The money from the paint factory deal sat in the lock-up, a thick, seductive stack of potential. For a few hours, it was theirs. They had carried the risk, navigated the checkpoint, and closed the sale. The triumph was real, a warm, buzzing feeling in their chests.
Reality arrived with the ghost.
He didn't come to the alcove. He summoned Harsh to the private vault in Kalbadevi. The room was colder than Harsh remembered, the air still and dead.
The ghost didn't ask for a report. He simply held out a hand. "The proceeds from your new venture."
It wasn't a question. He knew. Of course he knew. The docks were his nervous system; nothing twitched without him feeling it. The checkpoint incident had undoubtedly been reported up the chain, straight to him.
Harsh handed over the envelope he had prepared. It contained a significant portion of the profit, calculated based on what he thought would be a "fair" cut for the unseen facilitation of using the city's waterways, even indirectly.
The ghost took it. He didn't count it. He placed it on the cold steel table between them.
"It is insufficient," he rasped.
Harsh's heart sank. "The overheads were high. The supplier, the transportation—"
"The supplier used our waters," the ghost interrupted, his voice flat. "The transportation risked our attention. Your enterprise creates… ripples. Ripples require calm. Calm has a price. The price is fifty percent of gross. As per our agreement on the gold."
Gross. The word was a hammer blow. He wasn't taking a cut of the profit. He was taking half of every rupee that had come from Mr. Dalal, before expenses. Before paying back Mr. Nair. Before anything.
"That would leave us with nothing," Harsh argued, a spike of defiance piercing his fear. "We wouldn't be able to fund the next shipment. The venture would collapse."
The ghost's head tilted slightly. "Then it collapses. My employer's other interests are not dependent on your paint thinner."
The message was clear. Harsh's new business was a trivial side project. It was allowed to exist only as long as it provided a generous stream of tribute. Its survival was irrelevant.
Defeated, Harsh recalculated on the spot, his mind racing through the numbers. He emptied his pockets of the remaining cash, adding it to the envelope on the table. It left them with a pittance. Enough to maybe pay back Mr. Nair's initial investment, but nothing more.
The ghost finally picked up the swollen envelope and tucked it away. "The ripples have been noted by other parties as well. Officer Desai expects his share for the… tranquility at the checkpoint."
He left, leaving Harsh standing in the cold room, financially neutered. The victory had been hollowed out, its substance extracted by the two men who owned the world he tried to navigate.
The next payment to Desai was even larger than the first. Harsh delivered it himself to the customs house, a ritual of humiliation. Desai accepted it with a slight, knowing nod. No words were exchanged. None were needed.
That evening, Harsh gathered the final, meager remains of the paint factory profit. It was a laughably small sum compared to the initial haul. He divided it three ways.
He handed Deepak and Sanjay their shares. They took the money, but the excitement was gone from their eyes. They had seen the mountain. They had held it. And they had watched it be carried away, bucket by bucket, by silent, entitled men.
"We did all the work," Sanjay said, his voice small, looking at the thin stack of notes in his hand. "We almost got arrested. We convinced that factory-walla. And for what? For this?"
"For the privilege of not being buried in that garbage dump," Deepak said quietly, his practical nature framing their survival in the bleakest terms.
Harsh looked at his own share. It was payment for a job. A dangerous, high-stress job. He was an employee in his own life, and his bosses were a ghost and a bureaucrat.
He thought of Mr. Dalal's resentful face. The man thought Harsh was the predator, the ruthless opportunist. He had no idea that Harsh was just the middleman, the visible tip of a much deeper, darker iceberg of extraction.
The oil profit was gone. But the lesson was searingly clear.
He had been thinking like a businessman, focused on revenue, profit margins, and supply chains. But he wasn't in a business. He was in a ecosystem of predators. In this world, money alone wasn't power. It was just bait. The real power was the force that decided who got to eat.
He needed to stop being the bait. He needed to become a predator. Or at least, build a fence so strong the predators couldn't get in.
He looked at Deepak and Sanjay. "This is the last time," he said, his voice low and hard. "The last time we do all the work just to hand over the prize."
"How?" Sanjay asked, the word laden with defeat. "We can't fight them."
"We don't fight them," Harsh said, a new, colder strategy forming in his mind. "We become too valuable to eat. We become necessary."
He wasn't sure how yet. But he knew the answer wasn't in bigger shipments or better deals. It was in leverage. It was in connections they controlled. It was in building something that wasn't just profitable, but indispensable.
The hollow victory had left them with empty pockets. But it had filled Harsh with a new resolve. The game wasn't about making money.
It was about making yourself untouchable.
(Chapter End)