The rain was falling hard against the flickering streetlights of Sialfort City when Aira Malik realized she had just lost everything.
Her younger brother's surgery needed one hundred thousand rupees tonight. And the hospital didn't accept promises.
Her phone buzzed.
Unknown message: "Urgent one-night job. Legal company. No harm, just stay overnight in a monitored room. 100,000 on completion."
She hesitated for a long time and thought. Too good to be true—but the company name below it, LeGaled Corporation, showed a blue tick, a proper legal registration when she searched online.
People posted reviews—short ones, but all positive. "Safe. Confidential. Quick cash."
So she went there
---
The building stood tall, glass shining like ice. Inside, everything smelled of money—clean and cold.
Aira signed the contract under dim golden lights.
Clause 1: Stay in Room 107 from 10 PM to 6 AM.
Clause 2: No contact with outsiders.
Clause 3: Leave in morning.
She hesitated, and confirmed it again "so i'll just have to spend the night here doing nothing " The receptionist smiled politely. "Don't worry, miss. It's just a private endurance experiment. Everything legal."
Her pen trembled, but she signed.
---
When the door of Room 107 clicked behind her, she froze.
There was someone already inside—a man sitting on the bed, scrolling his phone.
He looked up, startled. "Oh—sorry, I think you're in the wrong room."
"No, they told me—this is 107," she said, voice shaking.
He frowned. "Me too."
For a moment, silence filled the air, heavy with confusion and tension. Then Aira's heart sank.
Something wasn't right.
Her bag vibrated—one last message: "Stay calm. Observation begins."
Observation?
She stumbled backward, panic rising. "Who are you? Did they send you?"
The man stood, hands raised in surrender. "Wait, calm down. My friend told me to come here it's supposed to be a joke, some stupid challenge."
"Don't come closer!"
She grabbed the fruit knife from the table and held it out with trembling hands.
"I swear," he said quietly, "I don't even know what's happening."
The night stretched on like that—Aira sitting in front of the door, knife gripped tight, eyes wide.
The man salim akil, Borned in rich family, party animal, and spoiled—sat on the bed, trying not to move. Try not to scare her and watching her warmly thinking "she is pretty".
Outside, cameras clicked silently.
---
By morning, she woke first and was scared to go outside as she was scared they won't let her go .. she plan to use akil ..she hold butter knife close to akil throat and wake him and threatening him with knife to take her outside safey.The door unlocked at 6:00 AM sharp.
Aira grap knife close to akil throat and start walking couridor....the security guard saw her .. Aira was not supposed to be outside so she ditched the akil and try hide.. trying to hide she brust into record room where she got her hand on counterfeits documents..in this document she saw how many illegal things has this company have done using one legal certificate... A sudden layer of revenge awake in her...then she saw a guard approaching...scared to get caught she hide the documents in building.. promised to take them back as if she got captured documents stay safe....and escape through back door
First thing she do was report to police but when she tried to report it to the police, they laughed.
"LeGaled Corp is registered. You signed consent papers. You weren't harmed. It's legal." she try to explain them their clause were different...the contract was fake but police didn't believed her..and she have proof but they told her to bring proof and then report them..she was in hope that police will believe her and she will get her hand in papers through police help but she was wrong
Legal.
A nightmare hidden behind paperwork.
Aira pushed through the automatic doors of the police station . The grey sky had turned to something harder now—harder than the drizzle that soaked her hem, harder than the shaking in her hands. She had expected to be believed. She had expected the system to at least look like it cared.
It didn't. Paperwork and polite smiles and a bureaucracy that treated fear like fine print.
She hugged her arms around herself and started to walk. Each step felt louder than the last. If they would turn their heads for the registered company, who would turn theirs for her brother's operation? No one. Only contracts that could be folded away.
A voice, low and careful, called her name.
"So they didn't file a report?"
She stopped. He was close enough for her to see the worry thread behind his eyes—familiar, sincere. Akil. She remembered the hotel room now: the stunted laughs, the clink of bottles, his face lit by a screen at some point; an ordinary face in an impossible night.
She didn't look at him. Her jaw tightened. The world had taught her to read men like him—the quick smiles that covered corners of thought. She let the old scorn rise, intended as armor.
"You think you can just stroll in and ask me that?" Her voice was sharper than she meant. "You think you're funny? You—" Her hands curled until her nails bit her palms. "You'll see what I'll do. I'll make you guys pay. Do you think girls are your playthings? We are not."
Akil's hands went up instinctively. "wait, listen. I already explained in the hotel room, I was set up too. I didn't know anything. I was there for a party with my friends—this was supposed to be a prank." He tried to keep the explanation simple, patient.
But she was already scammed—her trust drained away like water down a drain—and she didn't accept his words. "Stop lying," she said. "I know people like you."
And walk away
The insult landed on him sharper than he expected. Irritation flared
what's her problem?
mixed with a thin ribbon of worry that tugged harder than his irritation wanted to admit.he thought:
she looked dangerously determined, the kind of person who, once she picked a fight with an institution, would not stop until she'd torn it open. If LeGaled noticed her pushing back, she might be in real danger.
He bit the inside of his cheek and forced a tight, practical smile. "why should i worry she does whatever she needs to do" .
Akil watched Aira go,He told himself he didn't care told himself a dozen timesbut the tightness under his ribs wouldn't loosen. It wasn't interest, not properly. He told himself he didn't do casual feelings. He had never wanted anyone; girls were a distraction he didn't need. And yet her anger raw and uncompromising left a small, persistent ache in his chest, the kind that made him tilt his head and study her back as if it might explain something.
He let her go for a block, then another. He told himself he was being ridiculous. Then he turned and followed at a distance that felt safe: close enough to know she wasn't getting into trouble, far enough that she wouldn't see him and lash out.
Aira moved like she had a purpose she hadn't fully planned—fast steps, eyes scanning, a jaw set so hard a small white streak ran through her knuckles. She went first to the hospital to see her brother's condition. The corridor smelled of disinfectant and stale coffee. Her hands shook as she spoke to the nurse; her voice was all business, but the nurse's pity hit like another betrayal. No money, no room guarantee. The surgery was on hold.
From the corner of her vision, strangers blurred into faces that might help or might hurt. She had to get proof against LeGaled, something to force the police to look twice. she planned to scam them and then take papers and also camera footage as papers can be forged but no videos —if she could find footage showing the instruction messages, the managers directing people, or the way the rooms had been double-booked without consent, maybe she could build a case.
She left the hospital with nothing arranged and a plan that relied on guts and a camera lens.
Akil watched her meet a rickshaw, climb in, and give an address. He followed for a while longer, keeping his distance. She went to the company's building again—not to the front desk this time but around the back where the service entrance and staff park were. She waited in the shadows, breathing hard, looking less like a scared girl and more like a hungry animal circling prey.
He could have called someone—police, a friend who worked in forensics, even his father for leverage—but the habit of his life was restraint. He liked things neat: work, home, sleep. Complications were liabilities. Still, watching her stand there, reckless and small, made him want to move.
A security van rolled past; two guards stepped out, their jackets bulky, their eyes trained to sweep and miss. Aira stepped forward as if to intercept them. She was still carrying that thin, useless butter knife in the pocket of her coat—more for the comfort of weight than for harm. One guard glanced at her, then away. Nothing. The city works on omission as much as action.
She edged closer to the loading dock and saw a door ajar. Through the gap she could just make out the back of the lobby—rows of monitors, a man in a headset sipping tea, another scrolling through footage. Her breath fogged. She wanted to go in, snatch a USB stick, copy the footage, and run. The fantasy was simple. The risk enormous.
Akil stepped onto a side alley and found himself two yards from her, hidden behind a stack of crates. He wanted to call out and tell her to stop. He wanted to take the knife from her, to fold his arms around her and tell her there was a better way. Instead he leaned against the brick and watched.
She slipped inside, a shadow folding into a bigger shadow. Through the gap he could see the monitors; one showed Room 107 with an icon blinking—live. She moved with a kind of desperate, clumsy courage, fingers numb as if she were stealing glimpses of proof from under the world's sleeve.
A voice from the stairwell—firm, businesslike—made her freeze. "You shouldn't be here," someone said.
She pivoted, the coat flaring, eyes bright with something dangerous. "I have a right to know what you did to me," she snapped, the words sharper than the knife she still hid.
A man in a dark coat came down—late thirties, pleasant face, the kind that smiled at cameras. He asked for her papers, her name. She showed him the contract like a thrown gauntlet. He read it, eyes flicking over the fine print with practiced disinterest.
"You signed consent," he said, voice polite as a clinic receptionist. "Everything here is monitored. You understood the terms."
"No," she said. "The contract they gave me in the room had different clauses. I—" Her voice broke. She unclenched one hand and showed him the dirt under her nails, the way she'd spent the night on a chair. "You lied."
The man's smile tightened. "We follow the law. If you feel wronged, file a claim."
Aira's laugh was short and humorless. "They already told the police." The certainty in her words was a detonator. "They'll tell me the same thing. You're legal on paper. You are not legal in heart."
Akil felt a shock run through him—more at how small she looked against that man than anything else. He stepped from the shadow before he knew he meant to. The man's eyes shifted to him with a mild annoyance that said, another customer?
"Sir, you can't—" the man began, but Akil's voice was low and controlled. "She's with me."
Aira looked at him, offended as if he'd interrupted something intimate. "You?" she snapped. "You're not—"
"You should leave," the man said, cordial and dangerous. "leave the girl behind she is our property now"
For a second Akil considered walking away. He considered the safety of distance, the sensibility of not being dragged into an expensive mess. Instead he found himself saying, "She's been through something. Let her get the information."
The man's smile thinned into a line of business operations and phone calls to be made. "There's no footage we can release without a subpoena."
Aira's neck rose like a question. The man turned to call security, a slow, threatening motion. Akil's pulse spiked. He could feel the old, cautious person in him pulling back, but something else—an annoyed heat—kept him rooted. He stepped forward, hands in pockets, voice calm.
"we'll leave" he said. "if i was ur customer u must've know my father's details so if u don't want any further problem let me leave with the girl if you touch her, I'll make sure there's a scene."
It was a stupid thing to say. It was performative. It was not the kind of thing he did. But the man hesitated. For the barest second, the uncertain glare that passes between people who make power deals: would this scrape the carpet or scorch it?
The man laughed once, superficially. "Do what you like."
As they backed out , Aira kept her face turned away, furious and brittle by turns. Akil closed the door gently behind them, as if closing a book he didn't want to read. For the first time since the hotel, he felt the twinge again—an inconvenient, prickly interest that made him want to check whether she was breathing.
"You shouldn't have come here," Aira muttered when they were out of earshot, not a question but a verdict.
"Neither should you," he replied, saying nothing of the fact that he had only just decided he couldn't let her walk into the teeth of LeGaled alone.
They left the back of the building in silence. The city spread itself around them—indifferent, enormous. Aira tucked the knife deeper into her pocket, thumbing its cold edge like a talisman. Akil tried to measure the moment: irritation, responsibility, and that small, poking curiosity. He told himself he'd keep his distance. He told himself he wouldn't get involved.
But already his resolve felt like a paper umbrella in a storm.