Raman stared at the screen, his hands trembling.
Another email. Another short, cold sentence from the hacker who had ruled his life for three years.
He opened it, and his stomach clenched as if a hand had reached inside him.
“No money? That’s unfortunate. Try this instead:
$10,000 by Friday.
Or the wedding’s off.
She goes to prison.
Everyone will know what she did.”
Raman almost slid from his chair.
Ten thousand dollars.
By Friday.
He panicked. How?
How could he ever find that much?
He had nothing.
His savings were gone,
his bank account nearly empty,
every coin already swallowed by the endless blackmail —
tiny payments, false invoices, quiet ransoms —
a constant toll he paid to protect Mira.
He covered his face with his hands.
First came anger.
At the hacker, laughing behind his screen.
At himself, for letting it go on so long.
Three years of silence.
Three years of obedience.
Three years of being eaten alive.
Then came regret.
For every choice, every mistake,
for all the times he had failed to resolve this.
And then sorrow —
a heavy, dull ache that pressed down on him
until he could barely breathe.
The wedding.
Next week.
Everything Mira had built,
her plans, her career, her marriage, her future —
it all hung by a thread,
one message away from ruin.
He pictured the shame,
the headlines,
the whispers.
The thought of her being dragged through that humiliation
felt like a blade twisting in his chest.
He looked at his empty account.
Numbers that meant nothing.
Ten days left.
Ten days to find ten thousand dollars.
It might as well have been ten million.
Every possible path was blocked.
The police? No way.
A lawyer? How would that help ?
Family? How could he ?
He had no one.
The hacker knew exactly what he was doing.
With every passing hour,
the noose tightened.
Raman sat perfectly still, arms crossed, jaw locked tight.
He tried to think, to plan, to calculate —
but all the numbers came out the same.
Zero. Well, 100 dollars.
The air in the room grew heavier.
The light from the laptop painted his face pale,
made him look older, thinner.
He could hear his heartbeat, slow and hard,
a dull drum in the dark.
The hacker had owned him and had taken everything he wanted —
his money, his silence, his dignity —
and now, he wanted the rest.
Raman read the message again.
It stared back at him,
like a mirror whispering:
You are mine.
And in that moment, he felt utterly, completely small —
a father alone in the dark, trapped by the demon in the inbox.