That night, the storm outside howled like a wounded animal—unrelenting, primal, furious. Wind shrieked through the ancient corridors of the haveli, slamming shutters and rattling doors like ghosts trying to claw their way in. But even that chaos couldn't match the turbulence inside me.
The real storm—the one that mattered—was in my chest. In my mind. In every unspoken question I had ever swallowed.
I stood in my mother's old bedroom—the one she'd grown up in, in this ancestral haveli in Haryana. I'd only ever seen it a handful of times before, but something about it always unsettled me. The silence was too still, as if sound itself was afraid to stay. The air hung heavy with age and incense—sandalwood, rosewater, and the sharpness of naphthalene balls clinging to old saris.
It felt less like a room, more like a mausoleum of memory.
Everything was preserved with eerie precision. The fading pink walls, the sturdy teak cupboards with peeling varnish, the lace curtain still dangling unevenly. Even the copper basin in the corner held dried petals, as though someone had expected her to return and resume her rituals.
But something was different this time.
I didn't notice it at first. Maybe I wasn't meant to.
But my eyes, as if guided by something deeper, locked onto a frame on the far wall.
A portrait.
It was new. Too new. The frame was modern—oak with polished brass inlays. Sleek. Intentional. Unlike anything else in the room, which whispered of 70s Bollywood and family superstitions. This… didn't belong here.
The photo inside made my blood run cold.
Two women.
Identical.
One was my mother.
The other—her twin sister. The one who, according to every story I'd ever been told, had died in childhood. Some illness. Or maybe an accident. No one ever told the same version twice. I used to assume the details were just too painful.
But the portrait changed everything.
It wasn't a childhood photo. It wasn't black-and-white or stained with time.
It was vivid. High-resolution. The colors sharp, the lighting balanced. This was recent. This photo couldn't be older than a few years.
And both women looked alive.
My pulse quickened. I felt the old wooden floor creak under my weight as I stepped closer.
Then I saw it.
A mole. Small. Faint. But unmistakable—just beneath the right cheekbone of the woman on the left.
I leaned in. My heart was pounding now, thudding in my ears louder than the rain battering the windows.
The woman who raised me—who fed me, hugged me, yelled at me for sneaking out, cried at my graduation—she didn't have that mole.
This woman did.
I should've looked away.
But something—curiosity, fear, some primal instinct—held me in place.
Then came the hair.
One woman wore hers in a ponytail—neat, unfussy, the way my mother always did.
The other wore a braid. Thick. Traditional. Precise, like it was a habit she'd never broken.
Subtle. But glaring, once you noticed.
Twins. But different.
A single thread pulled loose in the back of my mind. I began to tug.
And memories began to fall apart like old film reels unspooling.
Birthday parties. My mother always stayed behind the camera. Why?
Photographs—carefully selected. The same three from the same day, over and over again.
My nani never spoke of the twin. Not once. Not in stories, not in passing. As though erasing her was easier than remembering.
I remembered asking my mother once, when I was ten, "What was your sister like?"
She had looked at me too long. Too still.
Then said, "Quiet."
That's all. Just "quiet."
It didn't feel right then.
It felt chilling now.
A cold knot formed in my stomach, twisting tighter with every breath.
There was only one possible conclusion—and I didn't want to face it.
But it was inescapable.
The woman who raised me…
Was not my biological mother.
She was her sister.
The twin.
The other one.
And the one we buried… was someone else entirely.
The Flight Back
I didn't sleep. I couldn't.
I paced the creaking floors of the haveli till the sky began to turn pale and bruised with dawn. Rain continued to lash against the windows. I kept glancing back at the portrait like it would vanish if I blinked.
At 4:06 a.m., I called Ross.
He picked up instantly.
"I need to get back to Berlin," I said, voice raw. "Now."
I told him everything. The photo. The mole. The hair. The implications too vast to say out loud.
Ross didn't ask questions.
"Airport in two hours," he said.
We boarded the first available flight out. Through security, through takeoff, through the six-hour journey—I barely said a word. My mind was a slide projector stuck between frames. A mother. A sister. A lie.
This wasn't about stolen research anymore.
This was about me.
I wasn't just chasing a lead.
I was chasing the truth of my own blood.
The Mansion Library
Berlin was grey when we landed. The sky low, like it wanted to press the city into silence.
The Vyas estate stood like it always had—cold, beautiful, monolithic. But as we stepped into the east wing, where my grandfather had once curated rare manuscripts and hidden codes in hollowed-out atlases, it felt different.
It felt like something waiting.
The library was cathedral-like. Mahogany shelves. Spiral staircases. Thousands of books heavy with forgotten languages and encrypted legacies.
I didn't care about the books.
I cared about the desk.
It was still there. The same ancient mahogany desk with clawed legs and brass handles. On it sat a globe—hand-carved, latitude rings still slightly loose. I used to spin it endlessly as a child.
Now, it looked like it held answers I was never meant to find.
I sat down. My hands hovered over the keyboard of the antique terminal. My fingers moved before I could second-guess.
The password—the one I'd seen my mother type when I was twelve, the one I memorized without knowing why—still worked.
The screen came to life.
Folder after folder.
Archives. Lab files. Surveillance logs. Medical reports.
And then, a photo.
A research symposium. Prague. Two years ago.
I zoomed in.
There.
In the center of the group.
Smiling. Wearing a white coat.
Her nametag read: Dr. Meera Vyas.
I couldn't breathe.
It was her.
Alive.
Alive.
The woman I buried.
The woman I was told was dead.
She was still working. Still moving. Still a ghost in the system.
My hands moved faster now, rage and panic making them blur.
I found it.
A hidden, restricted folder.
HYBRIS: TWIN PROTOCOLS
One click.
Dozens of documents exploded onto the screen. I read line after line, each one a knife through my sense of reality.
"Subjects M and S. Swapped post-incident. Only one informed."
"Separation required. HYBRIS objectives must remain undisrupted."
"Monitored behavioral divergence confirmed. Memory manipulation stable."
"Project risk assessment: LOW."
The screen swam before my eyes.
Meera and her twin weren't just sisters.
They were experiments.
So was I.
My life—the school I went to, the family I thought I knew, the woman I called mother—it had all been engineered.
A story.
Not mine.
The storm outside had followed me across continents.
And now, it was inside me.
Burning.