He is back

CHAPTER 5 — HE IS BACK

The changing room door wouldn't budge.

"Divya?" Tanisha banged again, knuckles aching. "Divya, open the door, yaar!"

No answer.

Something in her chest tightened — a cold, instinctive fear she couldn't name. She turned to the store manager who'd come running at her shouts. "Please, break it open. Abhi. Right now."

The lock gave way on the third hit.

And there she was.

Divya — crumpled on the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, dupatta pooled around her, face drained of every drop of colour.

"DIVYA!" Tanisha's scream tore through the store.

She dropped to her knees, hands shaking as she checked for breath, for a pulse, for anything. The manager was already sprinting out, phone pressed to his ear, voice frantic. "Hello — emergency — haan haan jaldi aao — ladki behosh ho gayi hai —"

Minutes stretched like hours.

When the medics arrived, Tanisha couldn't even remember moving out of their way. She just stood there, arms wrapped around herself, watching strangers press their fingers to her best friend's wrist like Divya was a stranger too — not the girl who'd been laughing about lip shades twenty minutes ago.

What happened in there, Divya? What did you see?

Divya's eyes flew open like she was surfacing from underwater.

Bright lights. Unfamiliar ceiling. The sharp antiseptic smell of a hospital room.

Her heart was a war drum.

"Divya. Divya, hey — look at me, I'm here." Tanisha's face swam into view, pale and scared in a way Divya rarely saw on her.

She tried to sit up too fast, and the room tilted.

"Easy, easy." Tanisha's hands steadied her shoulders. "You fainted. We're at the hospital. You're okay now."

Okay. The word felt like a lie sitting on her tongue.

Because she wasn't okay. She would never be okay again — not after what she'd just seen. Not after those eyes. That voice. That ghost from three years ago standing in front of her like no time had passed at all.

Tanisha watched her carefully — too carefully. "Hey. You're shaking."

"I'm fine," Divya whispered, though her hands betrayed her, trembling against the thin hospital blanket.

Tanisha had known Divya since they were eleven years old. She'd seen her cry over heartbreaks, scream over bad grades, laugh until she choked on her own spit. But she had never — never — seen her like this. This wasn't fear. This was something closer to dread. Something ancient and rehearsed, like Divya had spent years building a wall around it and it had just come crashing down in a changing room.

Something happened to her once. Something big. And it's not over.

But Tanisha didn't push. Not yet.

By the time they were cleared to leave, the sun had started melting into the horizon, painting the sky in bruised oranges and purples. Tanisha had run out and bought warm food — khichdi, because it was gentle on an empty, traumatized stomach — and sat with Divya in the hospital corridor, coaxing spoonful after spoonful into her like she was a child who needed care, not just company.

Divya ate slowly. Quietly. Like the food was the only thing keeping her tethered to the present.

When she finished, Tanisha set the container aside and finally asked, voice soft but deliberate.

"What happened inside the changing room?"

Divya's spoon clattered against the table.

Her whole body went rigid. A sheen of sweat broke out along her hairline despite the air conditioning, and when she spoke, it wasn't really to Tanisha at all — it was a whisper meant for no one, slipping out before she could stop it.

"He's back... I won't survive this time."

Tanisha's blood went cold.

She heard it. Every word, crystal clear.

But Divya's face — the way her eyes had gone glassy and far away, like she didn't even realize she'd said it out loud — told Tanisha this wasn't something to be confronted head-on. Not yet. Not when Divya looked one wrong word away from shattering completely.

So Tanisha did the hardest thing a best friend can do.

She pretended she hadn't heard anything at all.

But inside, her mind was racing. Someone from her past. Someone dangerous enough to do this to her. And it has something to do with Rajasthan.

I will find out who "he" is. Even if it kills me.

The taxi ride home was suffocating in its silence.

Divya sat with her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching Udaipur blur past in smears of headlights and neon signage, but she wasn't really seeing any of it. Her mind kept replaying the same three seconds on loop — the changing room curtain pulling back, the shadow falling over her, those eyes she'd memorized in her nightmares for three straight years.

Advansh.

Just his name in her head sent a violent shiver down her spine.

Tanisha sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed, but she didn't say a word. She just laced her fingers through Divya's and held on, the way you hold onto someone standing at the edge of something.

They reached home around 8:45 PM.

Dadi was waiting on the veranda, dupatta wrapped snug against the evening chill, her face lighting up the moment she spotted them.

"Aa gayi meri bacchiyaan!" she called out. "Kaisa raha din?"

Divya and Tanisha exchanged one quick glance — an entire conversation passing between them in half a second.

Don't tell her.

So they told her everything except the truth. The shopping, the lipsticks Divya had tried, the street food they'd eaten, the rickshaw driver who'd sung old Kishore Kumar songs the whole ride. Dadi laughed at every detail, completely unaware that her granddaughter had been unconscious in a hospital bed just hours earlier.

"Bas ab khana kha lo aur so jao," Dadi said, ushering them in. "Itna hectic din raha hoga, thaki hui ho dono."

Dinner was quiet but peaceful on the surface. Dadi chattered about her kitty party gossip, Tanisha nodded along and threw in the right amount of laughter, and Divya pushed her food around her plate, present in body only.

But Tanisha's mind never stopped working.

He is back. I won't survive this time.

Those words sat in her chest like a stone she couldn't swallow or spit out.

After dinner, soft goodnights were exchanged, and they each retreated to their rooms.

Divya's body felt impossibly heavy, but her mind was eerily, dangerously blank — like it had simply stopped trying to process what it had already seen. She showered on autopilot, the hot water doing nothing to wash away the cold that had settled deep in her bones. She changed into something soft and oversized, something that felt safe, and crawled into bed.

Sleep took her before she could even finish being afraid of her own dreams.

Tanisha, however, did not sleep.

She lay staring at her ceiling fan spinning lazy circles above her, Divya's whispered words echoing on repeat.

He is back. I won't survive this time.

Something happened to Divya in Rajasthan three years ago. Something that left scars deep enough to resurface as full-blown panic the second this man reappeared. And whatever — whoever — he was, he had enough power over Divya to make her, the strongest girl Tanisha knew, fall apart in a changing room.

I'm going to find out what happened on that trip, Tanisha decided, jaw set with quiet resolve. Even if Divya never tells me herself.

Meanwhile, in a penthouse miles away, behind floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a city that bent to his every word —

Advansh Singh Rathore stood in the dark, a glass of untouched whiskey dangling from his fingers, his mind nowhere near the drink.

Three years.

Three years since he'd last seen her — and yet tonight, watching her from across that store, he'd felt something inside him roar back to life with a violence that scared even him.

She wasn't the soft, naive girl he remembered anymore.

She'd grown into a woman. Curves he wanted to map with his hands. A maturity in her eyes that only made the obsession claw harder at his chest. Three years apart had done nothing to dull what he felt for her — if anything, it had sharpened it into something far more dangerous.

He set the glass down, untouched, and walked toward the window, city lights glittering like scattered diamonds beneath him.

A slow, possessive smile curved his lips — the kind that promised nothing good for anyone who stood in his way.

"Butterfly," he murmured into the silence of his room, voice low, almost reverent, almost cruel. "Soon you'll be here. On this very bed. Where I claimed you first."

Outside, the city slept.

But somewhere across Rajasthan, two women lay awake — one drowning in dread, the other planning to drag the truth into the light.

Neither of them knew the storm that was already at their door.

To be continued...

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