Epilogue

Karan Malhotra stood at the edge of the rooftop, the city sprawled beneath him in all its glaring lights. The hum of the city was a distant murmur in his ears, drowned by the chaos that swirled within him. The events of the past few weeks felt like a fever dream—each revelation, each betrayal, each choice tearing at his understanding of right and wrong.

He thought back to the moment he had confronted Kiara and Raghav in the factory. The moment he had pointed his gun at his partner, his friend—the woman he had trusted with his life—and seen the defiance in her eyes. But there had been no malice there, only conviction. What was once clear to him—his mission, his purpose—was now a blur.

The documents they had handed him, the data they had shown, painted a different picture. A picture where Raghav wasn’t the villain, but the victim. A man who had lost everything in his quest to expose the rot festering at the heart of the nation. And Kiara—her betrayal now felt like a mirror reflecting Karan’s own blind loyalty to a system that, as much as he had believed in it, was rotten to the core.

As he had pieced together the files, something had shifted in him. The man he had pursued with relentless determination, the man he had believed to be the mastermind of a series of violent attacks, was not the one pulling the strings. The true architect of this chaos was still hidden in the shadows, protected by a network so vast and deeply embedded that even Karan had been unable to see it until now.

But the revelation had come too late. In his pursuit of justice, Karan had inadvertently disrupted the work Raghav and Kiara were doing. He had played right into the hands of the real enemy—whoever they were. The web of corruption, the collusion between government officials, corporate elites, and organized crime, had grown far too powerful for any single person to bring down. It was a machine—an all-encompassing system that Karan had once fought for but now saw as a prison.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, pulling him from his thoughts. He checked the screen—it was a message from the higher-ups at the NSG, urging him to continue the pursuit of Raghav and Kiara. The orders were clear: capture them, eliminate the threat.

But Karan knew, deep in his gut, that following these orders meant serving a broken system, a system that had manipulated him for years. And now, the man who had once been his mentor, Major Vikram Sethi, was revealed to be a key player in this global syndicate. The layers of deceit ran so deep, Karan could no longer tell who was friend or foe.

He clenched his fist around the phone. The weight of the decision before him was suffocating. If he followed the NSG’s orders, he would betray everything he had learned. If he joined forces with Raghav and Kiara, he would be branded a traitor. There was no clear path, no clean solution.

Karan exhaled sharply, his breath misting in the cold night air. The fight was no longer about catching the enemy—it was about understanding who the enemy truly was. And in the shadows, where the strings were pulled, the battle for justice had only just begun.

The city before him, once a symbol of hope and security, now felt like a labyrinth of lies. The only certainty was that Karan would not walk this path alone. He would need to confront his own beliefs, face the harsh truths, and decide where his loyalty truly lay.

The burden of truth had never felt so heavy.

And in the distance, the shadows beckoned.

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