Sold.
Most likely trafficked.
I’ve seen the stats. Read the reports. Since he took over, adoption rates havesoared.
And 76% of those adoptions? Kids aged 4 to 15.
I would’ve just made the cut. If I’d grown up underhissystem, I’d have had a fucking price tag.
I let out a slow breath and turn back toward my bike. Delhi always does this to me.
Everything terrible that’s ever happened in my life—happenedhere.
My parents’ murder.
This goddamn orphanage.
My run-in with that motherfucking RAW agent.
The implosion with Advik.
Sometimes I wonder if all of it was pre-written. If my entire trajectory was fucked from birth.
My parents were runaways from some small village. They defied their rival families to be together, to make the radical, unforgivable mistake oflovingeach other.
They paid for it. With their lives.
I don’t remember them mentioning their extended family. They never came to claim me after the funeral. At theshamshaan ghaat.
I figured they hated me too. And I was right.
Turns out, they were the ones who had my parents killed. Because they dared to have a meagerdaughterwho still had the audacity to carry their‘sacred’family name.Pathan.
But I didn’t carry that name for long. I changed it at 18 toGreesha Das.
And with that paperwork—they found me.
It wasn’t even their first attempt, I realized later. So many strange “accidents” in my childhood made sense after that.
The gas leak when I was four.
The nearly fatal car accident when I was seven.
That stranger at the market who grabbed me when I was eleven.
All recontextualized.
Eventually, they got tired of subtlety and sent a man with a gun. And that’s when I learned something:
Bullets don’t need consent. They just need aim.
My family is all dead now. Funny? Or coincidence?
I should feel something about that, I suppose. Sadness. Maybe pity. But all I feel is the ghost of a burn in my hips from when I stayed crouched on a ledge for hours, a few years ago—rifle scope slipping slightly in the rain—waiting for the perfect moment.
They never stood a chance. Not against a fully-trained me.
It wasn’t about being abandoned. It wasn’t revenge for a childhood left unclaimed. It wasn’t even about how they killed my parents—their own children.
