The house had finally gone quiet. The ticking of the wall clock in the living room echoed faintly through the hallway. Shaurya's room lights were off. Nandita was asleep, probably with her usual face pack and crime serial reruns playing on low volume. But Kiaan… he didn't rest like the others.
His door shut silently behind him as he turned off the light. Darkness swallowed the room, except for the soft blue glow of the moonlight seeping in through the curtains. He moved quietly, methodically — as if his body remembered this routine better than his mind did.
Kiaan stood before his bookshelf. From the outside, it looked like any normal corner in a studious boy's room — stacked with books on criminology, science, dusty trophies from his school debate days. But he reached for the lower left shelf, slid out a faded copy of India's Top 100 Unsolved Crimes, and pressed his thumb into the hollow behind it.
Beep. Click.
The mechanism inside unlocked. The entire shelf groaned softly as it shifted backward, revealing a hidden biometric panel. Kiaan leaned forward, typed a 12-digit passcode, and pressed his thumb onto the scanner.
The bookshelf slid open like a vault door, revealing what he had spent the last six years of his life building in silence.
A hidden room. Dark. Chilling. And obsessively detailed.
He stepped inside, locking the door behind him. The air smelled like cold metal and burnt wires.
The walls were covered in corkboards and photographs — dozens of crime scene snapshots, names scrawled in red marker, red threads connecting suspects to victims, organizations to aliases. CCTV stills. Handwritten notes in cramped letters. Police case files he had hacked and stolen. He had even managed to pull frames from hidden footage the agencies had long buried.
"Rajeev Verma – CBI Officer – Status: Deceased" was written on a large center board. Below it:
> Date of Death: August 9, 2019
Case Status: Closed (Ruling: Gang retaliation)
Official Cause: Gunshot wounds – alley near Dockyard sector.
But Kiaan had never believed that lie.
He walked to his desk and flipped open one of his secured laptops, its screen flickering alive with encrypted files and dark web backdoors. He plugged in a special USB — his own Code Red Archive.
> "Let's start again," he whispered to himself, voice barely audible but laced with iron.
The screen loaded folders:
Drug Lords - Active & Deceased
Human Trafficking Routes
Local Gang Wars
Rajeev Verma Case - Unsolved
Unknown Boy – Alley Witness (Age 11-13)
Kiaan clicked on the last folder. There were two blurry photographs, taken from an old traffic cam. One showed a young Kiaan running. The second showed a shadowy figure — a boy, maybe his age or slightly older — standing behind a car, watching.
> "Who were you?" Kiaan muttered, staring at the image. "Why were you there that night? Why did you disappear when my father died?"
He flipped over to his wall. A handwritten list showed the small fry dealers he had arrested or encountered undercover over the past three years. Many were connected, albeit loosely, to a deeper network. He had no name, no clear boss — but he called it "The Vein."
> "You all think you're invisible," he said to the walls, fingers moving rapidly on the keyboard. "But every pulse has a vein. And every vein leads to a heart. A name. A face."
Three screens now glowed in the darkness — one showing chat logs from a dark web forum, one showing live tracking from a hidden server, and the third showing mugshots of drug lords from over five states.
> "You killed him for a reason. It wasn't just about a bust. He knew something," Kiaan whispered to himself. "And I'll find out what."
A notification flashed. "Data received from Tara Iyer - D-Root Decryption Complete."
He clicked it open. A new document unfolded in front of his eyes: an old CBI internal report… with redacted lines now exposed. His heartbeat quickened.
There — a name. "Rudra Khaali – suspected mastermind. Operates under multiple aliases. Known connections to corrupt CBI insiders."
> "Rudra…" Kiaan narrowed his eyes. "I finally found a piece."
He scribbled the name on the wall board. Drew a red circle around it. Connected it to "Dad - Last Case."
He leaned back, cracking his neck, jaw clenched.
> "You're next."
The room remained silent… except for the gentle whir of the laptops and the ever-growing heartbeat of a boy too young to carry the weight of a war. Yet somehow… he carried it better than anyone else ever could.