CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE IDIOT WHO PUT DEATH ON THE HOTLINE
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In the quiet of the night, alone in the privacy of their room, Aadhya presses her cheek to his dressed forehead, pressing a kiss to his temple. He looks beautiful in his sleep, she thinks, as she moves back to stroke his hair back from his forehead with infinite tenderness and sorrow that felt foreign to her. Beautiful, but cold as moonlight.
Suddenly, she felt so, so tired, for him, for them — and not in the trivial sense either. But rather an unshakable weariness that ran bone-deep. "Please fight," she pleads in despair. "Fight to the very end, okay. Don't go quietly. I know you would rather go to your mother, but I will be so mad at you if you leave me here alone." Her lips trembled, and she brushed away the tear that escaped down her cheek. "You promised me you would marry me. So don't go back on your words. Come back to me."
Her hands were shaking, she realized, clenching them into fists and fluttering her eyes shut tightly. But she couldn't hold back sobs that were stuck on the walls of her throat anymore.
So she breaks, finally losing her composure.
Shaking violently, she shatters into his limp arms, her heartbreaking apart into a million pieces like a piece of glass, no longer having the strength to hold it all together. Praying for the uncaring gods to give him a chance to live the kind of life where no one can wound him this deeply ever again. Hoping if she held him strongly enough, she could share all that pain and torture he's been suffering all on his own.
It was freeing, giving in to the rawness of all the pain she held in her heart that evening as she watched the doctors suture his wounds by cleaning the injured areas with sterile gauze and stitching his skin back with a crude needle. It was the moment in which she decided she hated the smell of saline more than anything in the world.
It felt terribly unfair. The injustice howled within Aadhya like a storm, tearing everything apart. Why should this man go through all these long and unbearably loud moments of pain to get a little bit of joy? Hasn't he suffered a lifetime's worth in just a little while? How far do they wish to go to break him?
She hears a moment behind her a few moments later. With a rough stroke of her hand to brush away the tear-stained cheeks, Aadhya turns her chin towards where Vanaram had come to stand in the shadows before fixing her eyes on Rocky. "Did you find anything?" Aadhya asks, her voice ragged with the tears scalding the back of her eyes as she pushes her hair off her wet face.
"You were right about Adheera," Vanaram reports, his hands firmly clasped behind his back. "John was working with him. They lured him into the mountains where Adheera was waiting with his men. And even though he tried his best, most of the men he took were even afraid to raise their guns when they saw Adheera. They were unprepared and frightened. By the time they did gather their courage, it was too late." Vanaram continues, his voice steady, "The only reason they retreated is that Rocky managed to deliver a fatal blow at Adheera; a bullet to the chest and a hammer to his head. His men had no choice but to take Adheera back to safety."
