Redemption of Royals (Royal #1: Book 3) | ✔

57

-• this is just the beginning •-

Rudra

On the brink of insanity.
Would you push or would you fall?

Twenty four hours ago when I got my head straight, I was in an abandoned warehouse that had once been the server room for Esther Innovations. We have moved to bigger spaces now, and have ten power stations all across India, on acres of lands in both rural and urban areas. It's astonishing how small we started and how big we made it happen.

I hadn't come here to hide. I didn't even know where I was until I woke up this morning at six. The scariest thing about me is that I rarely shut down, but I do, and when that happens, I have no recollection of the time spent after shutting down and before regaining my consciousness. I could have run over someone with my car and I would have no fucking clue. This hasn't happened to me in over years, the last time it did I was beaten black and blue and knocked out unconscious before waking up to Nurse Farida telling me I had turned animalistic on one of Virendra's guards and almost killed him before his men took me off and beat me to pulp.

It's scary, not because I can kill without a shred of hesitancy, but because I'd have no memory of killing when I'm reeled back to my senses. I'm fucked in the head. It's wired in all the wrong ways. There's a dark, gloomy place, and it's inside my head, disembodied from the rest of me, like a locked basement that unleashes a demon the moment it's forced open. I'm not me when that happens, my instincts are raw, animalistic, thoughtless, and my ways become ruthless, savage, brutal. I hate losing control.

And that's what happens. It's like I'm knocked out of my own body, and someone else takes me over, doing things that I'd think a hundred times over, making decisions that aren't mused about, and reacting faster than my head would normally allow.

This morning, when I woke up to myself normal and sane again, I found myself on the grim floor, curled against a wall. My head spun like a fucking siren and I had to retch over the window sill, throwing up all that I late last night into the open gutter next to the building. The stench was so strong, I had yanked myself back and slammed the windows close, sliding down the wall to hold my head in my hands until the thumping receded to a dull throb every alternate second.

Then I got up, rid myself of the blazer, and grabbed the cleaning supplies from the janitor's closet. Though we don't use this server station anymore, nothing here is unusable or broken. I had taken one look around the warehouse, rolled my sleeves to my elbows and cleaned the entire auditorium like room, starting from the floors to the cobwebs hanging on the ceilings. That done, I had moved to the power supply and tinkered around with the wirings a bit. Yara helped me pave the way to better my basic electrician skills. With his help, I got the servers and computers running again. Dragging a worn out leather chair to the middle of the room, I surfed through the multiple input and output devices, running them through a basic test to see which are working, which requires a little help, and which cannot be recovered.

Dismembering a CPU is as easy as it is hard to put it back together. It's a task that needs to be done with care, so you don't damage or ruin a functioning processor.

By the time the clock hand hits three in the afternoon, I get myself two high functioning computers, three running servers, and two external hard drives. Settling down on the leather chair, I wheel myself to the desk, holding the edge and frowning when it tilts to the side. Shifting my eyes to the legs of the table, I shake it a little, and it sways to the right corner, missing a rubber cap.

Tearing off the label sticker from the back of the monitor, I fold it five times, slide it beneath the table leg and test its balance. It doesn't tilt anymore.