!!Story Time!!
Dev P.O.V
The silence inside the northern wing wasn't heavy.
It was intelligent.
It felt like it knew we were there—like the walls had eyes, and the dust had ears. Every footstep we took stirred up more than just particles of time… it stirred memories. Secrets.
And guilt.
I'd heard stories growing up. Whispers about my father's past. Hushed conversations in the middle of the night between relatives who thought I was asleep. A word here, a sentence there—"not the same since the Venice trip," or "he keeps journals in a language no one understands."
But nothing had ever been *confirmed*. Until now.
Radhika pulled open a drawer from one of the covered desks. Inside: letters, photographs… surveillance pictures.
One of them was of **me**, from two months ago, walking out of a café in Delhi.
Another was of Sahil and Ishika on a beach in Nice.
A third showed Justin and Radhika, laughing outside a bookstore in Delhi.
These weren't casual shots.
They were dated. Labeled. Catalogued.
Organized like evidence.
---
I swallowed hard.
"This is my father's handwriting," I said, lifting a small notebook from the pile. "I haven't seen it in years, but I remember. He used to write like this when he worked in intelligence."
Justin stepped closer. "Are you saying your dad's behind this?"
"Yes... and no maybe." I flipped through the pages, heart pounding. "He's not the mastermind. But he's been used."
Radhika frowned. "Used how?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know...Not yet.
Instead, I walked over to the far corner, where a dusty cabinet sat sealed. Inside were black tapes—voice recordings, maybe. Next to them: old passports, SIM cards, forged documents. And one envelope with a symbol on it I hadn't seen since I was a teenager.
A sigil. Latin.
**"Obedientia per veritatem."**
(*Obedience through truth.*)
---
"Dev," Sahil said quietly. "Your dad didn't just watch us. He was tracking our movements. Predicting them. Planning something."
I nodded. "Because someone *told* him to."
Justin's brows tightened. "Who?"
I paused… and then said the name I hadn't said in years.
**"Aarya."**
The room went still.
Only Ishika reacted. Her eyes widened.
"You mean the professor from Zurich? The one who disappeared after the Eastern Collapse?"
I nodded again.
"She didn't disappear. She *was hidden*. My father trusted her more than anyone. She ran a private psychological program—an experiment, almost—on how to turn perception into control. And I think…"
I looked around the room.
"I think we're part of it."
---
As I spoke, I felt something shift inside me. The disbelief was gone. The need to defend him—my father—was gone too. Because if these documents were real, and if Aarya was truly pulling the strings, then my father wasn't a victim. He was **a weapon**.
Used. Controlled. And now—abandoned.
---
Radhika stepped beside me. "So what now?"
I looked down at the map again. One location blinked red on the tablet found in the drawer: **Venice**.
"I don't know who the real puppet master is yet," I said quietly. "But I'm done running."
"We're going to Venice," Justin said firmly. "Together."
Sahil nodded. "And this time… we'll end it."
---
Dev Father P.O.V
I still remember the exact moment she walked into my life.
Not with a bang. Not with chaos. But with **precision**.
Aarya never wore perfume, yet somehow the air changed when she entered the room. She was young then—but her mind? Older than any room she stood in. And I, fool that I was, mistook that brilliance for loyalty.
Back then, I was working covertly with European security agencies—a network too fragile to name. The collapse in the East had shaken all our alignments. But Aarya? She made sense of the noise. At least, that's what I believed.
"You want control, Mr. Malhotra," she had said during our first meeting in Zurich.
"You want safety. And safety is never real until it is manufactured."
I should have walked away then. I should've known no scientist uses words like *manufactured safety* unless they've already designed the danger.
But she offered me something no one else had: clarity. Not just surveillance systems. Not just prediction models. But a **human blueprint**—a way to forecast behavior, loyalties, betrayals, down to the minute.
I agreed to fund her.
In return, she gave me *access*.
And then she demanded *obedience*.
---
At first, it was subtle.
A list of people to watch.
Then a request to test the system.
"Your son is in love, isn't he?" she asked me once, flipping through a file on Dev and Gulafsha.
"Why?"
"Because love is the greatest variable. If we can control that, we can control everything."
That was when I should have stopped.
But I didn't.
I began watching him. Dev. My own blood. His friends. His enemies. His *wife*. All through systems Aarya had built for me—built to keep me powerful, relevant, *safe*.
But power never comes without cost.
And Aarya never stayed in the light.
---
The day she vanished, she didn't warn me.
She didn't erase the data.
She left behind something far worse: **unfinished control**.
And now, I see it unraveling.
The cameras I installed… stopped feeding.
The codes she gave me… are being used against me.
My own son is pulling at threads I once tied to protect him. And I know, deep down, the truth is unavoidable:
**We were all just prototypes.**
She's still out there.
Watching.
And she's using *them*—Dev, Radhika, Justin, Sahil, Ishika—not to destroy me…
…but to **complete her design**.
---
Radhika P.O.V
The moon hung like a pale eye above Venice, but it felt more like a witness than a light. Inside the villa, silence pressed against the walls like fog.
Dev stood near the fireplace, tense and still. Justin was seated by the window, barely blinking, his phone gripped tightly in one hand. Sahil hovered around the corkboard like a detective trying to pull sense from chaos. Ishika leaned against the far wall, her arms crossed—but her gaze, sharp and unreadable, flicked constantly between Dev and me. And Gulafsha sat beside me on the couch, warm and steady, the only one offering silent reassurance.
We had all come here for peace. A break. Maybe even healing.
Instead, we were building a battlefield out of thread and red ink.
"I still don't get it," Sahil muttered, running a hand through his hair. "Dev's dad helped stage the operations in Rome, the Venice safehouse, even the dropped GPS trackers—but not for himself. Aarya was always behind it. So why use him? Why not do it all herself?"
Dev didn't answer immediately. His silence held weight. Then finally, he spoke, voice gravel-soft.
"Because she didn't want power. She wanted control. And to prove she could take down anyone… by making them use their own people."
A chill ran through the room.
I opened the notebook in my lap—one I hadn't touched in weeks. The manuscript I had written months ago, supposedly fiction, but now too disturbingly close to our current reality. Ishika stepped forward, watching my hands.
Gulafsha leaned in, her voice soft. "Is that the one you never published?"
I nodded. "Yeah. I called it *Whispers Through Glass*. A thriller. A mastermind who stays hidden but always watches through others."
I flipped to a page I had bookmarked earlier.
Dev's name wasn't there.
But a character so eerily similar to his father was. Paranoid. Brilliant. Manipulated.
Sahil looked over my shoulder. "Wait—this line..."
He read aloud slowly:
> "The locked wing awaits those who forget what they were built to remember."
Justin's head jerked toward us. "What did you say?"
Gulafsha moved closer too, concern written all over her face.
Sahil pointed again. "And these coordinates. Look."
Justin stepped closer and scanned the numbers. "This is no coincidence. These aren't random."
Dev took the notebook from my hands and stared at the page.
"This is one of my father's black-sites… near Rome. Nobody's supposed to know about this."
I looked down at my own handwriting. "But I didn't know. I mean… I made it up."
Ishika's voice cut in, calm but heavy with weight. "Or someone made you *think* you did."
A silence settled.
Gulafsha placed a hand on my arm gently. "Radhi, you've been having sleep issues, right? The dreams? The migraines?"
I nodded slowly.
"What if Aarya wasn't just watching us," she continued. "What if she was *using* us? Through your words. Through your books."
My stomach turned. "That's insane."
"No," Dev said firmly, "it's *strategic*."
Ishika, still near the wall, finally stepped forward and added, "Aarya's playing a long game. Psychological warfare. And you…" she looked at me, not unkindly, "you were her canvas."
Justin exhaled, finally dropping his phone.
"She's not just leaving traps anymore," he murmured. "She's giving us a damn map."
Dev looked around at all of us. His voice was cold steel.
"Then we follow it."
---
**To be continued...**
Thank you....