Sruthi ran.
Her lungs burned as she stumbled through the darkness, her bare feet striking rough earth, stones and exposed roots. Every breath scraped through her smoke-filled throat, and every step sent another stab of pain through her damaged knee. The broken length of chain still hung from her wrist, its heavy anchor dragging behind her whenever her weakening grip slipped. She gathered as much of it as she could against her body and kept moving, though what she was doing could barely be called running anymore.
Behind her, the building she had escaped from was still burning. Flames rose above the trees and stained the night sky orange and red while smoke clung to her hair, her skin and the torn remains of her clothes. For years, those walls had been her entire world—the locked door, the chains, the darkness and the footsteps that made her body tense before a key even entered the lock. Now there were no walls around her, yet freedom still seemed impossibly far away.
"FIND HER!"
The shout tore through the night, followed by another voice telling the men to spread out. Sruthi flinched but didn't look back. She didn't need to. They were coming, and they were right about one thing—she couldn't have gone far. Her body was barely capable of walking, much less running. Her injured knee threatened to collapse every few steps, her ribs screamed whenever she dragged in too much air, and the soles of her feet were already slick with blood.
But stopping meant being taken back.
She knew exactly what waited for her if that happened. Another locked room. Another chain. Another stretch of darkness while they kept her alive until the day they decided to place what remained of her in front of Druve. The thought was enough to make her push through the pain.
A branch struck her cheek, and Sruthi stumbled sideways. The chain slipped from her grip, its heavy end catching around an exposed root and jerking her violently backward. She crashed to the ground, and pain exploded through her damaged knee so fiercely that a strangled cry escaped before she could stop it. For several seconds, she could do nothing except press one palm into the earth and fight for breath. When she tried to rise, her leg trembled and gave way beneath her.
"Spread out!"
The voice came from somewhere behind her, much closer than before.
Sruthi's head snapped up. Panic cut through the exhaustion, and she grabbed the chain, pulling until the broken anchor came free from the root. The chunk of concrete and iron fixed to its end made every movement harder. Worse, if she continued dragging it across the ground, the sound alone would lead them straight to her.
She needed to get rid of it.
Her shaking fingers moved to the cuff around her wrist. She twisted it, pulled against it and searched blindly for some weakness in the metal, but there was none. Of course there wasn't. That cuff had held her for years. Her gaze darted across the ground until she spotted a large stone. She dragged the chain across another rock, raised the stone and brought it down against one of the links.
The impact travelled painfully through her arms. She struck it again, harder this time, but the iron barely changed. By the third desperate blow, reality forced its way through her panic. She wasn't going to break iron with a rock, not tonight and certainly not with hands that could barely hold the stone.
Another shout echoed through the trees.
Sruthi abandoned the attempt. She gathered the loose chain around her forearm and lifted the heavy anchor against her body to silence it as much as possible before forcing herself to stand. Her knee buckled immediately, and she caught herself against a tree, biting down hard against the scream rising in her throat.
"Move," she whispered.
Her body didn't listen.
"Move."
She pushed herself away from the tree and took one step, then another. By the third, she was moving again. It could barely be called running, but it was enough to carry her farther into the darkness. Branches tore at her arms and stones cut deeper into her feet. Twice she slipped and caught herself against trees before she could fall completely. The forest seemed endless, stretching in every direction without a road, a house or another human being in sight.
Yet this darkness was different from the darkness of her cell. It didn't hold her. There were no walls deciding where she could stop, no locked door deciding whether she could leave. For one brief moment, that difference almost felt like freedom.
Then a familiar voice surfaced from somewhere deep inside her memory.
Where are you going?
She could almost see Druve again on that balcony, the teasing look on his face as his fingers closed around her hand before she could move away.
Away from you.
No.
Sruthi's lips trembled. If only it were still that easy. This time, she really was going away from him, and if she succeeded, he would never know why.
"I'm sorry," she whispered into the night.
Somewhere beyond this forest was a world with roads, houses and phones. Somewhere in that world was Druve. The thought came before she could stop it—she could find a phone and call him. She wouldn't even have to explain everything. She could simply say his name and let him hear her voice. She could tell him she was alive.
Druve would come.
She knew it with the same certainty with which she knew her own name. Whatever he believed about her disappearance, whatever anger or hurt seven years had left between them, he would come if he knew where she was.
Her steps slowed as the possibility took shape. She imagined his face when he saw her. She imagined his arms closing around her and the familiar beat of his heart beneath her cheek. After years of darkness, she could almost feel that warmth again.
For one aching moment, she wanted nothing more than to go home to him.
Moonlight slipped between the branches and fell across her arm. Sruthi looked down at the scars crossing her skin, some faded and others still raised and angry. The rusted cuff circled her wrist, blood dried beneath its edge, and the fantasy disappeared as quickly as it had come.
If Druve saw her, he wouldn't see only what those men had done. She knew him too well for that. He would look at every scar and wonder where he had been when it happened. He would turn every year she had spent inside those walls into another failure he believed belonged to him.
And the scars were only what he could see. What frightened Sruthi more were the things no wound could explain—the years inside those walls, the pieces of herself she could no longer recognize and everything she had learned to survive without. She couldn't give Druve any of it to carry as his failure.
Maybe he would find the people responsible. Maybe he would destroy every person who had touched her. Sruthi knew him well enough to believe those men were fools if they thought darkness would protect them forever once Druve had something real to follow. But there would always be an afterward, and when there was no one left for him to punish, she knew where the blame would turn.
Toward himself.
That was what terrified her.
Sruthi forced her legs to move again. Let him hate her. Let him believe she had walked away. Let him think she had chosen another life, another place—anything except the truth. If anger eventually made him stop searching, she would accept his anger. If hatred allowed him to forget her, she would accept that too. The thought of being forgotten hurt so badly that she almost stopped again, but she kept moving.
Better forgotten than used against him.
A gunshot shattered the night.
Sruthi ducked instinctively as the sound exploded through the forest, sending birds scattering from the trees. Her heart slammed against her ribs while she waited for pain to follow, but none came.
"Don't shoot her!"
The enraged voice came from somewhere behind her.
"Boss wants her alive!"
Cold fear moved through Sruthi despite the heat still trapped beneath her skin. Of course they wanted her alive. Death wasn't what they had planned for her. If they caught her, the fire would have changed nothing. They would drag her somewhere else, and another room would be waiting. Another lock. Another chain. Then, someday, Druve.
She ran harder.
Her knee protested immediately, but she ignored it. Another gunshot cracked through the forest, and wood exploded from a tree somewhere to her right. Sruthi screamed and covered her head as she stumbled forward.
"Idiot! I said don't shoot her!"
"Then catch her!"
Heavy footsteps pounded behind her.
They were gaining.
Sruthi's breathing became shorter, her vision blurring around the edges until the trees seemed to shift in front of her. Smoke still burned inside her lungs. Blood trickled from wounds she couldn't count, her feet were torn open, and every few steps her injured knee threatened to fold completely. Her body was failing, and she knew it.
Still, she demanded more from it.
One more step. Then another. Then another.
Something sharp sliced into the sole of her foot, and Sruthi stumbled with a gasp. The chain slipped from her grasp, the heavy anchor crashing against the ground as she fell. Her palms scraped across stone, tearing open already damaged skin, and her injured knee struck the earth hard enough for pain to swallow her vision.
For several seconds, she remained there with her face lowered, struggling to breathe. The ground beneath her felt almost gentle compared with everything else. Her body begged her to stay down, to close her eyes for only a moment and rest.
Then the voices came again.
They were closer.
Sruthi's fingers dug into the dirt. If they caught her now, everything she had done would mean nothing. She pushed herself onto her knees, but her arms shook violently beneath her.
"Get up."
Her own voice sounded unfamiliar.
She tried. Her knee buckled, dropping her back onto one hand.
"Get up, Sruthi."
This time she planted her good foot beneath her and pushed. Slowly, painfully, she stood. The world tilted so violently that she had to lean against a tree until it settled, but when it did, she moved again. She could no longer pretend she was running. She stumbled forward, dragging one leg and clutching the chain against herself, forcing her body to continue long after it had stopped obeying willingly.
Then something changed.
The trees were beginning to thin. Sruthi blinked through her blurred vision and noticed more light ahead, less undergrowth beneath her feet and something pale stretching beyond the final line of trees. It took her exhausted mind a moment to understand what she was seeing.
A road.
She stared at it, almost unable to believe something so ordinary could feel so impossible. A road meant cars, houses and people. It meant that somewhere beyond this forest, an entire world had continued living while hers had been reduced to four walls and a locked door.
Hope rose instinctively inside her, but Sruthi crushed it before it could become something dangerous. She wasn't going home. She couldn't. But the road could take her somewhere else, somewhere far enough that these men couldn't find her.
Far enough that Druve couldn't either.
"There!"
Sruthi's blood turned cold.
"She's at the road!"
They had seen her.
She forced her legs faster. The trees fell away around her, and her bare foot finally struck asphalt. She nearly collapsed, but somehow remained standing.
For the first time in years, nothing physically stood between her and the world. There was no locked door, no wall, no chain fixed into concrete and no captor blocking the way. Only an empty road beneath the night sky.
Sruthi looked in both directions, but darkness stretched on either side. She didn't know where she was or which direction led toward safety. Behind her, branches snapped as the men pushed through the trees.
"Sruthi!"
Hearing her name in their voices made her recoil.
"Stop! Don't make this harder!"
A strange, broken laugh escaped her. Harder? They had no idea what that word meant anymore.
Then light appeared around the bend.
Sruthi turned toward it, and relief flooded through her so suddenly that her knees nearly gave way. Headlights were approaching. A car. Another person. Someone who wasn't one of them.
Help.
For a heartbeat, she considered waiting in the middle of the road and forcing the driver to stop. Then the voices behind her grew louder. The men were too close. If she waited, they could reach her before the stranger understood anything. They could say she was dangerous, confused or a patient who had escaped. After years hidden from the world, Sruthi had nothing with which to prove otherwise.
Her gaze moved across the road. The forest continued on the other side. If she reached it, she could disappear again.
The headlights grew brighter.
She made her choice and stepped forward.
A horn screamed through the night, and Sruthi froze. The headlights swallowed everything in front of her, too bright and too fast for her exhausted mind to judge the distance. After years inside walls, with no open spaces and no moving world around her, she couldn't understand the speed quickly enough.
She tried to move, but her injured leg failed. Her knee folded beneath her, sending her stumbling just as the horn screamed again.
"SRUTHI!"
Someone shouted behind her.
Instinct made her turn.
The vehicle hit her.
The impact was brutal. Her body struck the hood, tearing the remaining air from her lungs before pain could even reach her mind. Then she was thrown upward, and for one impossible second there was nothing beneath her.
Above her was the night sky.
And somewhere between the headlights and darkness, she saw Druve.
Not the Druve who might still be searching for her. Not the man she had spent tonight forcing herself to run away from, but the Druve she had known before everything had fallen apart. The man on the balcony whose arms had once made the entire world feel small enough to survive.
Then the ground came.
Her body struck the asphalt and rolled before finally coming to a stop several metres away. For a moment, nothing existed. Sound returned slowly—the screech of tyres, a car door slamming, someone shouting and footsteps rushing toward her.
Sruthi stared at the sky and tried to breathe. Her chest refused at first, panic flickering through her before a shallow gasp finally entered her lungs. Pain ripped through her ribs. Her fingers twitched against the asphalt, and somewhere beside her lay the heavy anchor that had followed her all the way from that room.
She stared at it through blurred vision.
For years, it had been fixed to a wall.
Now it wasn't.
"Oh God! Call an ambulance!"
Footsteps rushed closer.
"She's alive!"
Sruthi wasn't sure whether that was good news anymore.
A stranger knelt beside her, his hands hovering uncertainly as though he was afraid touching her might make things worse. "Miss? Can you hear me?"
She struggled to focus on his face. He wasn't one of them—or at least she didn't think so. Her gaze shifted toward the trees, where dark shapes seemed to move between the branches, but her vision was narrowing too quickly for her to know whether the men were still there.
"Don't move," the stranger said. "Help is coming."
Once, help had meant only one person.
Druve.
A tear slipped from the corner of Sruthi's eye.
"She's conscious," someone said nearby.
The stranger leaned closer. "Can you tell me your name?"
For one terrible instant, another room returned to her. Another voice asking the same question while Sruthi struggled to hold onto something that should have been impossible to lose.
What's your name?
Back then, she had hesitated, and that brief hesitation had frightened her more than the pain because even her own name had begun to feel far away.
Not now.
She knew it.
Sruthi.
She was still Sruthi.
Her lips moved, but no sound came.
"Don't try to talk," the stranger said quickly. "Just stay with me."
But Sruthi was already slipping somewhere else. Dev came first—not the face that had haunted the darkest corners of her captivity, but her brother as she wanted to remember him. Alive. Smiling. Safe. The image stayed only for a moment before another face replaced his.
Druve.
Always Druve.
Her mind travelled backward through fire, chains, darkness and pain until she found the balcony again. She could feel his heartbeat beneath her cheek and his arms around her, hear the quiet amusement in his voice as though seven years had vanished.
Where are you going?
She had told him she was going away from him.
No.
Her lips trembled.
If only it were still that easy.
"Stay with me," the stranger urged.
Somewhere nearby, another voice said an ambulance was coming. Sruthi barely heard it. The pain had begun to change. It hadn't disappeared, but it seemed farther away now, as though her body were slowly becoming something she could no longer reach.
For years, she had been afraid of dying because death meant Druve might never know that she hadn't abandoned him. She had wanted him to find her because some small part of her had needed him to know the truth.
Tonight, she no longer wanted that truth at the cost it would demand from him.
If he believed she had left, let him believe it. If anger was easier than guilt, let him be angry. If one day forgetting her allowed him to live without searching for someone he could never find, then she would accept even that.
Just don't let him see what they did to her.
Sruthi's eyes slowly closed.
"Hey! Keep your eyes open!"
She forced them open again, but the stars above her had blurred into pale streaks. She had escaped. That was what mattered. Whatever happened now, those men hadn't taken her back. They wouldn't drag her into another room and wait for the day they could place her in front of Druve.
Her lips parted.
"Druve…"
The name was barely a breath.
The stranger leaned closer. "What did you say?"
Sruthi couldn't repeat it.
Her eyes closed again, and this time the balcony returned completely. There were no chains there, no fire, no screams and no scars. There was only cool night air, the distant glow of the city and Druve's arms around her. She could almost hear his heartbeat again, steady and strong beneath her cheek, exactly as she remembered it.
For years, she had survived by silently asking him to find her. Tonight, she didn't ask him to search. She didn't ask him to save her. She didn't even ask him to remember.
She had only one thing left to ask of him.
Live, Druve.
Her body finally went still, and everything faded to black.