The rain hasn't stopped in hours. It poured from the sky like it was trying to erase something the earth couldn't hold anymore.
Detective Arjun Verma stood under the flickering light of an old alley lamp, his coat soaked, boots splashing in puddles as he approached the tarp-covered body.
A uniformed officer nodded to him in silence and stepped aside. The crime scene was quiet. No reporters, no gawkers. Just the scent of blood and the metallic taste of something colder—absence.
Arjun knelt slowly beside the body as the forensic tech peeled back the sheet.
One stab. Precise. Straight through the sternum.
There was no sign of a struggle. No scratches, no bruising. The victim had simply… stopped existing.
"Just like the last five," Arjun muttered.
"Almost poetic," came a voice behind him—smooth, calm, and entirely familiar.
Arjun didn't turn. He didn't need to.
"Aryan," he said flatly.
Aryan Gupta stepped up beside him, dressed in black as always. Calm eyes, clean shoes, not a speck of rain on him. As if the storm had chosen to ignore him.
"They're getting bolder," Arjun continued. "No weapon. No prints. No motive."
"No mistakes," Aryan added, scanning the shadows. "Only messages."
Arjun stood. His eyes landed on a faint symbol scrawled on the brick wall in chalk, just above eye level.
A circle. Looped. With a single slash through it.
His breath hitched.
He had seen that before—a long time ago.
---
It was a rainy night like this one. The hospital had been on fire.
Flames clawed at the sky while Arjun, seventeen at the time, stood outside in disbelief, unable to speak. Inside, the children's wing of the old civic hospital had collapsed.
Meera had gone back in. She'd already saved two kids. She hadn't come out with the third.
They told him the roof gave in. They told him it was fast. Painless.
They lied.
Arjun remembered the moment too clearly.
He hadn't cried. He hadn't screamed. He had just sat on the curb, staring at the smoke, feeling nothing and everything all at once.
Until a stranger had sat beside him.
"You don't forget pain like that," the man had said.
Arjun hadn't responded. He didn't have words. Just grief.
The grief didn't hit Arjun like a wave.
It settled like dust — in his lungs, behind his eyes, under his skin. Quiet.Suffocating.
When Meera died, something didn't just break in him — something emptied.
That night was the first time he met Aryan Gupta.
Since that night, Aryan had always been there, drifting in and out of Arjun's life like a shadow that knew too much about Arjun and his life. Like a shadow of his own...
---
Now, standing in the alley, staring at that old, familiar symbol, old memories of his sister flashed before Arjun's eye. He felt the air thicken.
Meera used to draw it in her notebooks.
She called it her guardian mark.
A shield against anything evil.
She would press it into his palm as a kid when he had trouble sleeping. Told him it would keep the monsters out.
But why was it here?
Why now?
"She believed in it, didn't she?" Aryan said quietly.
Arjun looked at him. "You remember that?"
Aryan smirked. "I remember everything you try to forget."
---
Back at his office , Arjun stared at the case files again. Six victims. All strangers. All killed the same way—one stab, no resistance, no trace left behind.
No witnesses.
No DNA.
No security footage.
The cameras went dead for a few minutes before each murder.
It was almost as if someone had rehearsed it.
Aryan leaned over his shoulder, glancing at the whiteboard.
"You're looking in the wrong places," he said.
"And where should I be looking?" Arjun asked, more bitterly than he meant to.
Aryan smirked. "Behind you."
---
That night, Arjun couldn't sleep.
The city outside was dead quiet. Not even the rain dared continue.
Arjun stood at the sink, staring at his reflection.
He looked like a man unraveling — hollow beneath the eyes, breath fogging the glass.
He turned on the tap and splashed cold water across his face. It helped. For half a second.
When he looked up again, his reflection didn't match for a moment.
And in the glass covered in fog he saw a tall shadow figure. Scared he punched the glass. The glass now FRACTURED.
And then he saw it.
Words.
Forming in the fractured glass. As if written by the figure himself.
> REMEMBER ME
He staggered backward, hitting the wall behind him.
"No…" he whispered.
The letters were clear. Real. He blinked, rubbed his eyes — they stayed.
> REMEMBER ME
A sound came from the hallway.
Footsteps.
Arjun's heart leapt into his throat.
A soft knock.
Then Aryan's voice: calm, cool, like static in his mind.
> "Everything okay in there?"
Arjun hesitated. Looked at the mirror again.
The letters were still there.
He opened the door slowly.
Aryan stood in the frame, a half-amused look on his face.
> "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Arjun gestured frantically. "Look. Look at the mirror."
Aryan stepped past him, into the bathroom.
He looked.
Just A fractured mirror. No writing. No symbol. No fog.
Aryan looked at Arjun. Concerned he said.
> "Maybe you need some rest."
Arjun was shocked. with eyes wide open, he stared at the glass.
The words were gone.
As if they'd never existed at all.