KIARA (THE DEVIL'S POV)

The silence in the penthouse was no longer luxurious; it was suffocating, vast, and cold. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city lights blurred into streaks of indifferent gold, a dazzling mosaic of the world I was rapidly losing. I stood at the edge of the glass, a glass of untouched vintage whiskey heavy in my hand, staring down at the empire that Neil Khanna commanded—an empire that had just devoured mine.

​My reputation was in tatters, painted not just as a failed businesswoman, but as a malicious gossip-monger by the very press I had once commanded. And Kaveri. Kaveri had been the one to deliver the killing blow, her cool, brilliant mind spotting the regulatory flaw that my multi-million-dollar team had missed.

​It wasn't just the money or the humiliation that burned. It was the absolute, crushing finality of it all. I had lost the corporate war, but worse, I had lost Neil forever.

​I slammed the glass down on the marble counter. The sound was sharp, brittle, cutting through the heavy air. The illusion had been shattered, broken into a million jagged shards of truth. In the past, no matter how cruel I was, Neil always had a flicker of recognition for the history we shared, a moment of hesitation. Now, there was nothing. When he had faced me at that press conference, his eyes hadn't held anger; they had held contempt. And not for my corporate attack, but for my attack on Kaveri's self-worth.

​He had called her his fortress. His destiny.

​I saw it now with a clarity that stung like acid. It wasn't about the contract marriage or the money. It was about Kaveri. She hadn't just secured her position; she had framed me as the pure villain—the unstable, bitter, corporate saboteur. And Neil, convinced by her unwavering loyalty and cool intellect, would never, could never, look past that frame. He saw me not as the woman he once loved, but as the snake that tried to poison his partner.

​The realization settled over me, heavy and suffocating: I didn't want him like that. I didn't want a Neil who was convinced that I was fundamentally unworthy, a man who saw me only through the lens Kaveri had meticulously crafted. If I couldn't have his respect, his loyalty, or his love, I certainly wouldn't have his pity.

​I lost him because of her.

​That single thought was the tipping point. The love I harbored for Neil, the desire to win him back, curdled instantly into a toxic, absolute hatred. If I couldn't stand by his side, I would ensure he had no empire to stand upon. If she had framed me, I would now frame him.

​The new goal was simple, pure, and utterly devastating: Annihilate Neil Khanna.

​But how? Attacking his logistics failed. Attacking his stock would be temporary. I needed something that would strike at his very core—his reputation, his ethics, his moral standing. Something that would bring the wrath of the public, the government, and the regulatory bodies down on him simultaneously.

​I walked over to my private workspace, a room lined with banks of monitors and fortified servers. I needed to move fast before the current legal fire consumed me entirely. I needed to become a ghost, a perfect manipulator operating in the digital shadows.

​My fingers, guided by years of high-level intelligence gathering and corporate espionage, flew across the keyboard. I bypassed the usual, noisy corporate targets and drilled down into Neil’s personal philanthropic projects—the ones he spoke about with genuine, uncharacteristic passion.

​That was when I found it: The Arogya Telemedicine Project.

​The Arogya Telemedicine Project was Neil’s baby. It was his signature corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative—a sprawling, multi-state platform designed to connect remote rural health workers with specialist doctors in major cities, using AI-driven diagnostics. It was hailed as revolutionary, ethical, and, critically, government-subsidized and publicly funded through multiple global health initiatives.

​Perfect.

​A financial scam involving a logistics firm is cold and clinical. A scam involving healthcare for the poor is a national scandal—a moral and legal catastrophe.

​I began to dissect its structure. The project was complex, involving several layers

​

​I realized the genius of the attack: I couldn't steal the money directly, but I could make it look like Neil had, by manufacturing the evidence of a massive, systematic fraud intended to siphon off the public subsidies.

​My fingers danced, creating a schematic of the attack

​I needed a credible façade. I spent the next 48 hours creating a shell company in a remote tax haven, aptly." It was, on paper, was a medical hardware supplier based in Singapore, specializing in AI diagnostic kits—the exact type of equipment Arogya used.

​Next, I used my team’s forgotten, black-market digital resources to create a near-perfect clone of the Arogya platform’s front-end—the user interface, the patient onboarding process, everything but the core operational backend. This clone was designed to host entirely fictitious patient records and fraudulent equipment manifests.

​The plan: my shell company would appear to win multi-million dollar procurement contracts from Khanna Group Tech. These funds would be routed through a highly complex series of three international banks, before disappearing into a crypto-escrow account I controlled. The fraud wouldn't be in the transfer, but in the justification. The equipment the shell company was paid for would never exist, and the services they rendered would be attributed to ghost patients.

​

​Now was the critical step. I needed to make the scam appear to originate within the Khanna Group’s own data structure, pointing the finger directly at Neil and his key lieutenants.

​I began fabricating patient records—thousands of them. These weren't just random names; they were meticulously crafted, using actual demographic data from remote Indian villages where the Arogya project operated, making them look authentic. Each ghost patient was assigned a high-cost diagnostic profile and subsequently attributed to non-existent specialized care rendered by the phantom equipment.

The system was designed to appear as if Khanna Group employees were falsifying patient data to justify the massive hardware expenditures.

​I used a sophisticated man-in-the-middle exploit to insert the data into a non-critical, shadow database within the Arogya server farm—a database Neil used for preliminary cost-benefit analysis. This ensured that when investigators finally found the discrepancy, the trail would lead directly to Khanna Group IP addresses and management approval logs, all back-dated to make the fraud look like it had been running undetected for the past 18 months.

​The data had to scream: This was a deep, long-term scam orchestrated by the highest level of management.

​

​The funds for the fictitious shell company contracts were funneled out using the same banking structure Neil used for legitimate international transactions—only this time, the final account belonged to me. By mimicking Neil's usual financial routing, I made the transfers look like they were purposefully obfuscated by a corporate criminal.

​The final, devastating step was the leak. I couldn't just drop the documents. I needed to ensure the right people found them at the right time and in the most sensational way.

​I prepared an anonymous digital package:

​A highly technical report showing the discrepancy between the real patient count and the falsified patient count, detailing the costs associated with the ghost profiles.

​Copies of the fake contracts, bearing high-level Khanna Group signatures (forged to look plausible).

​An anonymous tip to a crusading, high-profile investigative journalist known for his disdain for corporate greed, along with a synchronized tip to the Global Health Initiative (one of Arogya’s major international donors) and the domestic Regulatory Authority for Digital Health.

​I timed the release for a Friday evening—the moment when financial markets close, but political and media news cycles spin into overdrive. The chaos would be maximal, giving Neil no time to perform damage control before Monday.

​

​I stared at the clock on my monitor. 5:28 PM. Two minutes until the markets closed, two minutes until I pushed the button.

​My heart was a cold, hard stone in my chest. There was no exhilaration, only a chilling, surgical detachment. I wasn't just ruining a man; I was destroying a project that helped millions of poor families. But my mind rationalized it immediately: Neil and Kaveri's perfect life was built on a lie of moral superiority. They deserved to see their philanthropic halo shatter, deserved to face the consequences of their supposed righteousness.

​Kaveri: The woman who had everything—the looks, the brains, the man I wanted—had used her pure-hearted facade to utterly destroy me. She had convinced Neil I was the villain, the cause of his every problem. Well, now I would become the monster she had framed me as.

​5:29 PM.

​I typed the final command into my encrypted terminal. The sequence was initiated: the financial transfers were triggered, the regulatory reports were uploaded anonymously, and the media package was sent to the journalist.

​5:30 PM. The market bells rang, signaling the weekend close.

​I leaned back in my chair, exhaling slowly, watching the city lights. It was done.

​Thirty minutes later, the first domino fell. A Google Alert flashed on my screen: Initial Reports Suggest Massive Data Breach and Fraud in Major Telemedicine Initiative. It was a placeholder, a vague rumor.

​But then, the major news channels picked it up. The investigative journalist, my carefully selected attack dog, had run with the anonymous tip.

​"FRAUD SHOCKER: Khanna Group's Arogya Project Accused of Siphoning Millions in Public Health Funds."

​The headline was sensational, accusatory, and aimed directly at Neil's ethics. The article didn't mention the source, but it detailed the "evidence" I had planted—the huge discrepancy in patient data and the suspicious transactions to shell company.

​I watched the news anchors discuss the gravity of the allegations. The government funding body had already issued a statement of "deep concern" and announced an immediate, full-scale investigation. The Global Health Initiative threatened to pull their sponsorship from all Indian healthcare projects if the claims were verified.

​The public reaction, visible across social media, was immediate and brutal. The backlash wasn't just corporate; it was personal. Neil Khanna was trending as a hypocritical fraud, a man who stole money intended for the sick and the dying.

​I pulled up my phone and opened the secure chat app I knew Neil used. I sent a single, anonymous message, a final piece of twisted psychological warfare.

​Message: You thought I was trying to win you back. I was only trying to show you who your real enemy is. You were right about one thing, Neil: The past is dead. But I am your future.

​I put the phone down, feeling an eerie calm. I had hit him where he was most vulnerable: his image, his morality, and his control. I had brought the entire system down on his head, and I had done it while he was distracted, relying on his new, perfect partner.

​My hands, though steady, were cold.

I knew the danger was immense. I was no longer playing games; I was waging a war of annihilation against one of the most powerful men in the country. But Neil Khanna would learn that the woman he dismissed, the woman Kaveri framed as evil, was capable of an evil far beyond their imagination.

​I looked at the city, now awaiting the chaos I had unleashed. I had lost the Khanna empire, but I had secured my revenge. And soon, Neil would be fighting a battle for his life, while Kaveri would finally see what true pain felt like. She would never frame me again.