Ghost Orchid [2] - Chapter 95, p. 19

Chapter 90: It was Time...

When she woke, the pendulum of the ancient clock in the room swung back and forth 4 times. The sun could only been seen in teasing glimpses over the horizon.

It was time.

She looked at his sleeping form next to her and for a moment felt an unadulterated affection flow through her.

Whoever he had killed, there was good reason for it, she knew for certain now. She would find out one day why….

She eased out of his arms and out of the bed slowly. She found her black skirt and blouse and put them back on. She grabbed a black dupatta from the many clothes that lined the room and turned to look at his sleeping form one last time.

She would never forget last night as long as she lived… but as he had told her before, the moment had passed…

Now it was time for what she came here to do…

She walked to the nearest bathroom she could find to freshen up. The thought of what lay ahead made her stomach roil. And before she could stop it, she threw up.

She washed her mouth and face again before securing the dupatta around her face.

She walked out to the back grounds of the house and found the mint plant that she had seen earlier. She plucked off a leaf and chewed on it as she walked around the house. When she reached the window in front of the room that she knew the man was staying in, she paused. She waited fifteen minutes before she could sense him at the window.

She stood there for a few more minutes, pretending to pluck flowers before she let her dupatta slide off her hair. She caught it at the last minute, turning around, and then pretended to be surprised to see him standing at the window.

She quickly averted her gaze from his, affecting a shyness that made her throat close up, before slowing walking off into the woods.

It was another 20 minutes before she knew for sure that he was following her.

She walked for another 30 minutes before reaching the clearing in the woods that led to the cave that she had found the day before when she had gone exploring.

She walked inside and quickly found the things that she had stored away. Her small vial of the deep brown powder, a bottle of rum that she had stashed beside it, and long chains….

Once she rechecked everything, she covered the lower part of her face with her dupatta before walking to the wall adjacent to the entrance of the cave to start her wait.

Ten more minutes passed before he walked in.

She waited in complete stillness until he walked ten steps into the cave and turned around to spot her himself.

A smile lighted his face when he took in her covered up form.

"You are a real tease…"

She didn't answer him, but walked closer, lowering the cloth that covered her face.

"You have an exquisite face, you know. I feel like I have seen it before, although I can't quite remember where."

She smiled then, her nerves settling finally.

SSP Brahmanand Jhaakar was in fine form this morning.

She walked to where she had hidden her things and brought the bottle of rum back to him.

He watched as she poured him a glass and then another one for herself. He took it and smelled it and laughed.

"You're plying me with rum this early in the morning?"

She tilted her head, making her eyes go limpid with confusion, and he shook his head.

"Cheers." He said, pressing his glass to hers.

She smiled and returned the gesture before taking a sip. She noticed that he did not drink as he turned to look at the wall behind him.

"You're not trying to poison me, are you girl?" he turned back to give her a smile. She smiled back.

"How dumb do you think I am?" he asked, walking back to her, his smile disappearing suddenly.

"You are Micah's daughter, Magdalena. You thought I wouldn't remember? I know everything about that bas***d!"

She smiled again, drinking deeply from her glass. She gestured to the one he held in his hand and raised an eyebrow.

"I will drink from yours." He said as he took the glass in hers.

She had been counting on it.

He took a sip and then a few more, all the while watching her.

"So, how did you seduce my saintly older son to do your bidding? You're beautiful, I will grant you that. But he is typically immune to such temptations." He walked closer to her.

She took a deep breath when he was at touching distance.

He tilted her face up to examine it from all angles.

"If anyone can seduce him, it wouldn't be someone who looks like you." He gave his final assessment.

He let go then and took another sip of the drink.

"I like women, Magdalena. I like them docile and sweet. Not poisonous. Like your mother. No one could resist your mother, did you know that? She was even more beautiful than you. And yet I never fell for her games. So, you think you stand a chance?"

She stood there still, offering no response, until his face started to blanch and then turned a mottled red.

"You witch, what the hell is in this?"

Something she had developed a strong immunity to over many years... but she didn't tell him that.

She didn't reply at all as she continued to stand there watching him with a serene expression until he finally dropped to the ground.

She walked back to the other end of the cave then and retrieved the chains that were stashed there.

He wanted to resist, but the paralysis was climbing up his body and she knew he could do nothing except stare at her with a rage that could kill.

Once she finished shackling him to the wall, she stood in front of him, watching his face.

She had waited for this moment for a long time, but a year ago the wait had changed into something else entirely when she had found out the truth.

Then, for the first time in her life, she spoke to him.

"Zdravstvuj Otets."

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Chapter 91: Zdravstvuj Otets…

"Zdravstvuj….. Otets."

The word ricocheted in the cavernous space.

Otets… Otets…. Otets…

It repeatedly echoed in his head, refusing to fade out.

The coldness of her voice and the soft lushness of the tongue she used created an odd conundrum and he could feel his mind trying to rip apart the two just as it tried to tear off fact from fiction.

It did tear… splintered rather, and from the deep fissure, words and memories erupted liked an opened geyser…

Truth is only as good as the questions you ask, Gaurav.

Once started, the words merged into her voice and he heard them in his head as if she had spoken rather than written them.

And Sometimes when you Don't Know the Questions to Ask, You Never get the Truth at all…

He felt his stomach churn as the words kept spewing up and out without cease.

Gaurav, listen to me. We cannot be together. But that fact doesn't mean anything.

That fact didn't mean anything.

We have a bond that has always been there and will always be there.

The churning inside his belly deepened until he could feel a burning.

It can never be broken.

It was making him ill.

Not by your wife and not by anyone who tries, not even us.

She hadn't been trying to be cryptic when she had written that. She had been trying to tell him what was now only plainly evident in light of what she had just called his father.

Her father.

Their Father.

In a sense, we are the same, Gaurav. Our lives are owned by our fathers.

She had let him go because she had found out that the blood of the same beast ran through both their veins.

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Chapter 92: Krait

She watched him stand at the foot of that cave, looking down at his belly. Suddenly, he clutched it tightly as if he saw there the warm blood of a mortal wound oozing through. His face showed no sign of such agony, but his body was starting to double-over as if someone had twisted a knife in his gut.

She started to move from where she had stopped, but saw Salome run out of the cave.

"Gaurav!" she heard the woman's voice… and in that moment, she knew that Salome had never fallen out of love with Gaurav… never…

She saw the woman straighten Gaurav. And she saw Gaurav looking at the woman as if he was seeing her for the first time. He whispered something that she could not hear from where she was standing. However, the tension between the two became so palpable that she could feel waves of it floating towards her.

She thought she felt a pinch in her heart, but she was wrong.

It was at her ankle.

Something slithered by that she barely registered.

"Vidya!" her name suddenly echoed all around her, although she knew the source of it came from behind her.

She saw the startled gazes of both Gaurav and Salome turn to her before she looked behind her to see a shirtless Naren running towards her. She was surprised at his urgency, but he was near her before she could complete that thought, kneeling down and lifting the edge of her sari.

It made her stumble and she balanced herself on his shoulder, but Gaurav was suddenly next to her as well, holding her first to steady her before kneeling down next to Naren.

"Shit!" she heard Gaurav's voice just as she felt off-balance again, but this time not because there were two men at her feet.

"What was it?" Gaurav asked.

"Krait. That's why she doesn't really feel the bite."

A Krait bite. She thought, somewhat in wonder… In all the time that she had lived in these woods and these lands, she had never been bitten by a snake.

"Where's there a hospital nearby?" Gaurav asked, his voice taking on a hard edge. But he wasn't asking her. He was asking Naren. Briefly, she wondered how Naren would know. Why doesn't he ask her?

But that thought flew out of her head as she saw Salome standing there, a few feet away from them.

Krait.

It was almost as bad as being bitten by a cobra or a viper. Although, as she remembered everything that she knew about Kraits, she knew the path to death would be different… Krait venom specialized in a quicker death that the other two… it would be respiratory failure rather than internal bleeding… far less messy…

"We don't have much time to get there safely." She heard Naren's answer.

Like she said, much quicker… Soon, she would start to experience stomach cramps, followed by tremors and spasms… and then the paralysis would start slowly. In about five hours, her diaphragm would completely shut down… she would essentially suffocate to death. Even if they started now, given how long it would take to get to a hospital that has the anti-venom for Krait bites, it was likely that the oxygen flow to her brain would be cut off sufficiently by then that she would go into a full coma.

Five hours to be paralyzed… And six to twelve, give or take 2 or 4 depending on the Almighty's whims, for death…

She looked at Gaurav now, bent over as he was next to her ankle, the panic evident in the tautness of his shoulder muscles.

She looked up towards the woman standing away from them.

The sounds of the men faded away…

She couldn't help but feel that somehow she had single-handedly destroyed the woman's happiness… that she had taken Gaurav away from her… there was no logic in that… but these things often had little logic.

The woman stood there calmly, not showing any signs of the duress that the situation had evoked in the men. Vidya watched her just as the woman returned her studying gaze.

Today was the third and last day of the Teej Vrat… her Mouna Vrat was already broken. And from the looks of it, she may not be around to see a sunrise after the Teej Vrat…

There was so much that she had been waiting to tell him… so much… yet, maybe it was the threat of imminent death that made her think so…

She was glad that she had had last night with him...

Maybe she had known all along that he belonged to this woman after all…

And now, she would give him back…

She smiled at the woman and felt a genuine peace steal over her for the first time since she got on that train eight long months ago.

She closed her eyes, wanting to take in that feeling… hold onto it, and not let it go… because when she opened them again and saw him, the pain of leaving him would become relentless...

Then, as if from far away, she heard the woman's voice call out in an agitated voice something that she had never heard from a woman's mouth before.

"f**k!"

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Chapter 93: The Unlikely Savior

"Open your eyes. You are fine! Open your eyes, dammit, Vidya." There was anger and panic in Gaurav's voice and she opened her eyes, leaving her oasis.

His was holding her tightly, his face close to hers.

She looked up into his eyes and saw a desperation there…

"You are fine. You are fine." He repeated to her, willing her to believe what he was making himself believe.

She nodded and smiled even as she felt the dizziness take over again.

She had heard Salome's footsteps as if from a distance, but now there were close by and she felt the woman kneeling at her foot.

"Let me do it." she heard the woman tell Naren.

"What are you going to do?" Vidya heard suspicion in Naren's voice, which Salome ignored.

"Can we carry her to the stream nearby?"

"What are you going to do?" Naren asked again.

Vidya looked down at her feet to see Salome turn a full glare on Naren for a few moments before saying, "It's old-school. I am going to make an incision and suck the venom out."

"What? That's your plan? No one does that anymore. It doesn't work."

There was a moment when the woman paused and looked up at Vidya. There was something in the woman's eyes that hadn't been there before. She felt the woman gently touch the toes of her bitten foot before she looked back at Naren.

"I have been bitten by snakes 11 times. Believe me, I know what works and what doesn't."

"11 times?? What the hell? What did you do? Drop into a snake-pit?"

Salome ignored the question, but instead asked, "Unless you have ten vials of tiger-snake antivenom handy, I suggest you go along with my instructions. We don't have much time. Do you have a blade? Or a Swiss army knife? Rip this shawl…" she took off the black dupatta around her shoulders to give to Naren. "…and make a tourniquet right here…." She pointed a distance up from the bite site."

"She could lose a limb if your experiment goes awry." Naren pointed out again.

"As opposed to her life if I do nothing." Salome replied impassively.

Vidya looked back at Gaurav once more before reaching over to squeeze Naren's shoulder. He looked up at her, seemingly startled to find that she was moving.

She nodded at him and then turned to Salome.

"You will have to trust me." The woman said looking straight up at her with no emotion in her eyes.

Yes, she would have to trust the woman who stood by watching the scene impassively for the first few moments after she was bitten. She would have to trust the woman who had likely thought in those moments that rescuing her lover's wife from imminent death was not her concern. She would have to trust the woman who was right on both counts. She didn't have to do a risky procedure that had essentially no medical evidence or backing to save the life of a woman who stood in the way of her happiness. She didn't have to do anything at all, really….

And yet here she was, asking to trust her.

She returned her gaze without blinking until the lack of emotion in the woman's eyes fell away. There was a moment of pain there that was stark and raw as she widened her eyes for a hair-breadth's of a second. And then it was gone and the mask was back on.

And finally Vidya nodded.

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Ohh.. isn't it ironic… Lena to save Vidya!

Thanks for the update!