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Veda dialled Ram and ran him through what was happening. Her brother listened, his silence getting colder and colder as she spoke.
“I don’t know if I can trust him,” she ended.
“What did you say his name was?” Ram asked.
“Virat Jha.”
Ram swore violently under his breath. “You can trust him,” he said, grimly.
“How do you know?”
“Virat, Agastya and I go back a long way,” her brother said cryptically. “Give him access, Vedu. If he says it’s the only way to save Agastya, then it is.”
Veda disconnected and looked at Virat, this man who seemed to have everyone’s faith and respect. This man she’d never seen before in her life.
“I want to speak to my husband first.”
Virat shook his head gently. “Please don’t.”
“Why?”
Virat took the small phone from her nerveless fingers. “Because he will never allow you to put him first. Agastya has spent his lifetime putting himself between his family and everything that comes at them. I don’t have the time to fight him and his overdeveloped conscience while I try to save him.”
“Why are you doing this? What does Agastya have over you?” Simple friendship and loyalty didn’t go this far.
“Nothing,” Virat said simply. “He has nothing over me. But I owe him everything. I owe him my life. May I have access?”
She nodded, knowing what her answer would be. She would always fight for Agastya. “Yes.”
And then she sat back and watched her life unravel.
Forty-One
AGASTYA
His plane had barely touched the tarmac before the shit hit the fan. He’d stayed an extra day, post Veda’s performance, in Delhi to wrap up some other work and wanted nothing more than to get home and get some sleep. And maybe try and call Veda and see if she would finally pick up. Now, he had over fifty missed calls and three hundred messages to deal with on his official phone alone. He bet none of them were from Veda though. Honestly, scam or no scam, some days he missed Ganesh.
“Nanna?” Striding down the tarmac towards the airport building in the distance, he called his father back first.
“You need to get to the Commissioner’s office now,” his father said without preamble, sounding out of breath.
Agastya stopped walking. “Why?” he bit the word out.
Static hit the line and his father’s next words were garbled. Agastya frowned. “Nanna, I can’t hear you.”
“Veda’s there!” his father shouted, the words suddenly coming through loud and clear before the line went dead.
Agastya opened a new tab on his phone and swiped through the news. His blood turned to ice as he strode towards the terminal, his people struggling to keep pace with him. He made it through the airport and to his car in record time.
“Commissioner’s office,” he told the driver tersely, his gaze still scanning the news headlines. There wasn’t much detail online except that there was something happening at the Commissioner’s office as Agastya Kodela’s wife and her brother had gone in there for a meeting at two in the afternoon and not emerged as yet. Not surprisingly, City News was toeing a moderate line, expounding on all the positive reasons why the scions of their family might be at the Police Commissioner’s office.
And then he saw the breaking news red ticker flash at the bottom. Clicking on it, he watched a video of his father storming into the building, media screaming questions at him.
“Sir, we’ll need more security,” Naresh murmured, clearly watching the same shitshow as him. Agastya nodded, not looking away from his phone.
By the time they pulled up in front of the Commissioner’s building, the mob outside had grown to epic proportions. Agastya’s team shouldered their way through to the entrance with the police helping clear a path. He was almost to the door when it opened and Veda and Ram stepped out.
Agastya came to an abrupt halt, someone slamming into his back. He didn’t turn around to look. He had eyes only for her. She wore a simple cotton, salwar kameez, large sunglasses perched on her nose and her dupatta wrapped around her head, extremely insufficient protection against the heat beating down on all their heads.
