-in-law finds out you got his son arrested, ruining his chance in the upcoming elections, he’s not going to spare you.”
“I don’t care,” Gaurav said quietly. “I’m not letting you go there alone. Either allow me to drop you or I’ll follow behind you.”
Nina wanted to curse, cry, and rage in frustration and worry, but she didn’t have time for such luxury.
AN HOUR LATER, Gaurav stopped his SUV outside a police station.
“Please, leave before you are discovered,” said Nina. She got out of the vehicle and then hurried inside past the swarm of reporters.
“Where’s my husband?” Nina demanded when she was inside.
The police personnel watched her with an uncertain look. And then their gazes were focused behind her.
When she turned, she saw Gaurav. He had followed behind her into the police station. Nina felt a bolt of panic. “Gaurav, leave—” she was about to warn him to leave right away when she saw him flashing a badge.
“Let her meet him,” Gaurav said quietly.
“Yes, sir!”
A shock passed through Nina at Gaurav’s command and a police officer’s response to his command. She stared at his badge and then at him, but he held a closed-off look once again.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
Gaurav wasn’t a reporter. He was a police officer! Nina tried to wrap that information around her head.
“How dare you!” a familiar angry voice of a female shouted while storming into the police station. “How could you do this!”
Nina stared blankly at Harika, trying to process what the other woman had shouted.
“How could you, Gaurav? Don’t you have any sense of love or family pride?” Harika demanded.
Harika knew Gaurav? What did she mean by family pride?
“How could you do this to your own father?” Harika continued.
With heart thudding in a sick manner, “Who are you?” Nina asked Gaurav once again. She felt stupid for having blind trust in a man she knew nothing about. She was devastated he took advantage of her loneliness and need for love.
“He’s the one who got Suraj and my uncle arrested. He’s my uncle’s son, the great ACP Gaurav Verma.”
Shock reverberated through Nina at the revelation. It was not because Gaurav was a police officer instead of a reporter like she had thought. It was because of who his family was.
“Harika, that’s enough,” Gaurav commanded softly.
“It’s not enough! Is your duty more important than your own father? He had a heart attack, Gaurav!”
Nina continued to stare blankly as Gaurav spoke through clenched jaw. “I didn’t ruin anything. The moment my father thought it was okay to live a life of power and luxury using blood money, he ruined himself.”
All thoughts wiped from Nina’s head except for one.
Gaurav Verma was not only the son of Ganesh Verma, but he was Pranit Verma’s brother.
The man Nina had stabbed and killed for raping her sister. The man whose murder Suraj had helped her cover up.
If there was the slightest of hope that Nina could still be with the man she loved, if he spared her husband’s life, the fact that she had murdered his brother, completely destroyed it.
CHAPTER 56
Gaurav climbed the long flight of stairs in the familiar curved staircase.
The house he was visiting had ten bedrooms and fifteen bathrooms combined wit
h several common area rooms that no one ever used. At least half a dozen people worked within the house to maintain it.
He reached the top of the stairs before heading to the master bedroom. A man lay on the bed with tubes attached to him.
“How is he?” Gaurav asked the nurse who was seated next to the bed.
“It wasn’t a heart attack. It was a mild panic attack. His condition is stable now. But he needs to rest.”
Gaurav nodded. “I’ll come back later. Call me when he wakes up.” He turned and was about to leave, when he heard a very faint whisper.
“Don’t go…”
Gaurav stopped, but didn’t turn.
“Please… son. Stay home tonight.”
Taking a deep breath, Gaurav turned around to look at the man on the bed.
The nurse looked at him. “He’s too weak right now to talk. It’s advisable not to agitate him right now.”
Gaurav nodded. “I’ll stay,” he said softly before leaving the room.
He walked across a corridor and pushed open the door to a bedroom.
It was the room he had slept in for the first eighteen years of his life.
Gaurav didn’t want to be here. But he did it as a favor to the older man who was his father by biology and not because of an emotional bond.
Gaurav was Ganesh Verma’s second child. Gaurav’s mother had died during childbirth. Since then, from the outside, Ganesh Verma provided almost everything that was required to raise a child. Everything except his time, attention or even basic understanding.
Even during his early childhood memories, Gaurav couldn’t recall seeing his father much. And neither did he see his older brother. By the time Gaurav had turned two, his brother who was older than him by six years had been shipped off to an expensive boarding school where he stayed most of the time.
Even during the holidays, his brother barely visited home.
Gaurav was alone in a huge house with only the paid help to cater to his needs. By the time Gaurav was six, he was supposed to leave for boarding school as well. But due to severe health issues, the doctors had asked not to send Gaurav away.
That was when Ganesh Verma grudgingly hired a caretaker to look after Gaurav’s needs while he attended a day school from home.
Saraswati was a young widow with an infant child when Gaurav was introduced to her.
Gaurav had expected her to be like any other paid help. He expected her to pity him and simply cater to his needs. But she was very different. She treated him with genuine affection rather than as a duty.
Soon he became so attached to her and her child that he began referring to them as his mother and sister. And by calling them as mother and sister, he felt the sense of security of having someone who cared about him.
Sure, he had a brother. But Pranit Verma didn’t really have the time or inclination to spend with his much younger brother. And that too, with a boy who was always sick.
Gaurav and his brother grew up apart and relative strangers. And when Pranit died in an accident, only then did Gaurav’s father take notice of him.
Gaurav’s father demanded that Gaurav step into the shoes of his dead brother whom his father had been grooming as his heir.
Gaurav refused. He didn’t want anything to do with his father or his father’s vision. Gaurav had his own dream. He wanted to be a police officer.
Initially, it had started as a childhood dream after having grown up watching movies while he was often sick. But later, as he grew older and began taking interest in subjects like computers and current affairs, the childhood dream turned into an aspiration.
Even though he was sick most of the time during his childhood and early youth, he exercised religiously until he built the strength and stamina to work towards his dream.
Gaurav’s father would have none of it. Ganesh Verma called his dream a lowly one and not fit for the heir to the Verma empire.
But Gaurav stood up to his dream. He refused to be shipped off to the UK to pursue financial studies as his brother had. Instead, he began working hard to earn a seat in computer engineering at one of the reputed institutions in India.
But Gaurav’s father warned him that unless he studied what he wanted him to, his father would not be financing his studies.
That was when Gaurav stepped out from his childhood home at the age of seventeen.
He had no money or home. He knew he would be able to get a seat in a reputed college, but he didn’t have the money to pay their fee or support any other basic needs.
That was when the woman he called his mother decided to help him achieve his dream.
Even though she didn’t have much money of her own, she quit her job in Gaurav’s father’s house as paid help.
Instead, she worked doubly hard outside and financed the money required for Gaurav to finish his college, and take the training required to achieve his dream.
With hard work and encouragement, Gaurav achieved his dream.
At the age of twenty-two, Gaurav became an IPS officer. And after training, he was recruited by the CBI in the anti-corruption division. He had chosen to work in that division in particular due to his interest in computer sciences.
Life, although a little stressful at times because of his job, was still good. He had a job he was passionate about, a family who loved and supported him, and friends with whom he spent his free time with as a bachelor.
Two years ago, he had been investigating a money laundering charge on a major national bank. Several transactions had led him to a popular five-star hotel chain.
Trinity Hotels were half-owned by the Bhupatis, Suraj Bhupati’s name was on it in particular. The other half was owned by Gaurav’s father.
Gaurav didn’t want to take up the case initially since he was related to the owner of the hotel. However, due to new revelations, he didn’t let the fact deter him from performing his duty. He went ahead by leading the investigation and dug up all the details and proof connecting the black money conversion to white, using the five-star hotel chain as the front.
The money came from the darkest underbelly. It was made through the blood of innocents. Money made from drug peddling, child trafficking, sex trafficking and more such illegal activities was taken and converted to white money.
In exchange for a significant amount of profit, Trinity Hotels used the money to show that their hotels were occupied to full capacity even though they weren’t.
The electricity bills, the staff payrolls and many such operational costs gave it away. Gaurav began putting together all the proof to build a case against the owners of the hotel chains. Right in the midst of it, he received a few threatening calls to back off.
He hadn’t. It made him even more determined to get to the bottom of it and lay everything out in the open. He had put the details of the investigation into a thumb drive, the backup of which was with his close friend who was an award-winning journalist.
Gaurav had given the thumb drive to Rohan as a precaution. He had also told Rohan that in case something happened to him, Rohan was to make the details of the case public.
A month later, Gaurav’s sister was killed and all the proof disappeared. His mother died of a heart attack. And while Gaurav was grieving, there was a murder attempt on him, and he was shot in his shoulder twice.
In the span of a few weeks, Gaurav lost everything. His family, his hopes, and his trust in the justice system.
That’s when he had decided to bring justice on his own.
He was even prepared to lose his life in his mission.
What he wasn’t prepared for—was to fall in love with his enemy’s wife.
Gaurav stared at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom as he lay on the bed and recalled the look on Nina’s face the last time.
She looked devastated and betrayed.
Gaurav knew that by killing Suraj Bhupati, he would lose Nina forever.
He closed his eyes, and tried to imagine his life without her.
He just couldn’t.
If, after everything, he somehow ended up making it out alive or not arrested, his life would still be equivalent to living in a vacuum without her.
He could almost hear his mother’s gentle voice asking him to pick love over retribution.
CHAPTER 57
“How are you feeling, father?” Gaurav asked.
Early next morning, Gaurav was called by the nurse, saying that Ganesh Verma wanted to speak with him.
“I’m sorry, son,” his father said in a weak voice. “Please forgive me.”
Gaurav remained quiet.
“Please, son. I don’t know how long I’ll remain alive, but please, give me a chance to spend the rest of my days knowing my son doesn’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you father,” he said, meaning it. He was angry and hurt by his father’s indifference, but he had never hated his father.
Ganesh Verma closed his eyes and opened them with a haunted look inside them. “Then you’ve been a much better person than I ever was, son, because I hated you for the longest time.”
Gaurav was taken aback with his father’s confession.
“I hated you because I held you responsible for the death of the woman I loved more than my life.”
Gaurav was stunned. He knew his mother had died during childbirth, but until then, he never knew that the reason his father behaved cold and indifferent to him was because he held him responsible for his mother’s death.
“I knew it was irrational, son. But in my grief, I just couldn’t face the reality of the situation. I couldn’t face that your mother was gone.”
His father reached for Gaurav’s hand and squeezed it weakly. “To avoid the pain of living without her, I ignored you and Pranit and drowned myself in work, wanting to acquire other things in life. Instead I should have been there.
“I should have been there to help Pranit be a better man and not the person he turned into until his death. And I should have been there to encourage you to be the man you wanted to be.”
Gaurav knew his older brother was well-known to have lived a lifestyle of excess.
Sex, alcohol, drugs and multiple affairs had filled most of Pranit Verma’s life. He died when his hotel room caught fire. At the time he was passed out due to drugs and alcohol.
