Creak. Creak. Creak.
The rhythmic groan of the rocking chair echoed through the silent room. On the wall, a lone painting hung-a portrait of a detective with a name etched at the bottom: Sherlock Holmes.
A young man, barely twenty-one, reclined in the chair. He held a teacup in one hand, while his other rested idly on the armrest, his gaze fixed on the shadows of the room.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
The shrill cry of an incoming call shattered what remained of the young man's solace. His gaze drifted toward the phone on the side table; he let out a low groan, stretching his limbs with the heavy, labored movements of someone battling the weight of the world. Finally, he reached out, snatched the device, and checked the caller ID.
"Akhil?" he whispered.
His voice was a low, magnetic rasp-the kind of sound that pulls a listener into its depths, promising secrets it wasn't yet ready to reveal.
A charismatic, booming voice erupted from the receiver, overflowing with a level of vitality that felt almost offensive to the young man. He frowned, letting out a long, jagged sigh of frustration as he listened to his childhood friend.
"Man, you were incredible!" the voice chirped. "You tore through last night's case like it was nothing. You really are the modern-day Sherlock, haha!"
"That wasn't difficult, dumb-ass," the young man drawled, his words heavy and elongated, as if every syllable were being dragged out of him against his will.
"Huh? Bro, are you insulting all of us cops… or just showing off? That was a hellishly difficult case, bruh."
"Like, who would even buy that the killer was him?"
"Even the autopsy report clearly said it was a natural death. How could anyone have known it was murder?"
Last week
A girl's body was found in her apartment—cold, alone, and eerily still. For days before that, she had been fading, getting weaker by the hour, until that morning, when she finally stopped breathing. Her last words had been to her mother, spoken in a voice that sounded almost normal… almost innocent.
The coroner's report said heart attack—natural causes. The findings were clean, clinical: no obvious trauma, no signs of violence. They also discovered traces of drugs in her system, which everyone quietly treated as a convenient explanation. Case closed.
But her mother refused to let it go.
She told the police her daughter had never had any heart problems in her life, not since birth. No chest pain, no shortness of breath. Nothing. So, under pressure, the department reopened the investigation, treating it now as a possible homicide connected to drugs.
The first lead came from the girl's boyfriend. He had been away on a business trip for six months and had only returned the day after she died. When the cops dug deeper, they found out she had been cheating on him.
The man she was meeting in secret was picked up within hours. In the interrogation room, he broke quickly.
He had met her at a party, he said. They had fun. He gave her some drugs—just "for fun," he claimed. But she got hooked. He introduced her to a local peddler and then washed his hands of her. Beyond that, he swore he knew nothing.
The case grew darker.
Officers turned next to the girl's neighbor—an old man who had been a constant presence in her life. He visited her apartment more often than anyone else. Under questioning, he lied at first, then cracked. He wasn't just a neighbor. He was a stalker. He had been secretly filming her for months, watching her through widening cracks in his fractured mind.
Still, no one saw a clear motive for murder.
Then they caught the drug peddler—the one who had supplied her with a steady stream. He sat in the interrogation room, calm, almost bored. He acknowledged everything: the deals, the money, the addiction. But he denied killing her.
"She had already paid for everything," he said with a shrug. "Why would I kill her?"
The detectives had no solid suspect, no smoking gun, no clear sequence of events. The case was a tangle of lies, half‑truths, and dead ends. The more they dug, the more it felt like someone had carefully arranged the pieces to look like an accident.
That was when the chief picked up the phone.
The department called in the "young man"—the most brilliant detective in the Crime Investigation Department, with a near‑perfect record of solving seemingly unsolvable cases.
The case was no longer just a death.
It was a trap waiting for someone sharp enough to see through it.
The young detective arrived at the girl's apartment and went straight to work. He combed through her phone, her laptop, every drawer, every corner of her room. Then he spoke with her boyfriend, her mother, her secret lover, that old neighbor, and finally the drug peddler. After hours of questions and silence, one thing gnawed at him.
He requested a higher‑level, far more expensive autopsy—advanced scans, toxicology at a deeper level, anything that could expose what simple tests had missed.
Last night
The young detective gathered every suspect in the same room and switched off the overhead lights, leaving only a dim lamp on the table. The air felt heavy, charged with anticipation.
Leaning back in his chair, he ran a hand through his hair and spoke in his low, magnetic voice, tinged with lazy amusement.
"Hmm… where should we start?" He paused, letting the silence stretch. Then he smiled faintly.
"Let's start from the beginning, okay?"
As he spoke, his gaze swept over them. Each one swallowed hard. Sweat trickled down their foreheads. The room seemed to shrink under his calm, almost sleepy presence. He looked less like a detective and more like a hunter who had already marked his prey.
"Forget it," he said suddenly, yawning.
"Explaining from the beginning sounds like a hassle."
He let his eyes rest on one person.
"The killer," he said softly, "is you, isn't it, Mr. Boyfriend?"
He pointed straight at the boyfriend.
The man's face went pale. His breath hitched. In a flash, he bolted for the exit—but the waiting officers lunged and dragged him back. He thrashed, his voice cracking.
"How did you know?!" he shouted. "How?! It was a perfect plan!"
The detective shook his head almost pityingly.
"Was it really that subtle?" he murmured.
"Your expression gave you away. You knew about your girlfriend's infidelity. You knew she was using your money to buy drugs for herself while you were out there working your ass off for her."
He leaned forward, his voice sharpening.
"You bought her a decorative plant—a gift, right? A plant whose pollen is poisonous. Not deadly all at once, but enough to slowly weaken the heart. Over time, it builds up, hiding behind a normal life until one day… heart attack."
He paused, letting the weight sink in.
"When you were away on that business trip, you had someone steal the pot from her apartment. A perfect cover: no obvious weapon, no traceable evidence. Just a girl who 'died of a heart attack' and happened to be a drug addict."
He folded his hands.
"The signs couldn't be caught by normal detection methods. That's why I pushed for that high‑tech machine. It didn't take more than a few scans to reveal the poison in her system."
"But in the end?" he added, his eyes narrowing.
"I already suspected you long before the results came back. The moment I talked to you about her cheating, you weren't heartbroken. You weren't angry in the way a betrayed boyfriend should be. You were… cold. Almost satisfied."
He smirked slightly.
"There's a famous facial‑expression expert who once said, 'Microexpressions are involuntary facial expressions that precede thought processes.' Yours betrayed you the second you tried to look innocent."
The room fell silent. The boyfriend's bravado collapsed into ragged breathing. The detective leaned back again, victory in his voice but no triumph in his eyes.
The case was solved.
The trap had snapped shut.
*END*
"Okay, okay, buddy, I didn't call you to insult my intelligence. We've got a case—a hella difficult, twisted one."
"Don't beat around the bush. Say it clearly," the young man replied, his voice flat and almost bored, like the world was nothing more than a dull rerun he'd seen too many times.
"So the case is this," Akhil began, lowering his tone, as if the words themselves were dangerous to say out loud. "Far from here, in a mountain village smothered in trees and encircled by rivers, a streak of deaths and disappearances has begun. The local cops haven't found anything. Every time the rain comes down, it washes away every trace—footprints, fibers, blood, evidence—all of it. The case is practically impossible to solve."
He let that hang in the air, letting the silence thicken.
"The village is buried in darkness. Not just from the storm clouds, but from itself. Split apart by religion, suspicion, and fear. And the locals… they say he came back—asking for revenge. And sacrifices."
"Who came back?"
For the first time, the young man's lazy mask slipped. His eyes sharpened, his voice cutting through the room with sudden, raw urgency—something that didn't belong to his usual laid‑back self.
"Oh, suddenly so excited, huh?" Akhil forced a laugh, trying to cover the tension crawling down his spine.
"Who would've thought our detective, Ray, actually has something that interests him? Haha."
"Shut up and tell me already," Ray snapped, frustration tightening his voice.
It echoed hollowly in his lonely room, raw and sharp in the silence. He pressed the phone hard against his ear, his knuckles whitening, as thunder cracked outside and lightning tore open the sky.
Thick, bruise‑colored clouds rolled over the city like a shroud, swallowing the light, as if the whole sky was holding its breath before the storm broke.
"Tell me… who is coming."
Akhil's laughter died. His voice dropped, stripped of any playfulness, each word heavy and edged with something darker.
"It is… BharmRakshas."
(Author's Note:
This is just the beginning, my friends. The real story hasn't even begun yet.
I work a 9‑to‑6 job, so I write in whatever time I can steal from the day. I'm planning to write several chapters, stack them up, and then start uploading them one by one.
Until then, store this novel in your library, keep an eye on it, and wait for the story to truly begin.
I'll be truly grateful for your patience—and I promise the wait will be worth it.)