Chapter 68: "I think I was six years old at the time..."

A heavy silence filled the room for a moment. Only the AC’s humming sound could be heard.

And then the very next second, a light chuckle escaped Gaurav’s lips.

"If it was me, I would have broken all 32 of his teeth." Gaurav said this with a laugh, and then he paused for a second, rubbing the back of his neck. "But maybe... I would have also checked how many of them were there first."

Silence fell over the room again.

And then... I would have counted and broken all of their teeth."

Saying this, a light wave of laughter ran through the room. Even Himanshu smiled a bit.

But the moment they looked at Maya, that laughter stopped instantly, like someone had flipped off a switch.

Maya was still sitting there with that same guilt and a pale face. It looked like she had taken the blame for this entire incident onto her own shoulders. She hadn’t even smiled at Gaurav’s joke.

"How much does it hurt now?" she asked with the same dryness. Her voice still had a soft edge to it, but that cheerful waitress from the cafe was nowhere to be seen. The mask was off.

Yeah, it’s fine now. It doesn’t hurt too much," Himanshu replied quickly, trying to make her feel better.

From Himanshu’s low voice, Maya understood that the closeness they shared before was probably gone, ruined by her dangerous behavior back there. She knew what she had to say now. She couldn’t keep him in the dark anymore.

Getting closer to Himanshu would have connected them even more, but beating up thugs so brutally and hiding a secret personality like that inside... that would scare anyone away. He deserved to know why she fought like a killer.

The senior paused for a second, looking down at her own trembling hands, and then spoke in that same cold tone.

"I think I was six years old at the time..."

Just then, Gaurav interrupted her. His voice was unusually soft.

"Maya."

"We have to tell him. For the sake of trust," Maya said without even looking at Gaurav.

She turned toward Himanshu again.

"I think I was six at the time... when I realized that I was completely alone in this world. I stayed alive by eating people’s leftover food on the pavements. As time passed, I realized that you need money to survive. And then I met Gaurav. We were fighting for the first time over a thrown-away half-eaten apple in a dirty alley. He won that fight... but even after winning, he gave me that half apple to eat. And since then... we stayed together."

Now, only Maya’s empty and pain-filled voice was echoing in the room. Gaurav just looked away, staring out the window as if reliving those days.

"As the days went by, we started working for people, and then one day we got a job in a bar. Calling that place a ’bar’ probably wouldn’t be right. Every bad thing in the world happened there. We cleaned floors, served drinks, and took beatings from drunk regulars just for dropping a glass. Slowly, we got beaten up, we fought, and we endured it all. We had spent 10 years in that hell. We weren’t humans anymore... we had become stones, worse than animals. For us, only money... money was the only thing that mattered."

Maya took a deep breath, but there were no tears in her eyes, just a horrifying truth.

"But one day, everything changed. When we found out that we were being sold to another country. We tried really hard to get out of there, but we couldn’t. And in the end, we were sold off. Our age was almost the same as yours right now. We had started to understand that money is everything, but maybe we were wrong."

"When those smugglers tried to take us away, the owner of our bar threw a huge amount of money in their faces for our release... but even then they didn’t let us go. Because more valuable than money... were our bodies. And then..." Maya’s voice trembled for the first time. "That owner decided to fight for us. We couldn’t understand why he was doing it, because his whole life he had only worshipped money. He was a bad man, Himanshu. But maybe in his final moments, the dead human inside him woke up. He gave us a way to escape from that hell... but he got killed by those thugs himself just to buy us some time."

Maya raised her gaze and looked straight into Himanshu’s eyes.

"And since then, we decided that we would try to live a normal life. A place where people mattered... not money. That cafe is all we have."

As soon as the senior said these final words, the air in the room felt heavy, and a deep silence took over.

She had said all of this in one go, without stopping. It felt like a script from some dark movie. But... nobody could deny the truth on her face, and there was absolutely no room for lies in her story.

But Himanshu still couldn’t believe it. He turned and looked at the demon. The demon’s eyes were locked on Maya. There was no surprise in her empty gaze, but rather a weird sense of ’recognition’—like a person who came out of hell instantly recognizes another person who came from hell. It was a silent understanding between two girls who knew exactly what the darkest parts of the world looked like.

And that was when it finally clicked in Himanshu’s head. He understood why the demon never talked to these seniors properly. Even with the fear of losing her job, she never tried to act sweet with them. Because from day one, the demon knew that these two weren’t ’normal’. They reeked of the same danger she did. Today, he realized that he was the only clueless dumbass who hadn’t figured out a single thing until now. He thought he was working in a cute, peaceful cafe, but he was actually standing right in the middle of a battlefield.