The truth didn't arrive loudly.
It surfaced quietly—like a corpse rising through dark water.
Shiva found it at 3:41 a.m.
Not while searching aggressively. Not while forcing his way through systems. He had learned patience after Mahi's death. Rage made mistakes. Silence didn't.
He replayed the timeline again.
School dismissal.
Main road junction.
Construction site perimeter.
He had already reviewed most public CCTV footage days ago—nothing useful. Cameras malfunctioning. Files corrupted. Entire hours missing.
Too clean.
So he went where no one bothered to look.
Private cameras.
Luxury apartments. Traffic-adjacent commercial buildings. Backup servers that were never meant to be accessed unless something important went wrong.
That was where he saw it.
A black car.
Long.
Glossy.
Impossibly expensive for the narrow road it occupied.
Shiva paused the footage.
Zoomed in.
The emblem on the hood was unmistakable.
Rolls-Royce.
His fingers tightened slightly.
The timestamp placed it exactly twelve minutes after Mahi was last seen exiting the school gate.
He advanced the footage frame by frame.
Mahi appeared at the edge of the screen, walking alone, adjusting her bag strap. The car slowed beside her—not abruptly, not violently. One of the rear doors opened.
Too calmly.
A man stepped out.
The footage lacked audio, but Shiva didn't need it. He watched the body language—the sudden stiffness in Mahi's posture, the way she stepped back.
Then hands reached out.
Fast.
Practiced.
The door closed.
The car moved on.
Shiva sat motionless for a full minute after the clip ended.
No shaking.
No tears.
Only a precise, surgical clarity settling into place.
He traced the car's movement across multiple cameras, stitching together fragments from different locations. The route led away from the public roads, through gated neighborhoods, toward the edge of the city.
Toward wealth.
The final camera showed tall iron gates opening inward.
A mansion.
Private property.
The footage ended there.
He didn't need more.
Vehicle registration records were buried, protected—but not invisible. The car was registered to a holding company. The holding company traced back to a name that appeared often in newspapers.
A politician.
Powerful.
Untouchable.
Smiling in public photographs.
The car belonged to his son.
By sunrise, Shiva had printed everything.
Still frames.
Timelines.
Location overlays.
He organized them neatly inside a thin folder.
At breakfast, his mother pushed a cup of tea toward him. "You didn't sleep again," she said quietly.
"I'm fine," he replied.
She looked at him for a long moment. "You're not."
He stood up, picked up the folder.
"I'm going to the police station."
His father froze. "Why?"
"Because they were wrong," Shiva said. "And I can prove it."
The station smelled the same as before—stale air, old files, indifference.
Inspector Rao looked irritated the moment he saw Shiva.
"We already closed this case," he said flatly. "You people need to move on."
Shiva placed the folder on the desk.
"Open it," he said.
Rao scoffed, but flipped it open anyway.
The color drained from his face by the third page.
He leaned back slowly. "Where did you get this?"
"From cameras your department didn't check," Shiva replied.
Rao's voice hardened. "You're accusing a very influential family."
"I'm showing you footage," Shiva said. "You can accuse them yourself."
Silence fell heavy between them.
Another officer glanced over nervously.
"This is… sensitive," Rao said finally. "Even if this is real, reopening this case requires approval."
"From whom?" Shiva asked.
Rao didn't answer.
Shiva nodded. "I thought so."
Rao closed the file. "Listen carefully. If you push this, it won't end well for you or your family."
Shiva leaned forward slightly.
"My sister was killed," he said quietly. "It already didn't end well."
Rao exhaled sharply. "I'll… look into it."
It was a lie.
Shiva knew it the moment he left the station.
That night, he sat in the dark, laptop open, city lights blinking faintly through the window.
The system had been given a chance.
It had refused.
Shiva stared at the mansion's final frame on his screen—the iron gates frozen mid-open.
"Then we do this properly," he whispered.
Not with anger.
Not with noise.
With law.
With exposure.
With pressure no amount of money could erase.