The investigation moved forward, inch by inch, like a snake slithering through tall grass - slow, deliberate, waiting to strike.
Detective Aaran watched everything unfold from behind his calm facade, a faint trace of amusement in his otherwise cold gaze. He had no interest in the obvious suspects. He had no interest in the noise. His attention remained quietly fixed on one person alone - Rhea.
Others called her harmless. Quiet. A writer obsessed with fiction, surely incapable of murder. But Aaran? He understood masks. He wore one himself.
Yet even he hadn't decided what lay beneath hers.
Still, suspicion wasn't his alone to carry. Inspector Harshvardhan was growing restless. Younger than Aaran, but with the sharp, dogged instincts of someone who didn't trust smiles easily - especially not from women tied to dead men. He had begun watching Rhea too, though not with fascination. With suspicion.
> "Her alibi doesn't fit cleanly," Harshvardhan murmured one night over a cigarette. "And she's too... untouched by fear."
Aaran had merely smiled. "Some people don't fear what they've already accepted."
---
Rhea sat in her quiet home, typing words into her laptop she would never publish. Words like guilt, revenge, silence, and blood. Words stitched together in sentences too dangerous to exist beyond her locked hard drive.
She did not fear Harshvardhan's suspicion. She had accounted for it. She had written this scenario before, after all - fiction taught her how to behave under scrutiny.
What haunted her wasn't the detective's gaze or the police's whispers.
What haunted her was quieter, deeper.
Her sister's face. Not broken, not begging for justice - but frozen forever in weakness she never deserved. The world thought it had been illness. A weak heart. Fragile blood. That was the story signed on death certificates and whispered at funerals.
But Rhea knew better. She had known the moment her sister stopped looking her in the eyes.
It wasn't illness that killed her.
It was terror. It was shame.
It was what they did to her - what he did to her.
No one else would ever know. That secret belonged to Rhea alone. Justice? No. Justice had never been part of this plan. Only punishment.
---
Meanwhile, clues began to surface. A neighbor reported seeing someone - not Rhea - near her house late that night. A cigarette stub, half-burned, found at the gate. Footprints too large to belong to her. Little things. Small enough to doubt, but not enough to convict.
Harshvardhan followed these scraps like a hound with blood on his teeth. He pressed harder. Questioned longer. Dug deeper into Rhea's days, her hours, her movements.
> "Writers know how to lie," Harshvardhan said flatly to his superior. "Especially ones who write murder."
Yet nothing fit perfectly. Nothing snapped cleanly into place.
---
Aaran watched. Listened. Waited.
He could see the threads unraveling slowly, beautifully.
He wasn't here to stop it. Not yet.
He admired the precision in her lies, the way she wore calmness like silk against her skin. But even silk tears if pulled hard enough. Aaran wasn't pulling. Not yet. He wanted to see where the natural fraying would begin. Where doubt would creep into her eyes. Where her confidence would slip - not from fear of punishment, but from realizing she had left some door open, somewhere, just wide enough for suspicion to crawl in.
He wanted to watch her unravel.
He wanted to see how she would rebuild herself afterward.
Because that - not the crime, not the victim, not even the blood - was what fascinated him most.
---
In the quiet of her home, Rhea pressed her hand to her sister's faded photograph and whispered beneath her breath - not grief, not apology, but a promise:
> "I will finish this. I already have."
And somewhere in the dark, Aaran smiled.