That darkness crept in the slight smile he gave her. It sent shivers down an already anxious Mitra.
"You thought you could escape from here?" he asked slowly stepping towards his lounge chair.
Mitra shrugged. "There's nothing wrong with trying. Besides, I suddenly got curious about what lay beyond that glass window. It's pretty disappointing to see only a dark corridor. I was expecting a bit of sunlight."
"I know you love going out," Sashi remarked.
"You know a lot about me, which makes me wonder how, why and what for," Mitra mused.
Sashi stopped for a moment then shrugged without an answer. He turned and set up his camera in its usual position.
"Oh, it's filming time again," Mitra said as sarcastically as she could.
"Yes, it's time people get an update on you."
"And understand that they shouldn't trust you or the videos you post?" Mitra commented. "I am supposed to be a dead woman, you know. If you post a video of me being alive you are going to face some serious credibility issues."
"Let's see who among us will be facing the credibility issues," Sashi muttered.
Mitra scoffed.
He turned to her and taking a long look at the glass shard in her hand, asked her, "Who are you planning to use that on?"
"Depends on your actions." Mitra stiffened as she heard herself say, "The moment you try to approach me in any way, I am going to plunge this into your heart. And if at any point I feel myself at stake, losing my consciousness or being overpowered in any way, you will watch this glass pierce through my neck. I won't hesitate in shedding blood, of either of us."
"You will kill yourself?"
"Without a doubt."
"You can kill me?"
"I most definitely would."
"Yes, you can be quite heartless, I know."
If there was a tinge of suggestive perception in his voice, Mitra didn't notice it. Sashi stretched to his side to look past Mitra at the wall. She registered his gaze immediately and shifted in her chair to block his view.
"Are you trying to dig your way out through the wall?" he asked, mockery flowing in his chortle.
"I would suggest you not to pay any attention," she warned.
Sashi took a step forward, towards her or towards the wall behind her, god knows.
Mitra immediately poised, pointing the weapon in her hand to her throat dangerously and muttered through her tightly grit teeth, "Don't you dare."
Sashi wore an expression of pain, which didn't quite sit well with Mitra. He froze for a moment and then stepped back, flopping down in his longue chair.
"I can just fix the window later," he declared.
Mitra didn't display the immense sense of defeat she felt. She was calculating the time she would get before her exit gets sealed again when Sashi interrupted her thoughts, "Don't think of escaping from here Mitra. It would all be a futile attempt. You will only end up hurting your hands, yourself, like today. You will leave this place only when I let you. Or when you decide to accept me."
The last statement rang a very familiar, horrible bell. Mitra had heard enough stories of obsession, watched many tragic takes of the situation she was in to understand the meaning of what Sashi said. It scared her, much beyond all the feelings of fear she had had till then. She still masked it all and asked for confirmation, "Accept you as what?"
"You know as what." Sashi was actually looking at her with mixed expressions of softness and anxiety.
Mitra didn't want to get her horrid imagination confirmed. She denied, "I don't. I don't know who you really are, nothing about you. So, there's no way I would know anything that is going through that wasted brain of yours."
"Accept me as a part of your life, in any way you want." He finally said it without struggle, his hidden desire for decades.
There was earnestness in his face which seemed so contrary to the gravity of his expectation from Mitra that she scoffed in helplessness.
"YOU ARE A FOOL!" she bellowed. "You tie me up here, almost murder me and want to be a part of my life? How exactly, in what way ever, do you think I would let a psychopath like you anywhere near me? I would rather die than have you in involved in my life in anyway."
"It's a pity you don't remember me," he said softly.
Mitra was more frustrated than ever. "Believe me," she said scornfully. "I most wondered to myself all this time was why am I in this situation, and in turn, why are you doing this to me, and by association, how in the whole world you are connected to me. You are not one of my classmates from school or college, no one I am acquainted with in my social circles, not anyone I've interacted anywhere with an impact enough for me to remember you."
Sashi had been incrementally brewing anger with every statement Mitra uttered, his eyes spitting fire, and by the time she finished, he seemed too furious to control himself.
"Not created an impact in our interactions?" he fumed.
"Not for me," Mitra confirmed stonily.
"We met twenty years ago Mitra."
If Mitra had felt frustrated till then, it got trumped by the flabbergasting irony that hit her. "When I was six?" her voice squeaked in high pitch, a result of her anguish.
Sashi nodded.
Mitra burst, figuratively throwing her words at him, "Okay, you can be certified crazy. I barely remember things from ten years back. How can you expect me to remember something from times immemorial, from when I was a barely six years old child? You think I have an eidetic memory, or I am a prodigy of some sort? Sorry, but I am not. So, if this is some sort of a perverted pedophilic obsession of yours, you should wake up."
Sashi looked hurt. Mitra started realizing the circumstances and proceedings that might have caused her confinement. If what he said was correct, the man sitting in front of her had been around her for twenty years. He had been observing her, stalking her and, god knows, obsessing over her for twenty long years, ever since she was a child.
He was perverted.
It was horribly scary.
It baffled her why he would go to such lengths when she didn't even know or remember him.
It broke her into a cold sweat as the implications dawned on her. His type of psychopaths were the cruellest ones to fight with, the most ruthless ones. Plus, she was a trigger to his insanity.
"You have such a low opinion of me Mitra," Sashi said, his voice dangerously low.
"Fruits of your own actions," Mitra said coldly.