Page 178 of No Boss
Only a faint red. Her saree glowed softly in the dark, warm as dying flame.
He stepped toward it.
It vanished.
No fading footsteps. No movement. One blink, and she was gone.
Abhinav froze.
Silence pressed in.
She would light a lamp, he thought. Open a window. Turn on a light. His mind reached automatically for logic because there was always a next logical thing.
Nothing followed.
"Hello?"
His voice returned immediately. The echo was wrong. Too contained. It felt like a closed space.
His hand moved outward. Stone met his palm. Rough. Cold. The kind of cold that belonged to places untouched by sunlight for years.
He spun around and switched on his phone torch. Harsh white light cut through the darkness and struck the wall in front of him.
His breath caught.
The entrance was gone.
He stared.
Blinked once. Again.
Stone stretched across the wall. No doorframe. No hinges. No crack where wood had been.
Nothing.
He moved toward it quickly, pressing his palm flat against it.
There had to be a door.
Therehadbeen a door.
He had walked through it. He had heard it close.
“That’s not possible!”
He dragged his fingers desperately across the stone. Up. Down. Side to side. The stone remained cold and solid beneath his touch.
“What the hell!” The harshness echoed. His fist hit the wall, splitting the skin further. Pain shot through his hand. But the stone did not yield.
The beam of light moved across the space. Narrow walls. Low ceiling. Dust lay untouched across the floor.
Abhinav stood inside the small circle of light and forced himself to breathe.
In. Out. Again.
His life had been built on proof. Numbers. Evidence. Cause and effect. Now he stood trapped inside a stone room reached through a road his GPS could not trace and a door that no longer existed.
The woman had disappeared. His phone had no signal.
