The Nurse with Chocolate Dreams

In the early hours of dawn, Poornima Singh sat alone in the staffroom of Samaritan Night Care Clinic, sipping cold coffee and staring at the empty chocolate wrapper in her hand.

The taste still lingered — a small joy in her otherwise burdened life.

She smiled to herself, remembering the mysterious man from the night before. Bleeding, half-conscious, gun under his coat, eyes bloodshot like fire — and yet, he hadn't scared her the way guns usually did.

Maybe because… she knew that world too well.

---

Born as the only daughter of Zain Singh, one of Mumbai's most feared mafia lords, Poornima's childhood had been soaked in power, blood, and silence.

She remembered it all — the large haveli, the armed guards, the meetings behind locked doors, and her father's voice that always made grown men tremble.

But never once did she feel loved.

Zain Singh hated weakness. And Poornima was his weakness — a girl who cried at loud noises, flinched at gunfire, and refused to even hold a weapon.

> “You’re not mine,” he had once spat at her after she fainted during a gang shootout when she was 12.

“You’ll never survive in this world.”

He was right.

She didn’t want to.

---

At 17, Poornima ran away.

Changed cities. Changed her name.

Used fake documents, scholarships, and stubborn courage to get into nursing school. She never once looked back. She worked night shifts, treated wounds, listened to dying patients whisper regrets — and for the first time in her life, she felt purpose.

She wasn’t a daughter of crime here. She was just a nurse.

And that was enough.

---

But some shadows never leave.

She still jumped at the sound of a gunshot on TV.

She still woke up gasping from dreams filled with screams and red.

And she never, ever talked about her father.

The only thing that calmed her?

Chocolate.

Small, silly pieces of happiness wrapped in foil.

> “You can’t fix the world,” she would whisper to herself.

“But maybe… you can make one person smile at a time.”

---

When that man — that cold, powerful stranger — stumbled into her clinic with a bullet in his side, she had felt it again: the danger, the familiar scent of gunpowder and blood.

But unlike the world she escaped from… he didn’t yell. He didn’t threaten.

He just sat there. Quiet. Bleeding. Broken.

She didn’t ask questions. She did what she was born to do.

She saved him.

And when he left, she didn’t expect to see him again. She didn’t even know his name.

But part of her… couldn't forget the way he looked at her as she handed him the chocolate.

As if no one had ever done that for him before.

---

Back in her tiny one-bedroom apartment, Poornima changed out of her scrubs, washed the blood off her hands, and sat by the window.

Outside, the city of Bangalore buzzed — loud, reckless, alive.

But inside, she closed her eyes and whispered the words that had become her nightly ritual:

> “I am not my father.

I am not my past.

I am Poornima Singh. And I choose peace.”

She bit into another Dairy Milk bar and smiled faintly.

She didn’t know that the man she had stitched back to life…

Was the kind of monster she had once run away from.