The next morning, everything looked the same.
The same cracked sidewalks.
The same impatient horns.
The same endless tide of anonymous, hurried faces.
But something inside Aarav had shifted.
He moved through campus like a ghost stitched into borrowed skin, every smile a mask stretched too tight.
He couldn't stop hearing the man's shallow, desperate breathing — or feeling the phantom weight of the silver key still cold in his pocket.
Maya found him in the library, buried in silence, staring at a book he wasn't reading.
"You look like you haven't slept in days," she said, sliding into the chair across from him without waiting for permission.
Aarav blinked out of the fog.
He shrugged, forcing a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Just adjusting."
She studied him.
Really studied him.
There was a sharpness in her gaze — not cruel, but surgical — like she could see the fractures spreading under his surface and was weighing the risk of touching them.
"You know," she said, casually flipping through a book she wasn't reading either, "sometimes survival isn't about being the smartest person in the room."
She glanced up. "It's about knowing when to pretend."
Aarav's breath caught.
Was she just talking about university life?
Or was this something more?
"Pretend what?" he asked, careful now.
Maya's lips curled into that broken-glass smile, and she leaned in, close enough for her breath to warm his cheek.
"That you're not afraid."
For a moment, the library disappeared — the dusty books, the flick of highlighters, the fluorescent buzz of too many sleepless minds.
Just the two of them.
Balanced on the razor's edge between honesty and danger.
Aarav let out a breath — a small, fractured laugh that escaped him before he could catch it.
And to his surprise, it felt… freeing.
They spent the rest of the day wandering forgotten corners of the campus — abandoned rooftops, overgrown courtyards, silent stairwells where echoes felt like secrets.
They traded pieces of themselves they rarely gave away.
She told him she'd transferred from another university after a "situation" — a word she left hanging like smoke.
He told her he came from a place where dreaming too loud was treated like blasphemy.
They didn't kiss.
They didn't touch.
But something tethered between them — unseen but unbreakable.
That night, Aarav returned to his room. The light overhead flickered like it was holding its breath.
And waiting on the floor, just like before, was a note.
But this one wasn't cryptic.
It was clear.
"Second Task: Her."
Underneath was a photograph.
Grainy. Black and white.
Maya, laughing. Alive. Unaware.
And scrawled across the bottom in blood-red ink:
"Bring her into the fold. Or destroy her."
Aarav's hands trembled.
His knees nearly gave out. The walls of his tiny room seemed to close in, breathing down his neck.
He looked at the photo again — at Maya's smile — and for the first time in days, something pierced the numbness that had wrapped itself around him.
Fear.
Not for himself but for her.