The next forty-eight hours were the most public days of Isha's life.
She went everywhere. Markets, cafés, parks — every public space in South Delhi, walking slowly, visible, accompanied by Dev and an invisible cordon of Raghav's officers. She gave interviews. She appeared on a news panel. She posted Instagram stories from every location, tagging her coordinates, essentially live-streaming her own bait operation to an audience of millions.
The strategy was simple: maximum visibility. The Watcher's model depended on subjects being isolated — alone, disconnected, unnoticed. Isha was the opposite. She was the most noticed woman in Delhi. Every camera was pointed at her — not the Watcher's cameras, but the media's, the public's, the internet's. She was surrounded by attention, and attention was the one thing the Watcher couldn't overcome.
Behind the public performance, the real operation was running. Raghav's team had identified two more studio locations — a flat in Gurgaon's Sector 56 and a farmhouse outside Faridabad. Both matched the profile: rented under false names, modified with cameras and soundproofing, accessible through a private road. Both were under surveillance, waiting for the signal to raid.
Rohan, working under police protection, had traced the CCTV hack to a specific IP range used by Curator Labs. More importantly, he'd identified the financial trail — Bitcoin transactions from the streaming platform to a wallet controlled by Aarav Mallik, routed through the Singapore shell company and ultimately connected to the Indian angel investor: a real estate developer named Harsh Chadha, whose portfolio included commercial properties in Gurgaon.
The properties included the co-working space where Curator Labs operated.
The case was building. But the missing subjects — Tanya, Arjun, Priyanka — hadn't been found. The Noida flat had been emptied. The two new locations were empty too — cleared out, as if someone had been warned.
On Saturday evening, twenty-six hours into the countdown, Isha's phone rang. Unknown number.
She answered. Raghav's team was recording.
