The trio of friends had become a circle of hushed, frightened conspirators. They met in secluded corners of the vast campus—in the dusty, forgotten stacks of the library's oldest wing, in a soundproofed music practice room that smelled of old wood and resin, on a remote, crumbling stone bench overlooking the city from the back of the campus. Their conversations, once filled with easy laughter and mundane college gossip, were now laced with fear and a grim, unwelcome purpose.
Ashutosh's protective instincts, once aimed at overt bullies, were now directed at a far more insidious and terrifying threat. "We can't just go on like this," he said, his voice a low, urgent rumble. They were huddled in the music room, the air thick and claustrophobic. "We can't just sit around and wait for the next 'accident' to happen."
"But what do we do?" Rihan asked, his voice strained, his hands twisting together in his lap. "Go to the police? With what? A hunch? A series of unfortunate coincidences? They'll think we're crazy. She'll make them think we're crazy. You saw how she was at the station. She's flawless."
Kritika, who had been silently staring at the wall, her journalistic mind racing, finally spoke. Her voice was steady, her usual boldness now tempered by a cold, hard resolve. "We need proof," she said. "Something concrete. Something undeniable. Something that proves she's behind all this."
"And where are we supposed to find that?" Ashutosh retorted, frustration clear in his voice. "Her room in the hostel is clean. Her office is public. She's the most careful, guarded person I've ever met. Her whole life is a fortress."
"Every fortress has a secret passage," Kritika said, her eyes glinting with a dangerous, desperate idea. "She has an apartment. Off-campus. A place she stays at on some weekends, or when she says she needs to be alone to study for a big exam. She thinks no one knows about it."
"How do you know that?" Rihan asked, surprised.
Kritika had the decency to blush, a faint pink staining her cheeks. "I followed her," she admitted, her voice low. "A few times. I have since... since the hospital. I was scared. I wanted to see where she went when she disappeared. It's in a quiet, anonymous building in Civil Lines, on the other side of town."
The plan that formed in the stuffy air of the music room was insane, reckless, and terrifying. They all knew it. But the alternative—living in this constant, paralyzing fear, watching the woman Rihan loved and wondering when her dark side would surface again—was even crazier.
Their opportunity came during the college's annual Founder's Day event, a grand, formal affair that consumed the entire campus for a full day. As College President, Ruhi was the master of ceremonies. She would be on stage, in the spotlight, completely occupied for at least three hours. It was their only window.
They decided Kritika was the one to go. She was the quickest, the boldest, and the least likely to fall apart under the immense pressure. Rihan and Ashutosh were to be lookouts, stationed in a coffee shop across the street from the apartment building, their phones ready, their nerves frayed to the breaking point. Rihan felt a profound, gut-wrenching guilt. He was betraying her trust, the trust of the woman he loved. But the fear, the gnawing need to know the truth, was stronger.
The apartment building was exactly as Kritika had described: a quiet, anonymous, three-storey block, painted a bland shade of cream, a place you would never look at twice. Kritika, her heart hammering against her ribs so hard she felt it in her throat, slipped into the building's stairwell. Her face was pale, but her eyes were determined.
She reached the apartment on the second floor, number 2B. She took a deep breath. She had watched enough spy movies to know the theory. She pulled a credit card from her wallet—an old, expired one—and slid it into the crack between the door and the frame. She jiggled it, pushed, and prayed to every god she could think of. The simple lock, not designed for high security, clicked open. The sound was deafening in the silent hallway.
She slipped inside, into the lion's den.
The apartment was spartan, immaculate, and eerily impersonal. The air was still and cool. It was less of a home and more of a hideout, a sterile way station. A simple bed, a desk, a chair, a small kitchenette. There were no photographs on the walls, no personal trinkets on the desk, nothing to suggest that the warm, caring, vibrant Ruhi Soni they knew had ever set foot in here. It was the home of a ghost.
Kritika's heart sank. She began to search frantically, her hands shaking, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She checked the desk drawers—empty, save for some stationery. She checked the closet—a few sets of simple, nondescript clothes. Under the bed—nothing but dust bunnies.
Defeated, her eyes stinging with frustrated tears, she was about to leave. It had been a wild goose chase. She was wrong. They were all just being paranoid.
And then her eyes fell on it.
Tucked away on the highest shelf of the wardrobe, hidden behind a stack of old, folded blankets, was a small, locked metal box. It was a simple, grey cash box, the kind you could buy at any stationery store. It was cold to the touch.
Her heart leaped. This was it.
She didn't have the key, but Ashutosh, in a moment of foresight, had given her a small crowbar he'd taken from his engineering workshop toolkit. "Just in case," he'd said. With a grunt of effort and a sickening screech of protesting metal that made her flinch, she pried the box open.
Inside, there was only one thing.
It was a thick, brown manila file folder, tied shut with a loop of faded red string. Her hands trembling so violently she could barely control them, she lifted it out. The label on the front was typed in a stark, bureaucratic font. It didn't say 'Ruhi Soni'.
It said 'Case File 734: Ananya Sharma'.
Her blood ran cold. Who was Ananya Sharma? She didn't dare open the file there. Time was running out. She stuffed the file into her backpack, forced the broken, mangled box back into its hiding place as best she could, and fled the apartment, her heart screaming in her chest.
She met Rihan and Ashutosh back at Rihan's hostel room. He had drawn the curtains, plunging the small room into a gloomy twilight. The silence was deafening as Kritika pulled the file from her bag and placed it on the small study table in the center of the room. For a long, agonizing moment, no one moved. The file lay there like a venomous snake, coiled and ready to strike.
"Ananya Sharma?" Ashutosh whispered, reading the label upside down. "Who's that?"
With trembling fingers that felt disconnected from his own body, Rihan reached out, untied the string, and opened the folder.
The first page was a psychological evaluation from the State Juvenile Correctional Facility.
"Patient: Ananya Sharma (alias adopted at admission: Ruhi Soni). Age at admission: 16. Diagnosis: Dissociative Identity Disorder, Severe Conduct Disorder with Callous and Unemotional Traits (Psychopathy)..."
The floor dropped out from under Rihan's world. Ruhi Soni. An alias. A name she had adopted. A mask she had created.
His trembling hand turned the page. It was a yellowed, carbon copy of a police crime scene report from a town near Delhi. His eyes scanned the cold, clinical, typewritten text, but the words burned themselves into his brain like acid.
"...the mother, Mrs. Kavita Sharma, found in the master bedroom... sustained multiple stab wounds, primarily to the facial region and ocular orbits... evidence suggests the heart was extracted post-mortem..."
Kritika let out a strangled, horrified sob and clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with terror. Ashutosh looked like he was going to be sick, his face turning a sickly shade of green. Rihan felt nothing but a hollow, ringing emptiness, a complete and utter detachment from reality. He kept reading, a horrified spectator to his own life's spectacular implosion.
"...the father, Mr. Dev Sharma, located in the downstairs study... accelerant was used... victim was bound to a chair and burned alive. Subject Ananya Sharma, age 15, was found at the scene by the first responding officers, reportedly laughing..."
He flipped through more pages, a horrifying chronicle of darkness. A report on a schoolteacher, found tied to a chair in his own home, his throat cut with what the report described as "surgical precision" over a prolonged period. A judge's sentencing notes: "A danger to herself and society... a complete lack of empathy... a monster in the guise of a child... sentenced to six years in a secure facility for treatment and imprisonment..."
They stared at the documents, at the cold, clinical descriptions of unimaginable brutality. This was the girl Rihan loved. This was the calm, caring, gentle woman who had held him, protected him, mentored him, kissed him. The angel of mercy who had saved him from the rain had a past written in blood and fire. The kindness he had cherished, the love he had fallen for, was the shadow cast by a monster.
They were so lost in their shared, silent horror, so completely broken by the devastating truth, that they didn't hear the soft click of the hostel room door opening behind them.
A voice, a voice they knew better than their own, sliced through the silence. It was deep, cold, and utterly devoid of the warmth they had always associated with it.
"Why?"
They looked up, their hearts stopping in their chests.
Ruhi—or Ananya—stood in the doorway. Her Founder's Day saree was impeccable, her makeup flawless. But her face was unreadable, her eyes like chips of cold, brown ice.
"Why did you read this?" she asked again, her voice a terrifying, flat monotone.
Kritika, finding her voice in a sudden, volcanic surge of terror and rage, scrambled to her feet, pointing a trembling finger. "You... you're a monster!" she shrieked, the sound hysterical.
A slow, chilling smile spread across Ruhi's lips. It was a smile that held no warmth, no kindness, only a terrifying, predatory amusement. "Yes," she replied, her voice dropping to a near whisper. "I am a monster."
She took a deliberate step into the room. "And what are you going to do about it?"