Trigger warning: mentions of sexual assault; please read at your own discretion and skip/don't read at any point if you feel uncomfortable.

𓆩𓆪

Adira's breaths settled into a rhythm against Mukti's chest within a few minutes, in contrast to the elaborate chatter she would either have with herself or her uncle dearest before she usually fell asleep. Detaching her tiny hands from her bosoms, Mukti turned the baby on her back, tucked her in her baby blanket and brushed her forehead tenderly.

Her two overgrown ponytails, curling at their ends, desperately needed a trim. Ever since the little girl had finished watching Rapunzel, the idea of bringing scissors anywhere close to the baby's head resulted in prolonged hysterical screams that ruined everyone's day. She would have to devise another tactical plan to get the kid in the salon chair. 

She grabbed the reflective piece she was examining earlier from under her pillow, and went outside the room, careful to shut her bedroom door softly.

The room where Mukti found the object was on the other end of the hallway. She strolled in that direction, and when she turned into the corridor, a fluorescent beam basked underneath the door she had to enter.

Who was it who was already there?

Clutching the piece in a fist, she approached the office room with swift strides.

On hearing footsteps, Dhruv gathered the documents sprawled across the desk and stuffed them into the folder he held with hurried, trembling hands. He didn't know if the order of them mattered. While many of the papers in the mass were worn and crumpled along the edges, the ones he had seen were fresh... not a single mark in sight. He put them into the locker, locking the cabinet when, gently, Mukti pushed the door. 

He pranced across the room, fiddling with the chair.

"What are you doing here?" Mukti asked suspiciously, eyeing Dhruv's disheveled appearance. The way he was squirming and the haphazard manner in which the table, desk lamp, and chair were relative to each other depicted that someone had been examining something thoroughly on that desk, sitting on that chair.

Most likely he was.

"I just... needed a place to... think," He sighed deeply, swatting dust off himself. "How come you are here at this hour?"

She shuffled the piece in her fist, and straightened up. "I – I put Adira to sleep, and I was... um... walking by, and I saw the light. Is everything okay? You seem lost, or worried, or both."

The truth of the matter was Dhruv had tried relaying his finds multiple times over the course of the evening. Actually, since the time he had stepped foot in the room, he had contacted Alia a minimum of five times to get a second opinion. Regardless of the issues between them, there were certain secrets only the two of them had with each other. And without another person's support in his quest, he didn't feel himself.

That was why, when Mukti showed an ounce of concern, he caved. "I think I might have found something." He moved towards the cabinet he was by, where a key had been inserted. "Shut the door," he suggested plainly, and Mukti obeyed, warily stuffing the piece she had previously hidden in her palm into her pocket.

He opened a folder and took out certain sheets from it, while Mukti's focus shifted with the new-found papers.

"Do you remember a few months ago when the donation transactions bounced and couldn't hit our account?" His hand shook before her as he held up a document.

"Yeah?"

"It was because a sale deed was being arranged for SPACE," his voice was merely a whisper, as if the walls could overhear their conversation if he was any louder.

Mukti's heart pounded at the thought of their establishment, their clan's property that sustained them all these years and kept them afloat, going to another person. It was her safety bracket, since the day she had been taken under Raghav's wing. "There was a buyer?" She frowned.

Dhruv nodded, pointing to the name on the document. "Pandit Trilok Chaurasia... It's all here..."

Mukti leaned in, scrutinising the document. The dim light was cast wavering shadows over the page, making it difficult to focus on the person's profile.

"Who is this guy? And why didn't we see these documents until now?" The fresh printouts, in contrast to the other smudged and tampered ones, made her raise a brow.

"They could have been in SPACE," he answered, his urgency growing.

Or evidence placed tactfully to frame someone, Mukti thought. Her gaze fell at the sheet that summarised a background check on Pandit. "Wait, wait a second... even if there was a sale agreement, it's a trust, right? You can't just sell it off without—"

"Maybe that's why the sale didn't go through," Dhruv cut in, his eyes blazing with intensity.

"Because there's no guarantor," Mukti deduced to her own question, grappling with the enormity of the situation. In a way, that meant the property could not be sold. It was supposed to bring them relief that what they possessed was still safely theirs, but why did she feel that something had been off about it all?

She couldn't just pinpoint what it was, but her gut feeling was that danger still lurked.

Dhruv shrugged. "It's only speculation. But that's not even the surprising part. Look..." He pulled out another document and passed it to Mukti, who scanned the tabular sheet. "I did a deeper dive into the donor list. What do you see?"

"Deposits. Aur kya?" Her tone was still puzzled.

"Look closer." As Mukti had a second pass, not entirely sure what she was supposed to be looking at, Dhruv completed, "The account numbers, they look legit, but none of these transactions are traceable. Not even in the dark web."

She gawked at him.

"What does that mean?"

"Government," He stated in an as-a-matter-of-fact tone.

Mukti's soul left her body and only returned after a short pause.

"Why would they help us?" It didn't make sense to her.

"I don't quite know but off the top of my head, if someone tried to sell SPACE... sell our clan's property... and there's paperwork that's been done before it was called off... someone else knows too. We're already on the radar. This might be a truce... or something darker..."

The implications of what that meant were slowly sinking in, and Mukti's face paled.

"So this is the end... this is the last I'll see of my child," her voice broke as she spoke.

She remembered a night from her past with painful clarity. At sixteen, after finishing her evening shift at a local cafe, she had been walking down a brightly lit street with three coworkers. There were four of them in total; it was supposed to be safe. She had been offered a cigarette-like tube from one of them, its sharp taste had been strange, but she hadn't questioned it.

When a van filled with their coworkers' friends stopped, offering her a ride home, Mukti had climbed in. Though only one man had laid hands on her, those whom she trusted had ignored her screams and pleads to be saved. The night had blurred into a haze, snapping a light out of her life forever.

Six weeks later, after her savings were gone and her symptoms — nausea, cramps, an overwhelming need for comfort — became undeniable, she discovered she was pregnant. The reality of it, that she had been ignoring for so long, brought her to the streets in a desperate bid to keep herself alive.

If she didn't want an innocent soul's blood on her hands, she had to stay afloat... do the bare minimum it took to keep herself physically well. She resorted to random jobs like discreet pick-ups or deliveries of small packages. That was where she met Raghav for the very first time. He offered a malnourished pregnant teenage girl a clean and private place to stay, money to support herself, and a community of misfits who accepted her through her numb and outburst stages. Without questions.

Seven months later, she fought against destiny — risking her own life to bring her premature baby into the world — but fought bonding with her. She resisted the affection her daughter showered her with and denied her of little joys, like her Mumma's hugs and presence through her tantrums... all in the fear of Mukti passing one day and leaving the baby all alone. Abandoned.

It was as if all her fears had come true, and amidst the ticking clock, all Mukti could carry with her ironically were regrets – the little desires her little one had that she could not fulfill.

Torn by the visible, excruciating grief his friend was going through, and his own attachment for the child, he bravely suggested, "It's too early to give up. We haven't even fought back."

Reeling in a mix of bone-chilling fright and devastating determination to give her daughter at least a better life, Mukti reaffirmed, "But if someone tried to sell SPACE, that means..."

"It's someone among us. Could be you," He remarked casually.

Gob-smacked by the blank accusation that was neither here nor there, she countered roughly, "I could... very well say the same about you, but to accuse someone, you need evidence."

"That's the blank I can't fill," he admitted, his frustration evident. "All I have is this autopsy report Rose gave me and a message Alia found. I can't join the rest of the dots."

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to grasp an insinuation her friend was making. "What are you even talking about?"

A packet containing evidence against Nawab came into light, causing Mukti to deeply frown.

𓆩𓆪