Fighting My Demons

secrets unraveling

Chapter 11

The Son of Kumar

FELIX

I had to be careful.

Madam Gregson was a sly fox and I had no intention of underestimating her. Whatever she and Vivian were planning, they were not amateurs. Which meant I could not afford to be either. One wrong move and my cover would unravel before I had gathered enough to act on.

But first things first. Becky Stafford needed to be protected.

I slipped out my secondary phone, the one nobody in this school knew existed, and typed a quick message to the Chief.

The reply came back within minutes.

How will you track him?

Tracking device, I typed back. Have to move now.

I pocketed the phone and headed out of the school building toward my motorbike. I had placed the device three days ago. It had been quietly doing its work ever since.

The tracker was a remarkable piece of equipment. Three functions in one compact unit. Location. Visual. Audio. Everything I needed to follow someone without ever getting close enough to be seen.

I pulled out into traffic and let the device do the leading.

David.

I had suspected for a while that his movements outside school were worth watching. The intensity he carried, the way his eyes moved in a room, the particular quality of his silences. These were not the habits of a regular seventeen year old. These were the habits of someone with an agenda.

I had been right.

The tracker led me across town and then, to my genuine surprise, slowed to a stop outside a building I recognised immediately.

A prison.

I pulled up near an eatery across the road and parked. Ordered roasted chicken, pork and a canned fruit juice. If I was going to sit here I might as well look like someone who had simply stopped for lunch.

I opened the tracking app on my phone and watched.

David was inside, seated across a table from a man in a prison uniform. The man looked to be in his late forties, broad-shouldered but diminished somehow, the way people get diminished when they have been confined for a long time. He carried the particular heaviness of someone who had been living with guilt for years and had stopped trying to put it down.

I leaned in closer to my screen.

"Hello, Dad," David said.

I almost knocked my juice over.

His father. David's father was in prison. I sat back and tried to process that while the audio continued to feed through my earpiece.

"Or should I call you Kumar?"

The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Kumar.

I knew that name. I had heard it in briefings. I had seen it in files. Kumar, the man who had kidn*pped and caused the death of a three year old boy named Darlington. Kumar, serving a life sentence for crimes that had destroyed an entire family. Kumar, whose case file had a connection to the very reason I was enrolled in this school in the first place.

David was Kumar's son.

I sat very still and made myself keep listening.

"How long are you going to be like this?" Kumar asked his son. His voice was tired. The voice of a man who had rehearsed this conversation too many times and knew how it ended.

"You talk about paying for your sins," David said. His voice was not tired at all. It was sharp and cold and absolutely certain. "You are wrong. We are all paying for your sins. Every single one of us."

"You have no idea what your mother—"

"I have every idea." David cut him off. "She went to pieces after you were locked away. She lost her mind. She hurt me. She hurt herself. And then she was gone." He paused. "You did that. Your choices did that. And I spent eighteen years without a father or a sane mother because of you."

I watched Kumar's face on the screen. He was crying. A grown man, a man who had committed terrible things, sitting in a prison visiting room crying in front of the son he had failed completely.

"I am sorry," Kumar said. "I know it means nothing now. But I am deeply sorry. Please, son. Let go of the revenge. It will destroy you the way it destroyed me."

"No."

One word. Final as a door slamming.

"I am going to make that family pay. Every one of them. And through them, I am going to make you suffer for what you cost us. That is my promise to you."

"I forbid it." Kumar stood up, his chair scraping back. "I forbid you. It was my fault. All of it. I went after another man's wife. I murdered their child. I divided their family. That sin belongs to me alone and I am the one serving the sentence for it. Do not add yours to mine."

"Says who?" David said. "You? My father? You lost the right to forbid me anything a long time ago."

He began to laugh. A low, unhurried laugh that was far more frightening than anger would have been.

Kumar looked at his son for a long moment. The shame on his face was unlike anything I had ever watched a person carry. He had created this. He was looking directly at what he had created and he could not undo a single second of it.

"The only thing you will get from revenge is prison and death," Kumar said quietly. "I am sorry for being the world's worst father. Forgive me if you can. And please." He straightened. "Do not come back here."

He walked away from the table without looking back. I could see from the set of his shoulders that he was crying as he went.

David sat alone for a moment after his father left, the laughter gone, something rawer and more human briefly visible on his face.

"All I ever wanted," he said quietly to the empty chair, "was for you to come home and be a father. But that is impossible now, isn't it."

He stood up, his expression closing back into that familiar unreadable mask, and walked out.

I packed up my food, left a note for the Chief with everything I had just witnessed, and pulled back into traffic.

David was not just a troubled boy with a grudge. He was Kumar's son, raised on resentment, shaped by abandonment, and now sitting inside the same school as the daughter of the family his father had destroyed.

Boma had no idea.

And from the look in David's eyes during that visit, she was running out of time before she found out the hard way.

I had to move faster.

BOMA

The mailing unit was a quiet, neatly organised building two streets from the main road, the kind of place that smelled like old paper and bureaucratic order. I had called ahead and made an appointment, which meant at least I would not be kept waiting at the front desk trying to explain myself to someone who had better things to do.

"Hi. I am Boma Michael. I have an appointment with Mr. Dickson Katya."

The woman at the reception smiled and rose from her seat. "Yes, he has been expecting you. Follow me please."

I felt a small pang of guilt for keeping him waiting even a minute.

The office she led me to was well appointed, a national flag mounted on the wall, a framed motto on the desk, certificates arranged with obvious care. The man behind the desk looked to be around forty, with the kind of face that suggested he took his work seriously without taking himself too seriously. There was a family photograph on the corner of his desk. He looked up when I walked in and smiled.

"Hello, sir. I am Boma Michael. I booked an appointment with you earlier."

"Yes, the young lady I spoke with yesterday." He gestured to the chair across from him. "Please sit down. How may I help you?"

I reached into my bag and placed the letter carefully on the desk in front of him.

"This letter was sent to my father on the seventh of November, 2019. According to the postmark, it came directly from this office." I held his gaze. "I need to know the name of the sender."

He looked at me, then at the letter, then back at me.

"Miss, that kind of information is confidential unless it is stated on the correspondence itself."

"Please read it first," I said quietly.

He picked it up and read. I watched his expression shift as his eyes moved down the page. When he looked up his face had changed entirely.

"Miss Michael," he said carefully, "this is blackmail."

"I know. That is why I need the sender's name."

He nodded slowly, picked up his phone and put a call through. Within a few minutes a staff member appeared with a box of files from November 2019. We went through them together, cross-referencing dates until we found the one that matched.

I opened it.

The sender's name was blank.

In the space where a name should have been, there was only a handwritten line.

In your flower pot lies whom you search.

I stared at it.

"I have heard that before," I said, almost to myself. "But from where?"

Mr. Katya shook his head slowly. "I am afraid that is all we have, Miss Michael. I am sorry we could not do more."

"You have done more than you know," I said honestly. I reached into my bag and placed an envelope on his desk. "Thank you for your cooperation. Your motto is not just decoration."

He smiled at that.

I left the building with the riddle turning over and over in my head and absolutely no idea what to do with it.

The sender knew me. That much was clear. You do not leave a clue for someone unless you know they will eventually come looking for it. Which meant whoever sent that letter to my father had anticipated that one day I would trace it back to this office and find exactly this message waiting for me.

They knew who I was. They had known for a long time.

I hailed a taxi and stared out the window the whole way home, the riddle running on a loop.

In your flower pot lies whom you search.

My mother was not home when I arrived. I freshened up, ate alone, and left a note on the fridge.

Hey Mum. I have eaten. Take care of yourself. Going to bed.

I climbed the stairs slowly, my mind still churning. The phrase was familiar in a way that felt less like knowledge and more like memory. Something old. Something from before I was old enough to properly hold onto things. A voice, maybe. A place.

It was there, somewhere in the back of my mind, just out of reach.

I lay on my bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling, waiting for it to surface.

It did not come.

But it would. I could feel it getting closer