The day Rihan was discharged from the hospital was grey and overcast, the sky a bruised, moody purple that mirrored the turmoil in his own heart. Ruhi was there, of course, a pillar of calm efficiency. She handled the mountain of paperwork, settled the substantial bill with a quiet, detached competence that was both deeply reassuring and slightly unnerving, and shepherded him through the bustling hospital lobby. Ashutosh was there too, sullen and quiet, a thundercloud of guilt and suppressed rage still hanging over him. He hadn't said much in the past few days, but his presence was a constant, solid support.
Kritika was conspicuously absent. She had sent a brief, stilted text message that morning saying she had a fever and couldn't make it, an excuse so flimsy it was transparent. Rihan knew she wasn't sick. She was avoiding them. Avoiding Ruhi. The thought sent a pang of hurt through him, adding another layer to his misery.
As Ruhi helped him into the back of a waiting taxi, her touch infinitely gentle on his arm as he navigated his clumsy new crutches, a commotion near the main campus gate caught their attention. A police jeep, its blue and red lights flashing silently, was parked haphazardly on the side of the road. A small crowd of students had gathered, their voices a low, excited, morbid buzz.
"What's going on?" Rihan asked, leaning against the taxi door for support.
Ashutosh, his eyes narrowed, strained to hear the fragments of conversation drifting from the crowd. "Something about Vikas... and his friends."
Just then, a student they knew from their BCA class, a boy named Sameer, ran past, his face pale with a mixture of shock and morbid excitement. "Can you guys believe it? They found them this morning. Behind the old science block."
"Found them? What do you mean, found them?" Ashutosh grabbed Sameer's arm, his grip tight.
Sameer's eyes were wide, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Someone threw them off the first-floor balcony. All three of them. Vikas, Sandeep, and that other guy. They're alive, but man... you don't want to know. Broken bones everywhere. They're saying Vikas landed badly... he might never walk again. It's brutal. The police are calling it attempted murder."
The words hit Rihan like a physical blow. A wave of nausea and dizziness washed over him, and he gripped his crutches tighter to keep from falling. Thrown from a balcony. Critically injured. The sheer, savage violence of it was staggering. This wasn't the black eye or bloody nose of a college brawl. This wasn't even the calculated cruelty of what they had done to him. This was something else. This was dark and ruthlessly punitive. An eye for an eye, a broken leg for a broken spine.
He looked at Ruhi. Her face was a perfect mask of horrified shock. Her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide and glistening with unshed tears. "Oh my god," she breathed, her voice trembling convincingly. "That's horrible. Who could possibly do such a thing?"
Ashutosh just stared, his earlier rage completely replaced by a stunned disbelief. The raw, animalistic revenge he had craved in the heat of the moment had been enacted, but with a clinical, terrifying brutality that turned his stomach. This was too much. This was too dark.
Their shocked silence was interrupted by a firm, official voice. "Are you Rihan Malik?"
They all turned. Two police officers, a stern-looking Inspector with a thick moustache and a weary expression, and a younger, grim-faced constable, were standing there. The Inspector's eyes swept over them, lingering for a moment on Rihan's cast, then on Ashutosh's clenched fists, and finally on Ruhi's perfectly composed, concerned face.
"We need you all to come down to the station. We have some questions," the Inspector said, his voice flat and devoid of warmth. It wasn't a request.
The interrogation room at the local thana was small, suffocating, and smelled of stale sweat, damp files, and fear. They were questioned one by one, separated from each other.
Ashutosh went first. He came out an hour later looking rattled and angry. He had been belligerent, defensive. "Yeah, I was angry! Wouldn't you be? They put my best friend in the hospital!" he told Rihan later. "I told them I went looking for them that night, but I couldn't find them. I got drunk at a bar downtown and my roommate had to help me get home. They can check the cameras at the bar." His alibi was messy, fuelled by righteous anger, and it made him look like a prime suspect with a convenient, if verifiable, excuse.
Kritika was called in next. They had summoned her from her hostel. When she came out, she looked like a wreck. She had sat huddled in the chair, twisting her hands in her lap, avoiding the Inspector's probing gaze. "I don't know anything," she had repeated over and over, her voice a trembling whisper. "We were at the hospital. I was upset. I just went home and went to sleep. Please, just leave us alone." Her terror was palpable, but as she later recounted to Rihan, it wasn't the terror of a guilty person. It was the terror of someone who suspected a truth far more frightening than anything the police could imagine. She kept picturing that cold, blazing look of promise in Ruhi's eyes.
Then it was Ruhi's turn. She walked into the interrogation room with the calm dignity of a visiting diplomat attending a tedious but necessary meeting. She sat down, her posture perfect, her hands folded neatly on the metal table. Rihan, watching through a crack in the door, was mesmerized by her composure. She recounted the events of the previous night with heartbreaking clarity—finding out about Rihan's attack, her worry, her vigil at the hospital. Her expression was a masterclass in profound sadness and gentle concern.
"Those boys have always been trouble, Inspector," she said, her voice laced with a believable sorrow. "They bully so many students. But this... this is monstrous. I can't imagine who would be capable of such a thing." When asked for her alibi for the time of the attack, her answer was flawless. "After I left the hospital, I was in the student council office until past midnight, making arrangements for Rihan's academic leave and catching up on work. The night watchman, Ram Singh, saw me. The secretary of the council, Priya Sharma, was with me until 11 PM. You can ask them." She was the perfect witness. The grieving, protective girlfriend. A pillar of the college community, shocked and appalled by the violence that had touched her life. She was utterly, terrifyingly believable.
Finally, they questioned Rihan. He was exhausted, in constant pain, and utterly bewildered. He told them the simple, unassailable truth: he had been in a hospital bed, sedated with painkillers, a world away from the violence. "I never wanted this," he said, his voice cracking with genuine emotion. "I just wanted them to leave me alone."
They were released a few hours later, with a stern warning not to leave the city. There was no evidence, nothing to hold them on. Ashutosh had a plausible alibi. Ruhi had an airtight one. And Rihan and Kritika were clearly victims in their own right. As they walked out of the police station into the fading light of the afternoon, a heavy, unspoken tension hung between the three of them.
The campus was a hive of frantic speculation and whispered rumors. The story had already taken on a life of its own, a dark, modern legend of vigilante justice. No one ever bothered Rihan again. The bullies were gone, removed from the equation with surgical brutality. An aura of fear now protected him more effectively than Ruhi's presence ever could. Life, on the surface, returned to a strange, disquieting kind of normal.
But for Rihan, nothing was normal. The incident gnawed at him, a festering wound in his mind. The sheer, savage efficiency of the revenge was too much of a coincidence. It was too neat, too... poetic. An eye for an eye.
One evening, about a week later, as he and Ruhi sat in the quiet of the student council office, he finally voiced the fear that had been metastasizing in his mind. He was supposed to be doing some reading, but he couldn't focus.
"It's crazy, isn't it?" he said, staring at his propped-up, casted leg. "First, I get beaten up, and my leg gets broken. And then the guys who did it... they end up with broken bones, thrown from a building. Who would do that, Ruhi?" He looked at her, his eyes searching her face for an answer, for a reassurance he desperately needed to believe.
She turned from the window, her face silhouetted against the twilight sky over the Aravalli hills. She came and sat on the sofa beside him, taking his hand in hers. Her touch was warm, comforting, a familiar balm. "I don't know, Rihan," she said, her voice soft and soothing. "You're right, it is a very serious and disturbing matter." She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb. "The world can be a dark place. There are people who do terrible things for their own reasons. But you're safe now. That's all that matters."
Her words were meant to be a balm, a comfort, but they sent an icy chill down his spine. The way she said it, with such finality, such serene certainty... It wasn't a hope or a belief. It sounded like a guarantee. The problem has been solved.
He looked into her calm, loving, beautiful brown eyes and, for the very first time, felt a flicker of a terrifying thought, an idea so monstrous he immediately tried to squash it. He wasn't being protected from the darkness. He was being loved by it.
His suspicion, a tiny, insidious seed, had been planted in the fertile ground of his fear. And it was beginning to grow, watered by a love that felt increasingly like a beautiful, gilded, and very dangerous cage. The "coincidences" were just beginning. A new kind of torment was on the horizon, in the form of a professor who would take a particular, cruel dislike to him. And Ruhi's promise to "take care of everything" echoed in his mind, no longer a comfort, but a terrifying premonition of horrors to come.