AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“All of life is a war zone,” I said grimly.
My statement was met with silence. When I finally looked up, she was staring at me thoughtfully. I stared back at her, wondering when she was going to tell me why Ayush’s men had tried to kill her. It looked as if she wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. As if she hadn’t killed a man in self-defence.
“Take off your shoes,” I ordered.
Diya silently shrugged off her flimsy sandals and I was aghast at the state of her feet. They were covered in dried blood and sand, and she hissed in pain when I rubbed some of the sand off. I realised there were deep cuts in her soles. I had to clean the cuts before I bandaged them. First, she needed a drink to jolt her out of her shock. Because she might be bantering with me like before, but she was shivering.
I resisted the urge to pull her into my arms and hold her until she felt warm again and poured her a small glass of brandy.
“Drink this,” I said, and she took me at my word.
Diya downed it like it was a jello shot. And then she let out a yelp as the brandy burned its way down her throat. She held out the glass.
“Hit me again,” she ordered, almost daring me to object.
She looked disappointed when I poured her another one without a word. Maybe she wanted a fight, but I wanted her mellow because what I was about to do next was going to hurt like the devil.
“How did this happen?” I asked as I prepared a foot bath with a bit of hydrogen peroxide in lukewarm water.
Diya groaned in pain when I lowered her feet into the tub.
“Is this necessary?” she bit out before she drained the glass and set it on the counter.
“Yes,” I snapped. “Your soles are covered in cuts. What did you do? Walk across a bed of nails?”
She sighed heavily.
“I jumped into a huge bougainvillaea bush. I had no idea they were so thorny,” she said defensively.
“Why did you do something so stupid?” I demanded.
“Because I was trying to escape,” she mumbled.
“From what?”
“Ayush,” she said starkly.
My hands froze in the act of wiping her soles clean.
“But why? What did he do?”
“He threw a woman off the terrace of his house,” she replied.
CHAPTER 5
DIYA
My feet stung like hell but as the memories of the past couple of hours washed over me, I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. Maybe it was the brandy, but I felt as if I was floating above my body, except my feet still hurt like a bitch.
Was it only a couple of hours ago that I had walked into Ayush Goel’s mansion? It felt like an eternity had passed since then. And I was not the same girl that I was when I allowed my mother to bully me into giving Ayush another chance.
My life was going to be split into two eras from now on - BM and AM. Before Murder and After Murder. Only which murder was I referring to? The one Ayush committed, or the one that I had?
“Why were you at his house?”
I sighed wearily. Why were we even talking about this? I just wanted to curl up in a corner and come to terms with what I had just done. And wait for the police. Because that was my future. I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail. All because I decided to take a walk at the wrong moment.
Dheer finished bandaging my feet and placed a pair of brand-new fluffy bathroom slippers at my feet. When I made no move to slip them on, he slid my feet into them carefully.
