Page 10 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

Flickers of motion of Vera walking into her office, brushing past the receptionist, nodding once at a junior associate who looks startled by her presence.

The lobby camera catches the wind curling through the hem of her coat. She doesn’t slow down.

It’s raining again. Manhattan looks bruised.

Inside the surveillance room, I sit perfectly still.

She crosses the office floor with practiced ease, unaware of what’s waiting on her desk.

The package arrived twenty minutes ago, timed precisely, placed by a neutral courier with no traceable ties in a brown paper with no return address. Just her name, printed in serif font.

Her fingers hesitate over it now. She’s alone in her office. The door clicks shut behind her.

I lean slightly forward.

She peels the paper back neatly and precisely, like she expects something fragile. When she sees the book, she stills.

The Secret Garden.

A pulse of memory and recognition so sharp it makes her thumb pause at the corner of the cover creeps into her eyes.

She opens it slowly and finds the envelope tucked between the third and fourth chapters.

She holds it like it might detonate. And then she opens it.

The still frame I captured of her asleep, untouched and vulnerable, is there, perfectly sized. Her breath catches.

And for the first time…she looks afraid in the way a person is when they realize they’ve been truly known by someone they can’t name.

Her eyes don’t dart. She doesn’t pace. She just…stands there.

And I feel it in my chest, in the stillness between frames, and in the raw silence she gives me. This is our first real contact.

No more shadows or theory. She sees me now; she sees my hand in her world.

I watch her lower the photo onto the desk. She smooths the envelope flat and slides it underneath her calendar. She looks at the photo.

She suddenly snatches the photo off the desk. She checks the door. It’s locked, of course. She rushes to the blinds, yanks them shut, and clicks the window lock, though she hasn’t opened it in weeks.

I sit back, surrounded by screens.

She turns the book over once in her hand, as if trying to decide what part of the gift unnerves her most. Then she locks it in her drawer. And picks up her office phone.

The surveillance room is the only place in this building that feels alive. Every other square foot of the penthouse is curated with cold metal, silent floors, and glass so clean it reflects nothing. I designed it to erase humanity.

But in here, humanity happens.

In here, my obsession breathes. In here, she lives.

Every whisper of her life flickers softly around me.

One feed catches her biting the inside of her cheek at a board meeting. Another shows her reading in bed, spine curled against a headboard that doesn’t quite support her posture.

Another catches her laughing at something off-camera, eyes crinkled, hand resting over her chest like she’s afraid to let joy out too loudly.

These aren’t intrusions anymore. These are intimacies.

Things no one else sees.

And now, finally, she sees me too.

I rise from the chair and walk to the far end of the room. The glass stretches from floor to ceiling, Manhattan washed in rain beyond it. There’s nothing romantic about the view.

It’s surgical, with lit windows and gridlines. A city that bleeds information, whether it wants to or not.

My reflection in the glass looks calm, but something in my chest tightens.

I am not watching a woman I intend to break. She challenged me. Now I’ll consume her completely.

I’ll own her mind, emotion, silence, and secrets.

She let me in without meaning to. When she left that note—“If you’re going to watch me, have the decency to do it from the front”—she invited me forward.

And I have never needed a second invitation.

Dorian texted me earlier: “Package delivered. Courier disposed.”

I didn’t respond.

Dorian knows better than to expect answers when my mind is occupied.

But my thoughts haven’t left her since. I saw the shift in her expression when she opened that envelope. The recognition and realization. The beginnings of something new.

This isn’t a game to her anymore.

And I feel it like pressure behind the ribs and something blooming where obsession used to reside.

Ownership. I want her to know me the way I know her by presence.

The book was a key. The photo was a revelation.

Next will be proximity.

A breath too close. A silence that feels familiar. A touchpoint inside a moment she thought was private.

And then I’ll let her see me.

Not all at once.

But enough to know she was never alone.

I return to the desk.

The monitors run in soft loops now. Her office is quiet again, as she left for a meeting twenty minutes ago. The drawer with the book remains shut. The envelope undisturbed.

But something has shifted in her, and I know it.

This is the moment before the glass breaks. The heartbeat before the trap is recognized as home rather than punishment.

I whisper her name, not like before.

And this time, it answers back without sound or certainty, but with something close to surrender.