Page 12 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The room is colder than the rest of the penthouse. It always is. By design.

The glass walls overlook a skyline swallowed by rain, Manhattan’s glow smothered beneath wet clouds.

Inside, the only light comes from a single desk lamp, casting hard shadows across scattered files, open ledgers, clipped photos, and walls lined with mounted screens.

I sit at the center of it all, a quiet deity in my domain of silence and surveillance. My sleeves are rolled up, forearms resting against the edge of the desk, fingertips steepled in front of me as I watch.

Five monitors blink with muted life: Vera in her apartment, Vera’s hallway, Vera’s office lobby, the street outside her foster mother’s grave site, and her work inbox mirrored through a soft breach in the firm’s firewalls.

Each screen pulses with quiet rhythm. Time-coded, labeled, and monitored.

I lean forward and adjust the volume on one feed.

Her apartment from last week. She is in the garden at dusk. She is barefoot and tired, holding a cup of tea she never finishes.

There it is. The soft, almost imperceptible sound of her crying.

I close my eyes.

She cries when no one is watching. Except someone always is.

I play it repeatedly.

I tell myself it isn’t obsession. Not really.

It is patience, protection, and precision. I’m not hurting her. I’m preparing her.

The world will turn on her eventually, like people always do, but I won’t.

I will be there. Steady and constant. I will understand her better than anyone ever has.

And when she realizes that, she’ll come to me on her own. I don’t need to use force or tricks. Our collision is inevitable.

Still, I watch.

Every morning at 6:00 a.m., she opens her blinds.

Every third morning, she forgets and does it at 6:14.

She checks her phone five times before breakfast, always between 6:30 and 7:00.

Her texts are short. Her calendar precise.

On rainy days, she skips her usual café and makes coffee at home, but adds more milk than usual. She only does that when she is upset.

I have it all logged.

Every deviation, routine, and soft, human inconsistency.

A digital transcript on the desk details her latest voice memo, dictated into her phone while walking home the night before:

“Find updated Harbor zoning codes…. Ask Clara if the surveyor report came in…. Jesus, I’m talking to myself again.”

I smile faintly. She doesn’t know I have it. That I’ve printed it out, highlighted her pauses, even catalogued the way her voice breaks on the word Jesus.

I rise from my chair and move toward the corkboard on the opposite wall. Strings of red and black thread tie together dozens of photos, newspaper clippings, receipts, and digital stills.

At the center is a high-resolution image of her taken six years ago at a charity gala, before I’d even introduced myself to her firm.

She is laughing in it. Head back, wine glass in hand, and eyes closed.

She doesn’t laugh like that anymore.

I have the video too. It plays on loop sometimes, when the silence becomes too sharp.

My gaze drifts toward the new file on the desk. A printed image of a tall, dark man in his late thirties sits on top. He’s dressed in a casual suit that houses his narrow build. He looks harmless.

My jaw flexes.

I click a remote on the desk, fast-forwarding footage of Vera leaving her office at midday. She turns a corner and brushes past this man shoulder to shoulder. It isn’t intentional.

But the man looks at her for too long. His eyes linger. And Vera doesn’t notice.

I replay it. I don’t know the man. He’s not one of my people or from her firm. He’s definitely not someone I’d profiled.

That alone makes him dangerous. I step back to the desk and hit pause.

The room is still.

The sound of rain presses harder against the glass now. Wind howls just faintly through the sealed edges.

I stand motionless, eyes locked on the screen, as a flicker of something unfamiliar begins to rise in my chest.

It isn’t jealousy. That is too simple and human.

It is disruption and intrusion. Someone has entered her field of gravity. And not by my permission.

I move slowly to the drawer beside the monitors and open it. Inside is an unmarked, smooth black case that holds a phone.

“Dorian.” My eyes wander back to the photo. “The man who passed her at 12:17 p.m. today—find out who he is. I want a full workup. Home, car, past employer. School. Family. I want to know what he smells like before the day ends.”

There is silence on the other end at first.

“Understood.”

I end the call.

My control hasn’t slipped entirely, but it has tilted.

I walk back to the monitors, eyes locked on the paused frame.

***

The alley is narrow, slick with oil and rain. Water trickles in rivulets along the edges, pooling around rusted metal bins. Somewhere, a dog barks. Somewhere else, a siren flares and fades into silence.

I stand in the shadows, gloved hands raised, palm to palm, as I peel the leather off slowly. My breathing is steady as I move. The same rhythm I’d trained into my body for years.

In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Control, always.

A streak of red smears the knuckles of the glove.

I crouch beside the unconscious man, inspecting the jaw where the skin has split open. A pulse still thuds beneath his temple weakly, but present. I haven’t killed him. It isn’t out of mercy.

Death would have been forgettable. Pain lingers longer. Memory is made of fractures.

The man hadn’t fought back. He hadn’t understood why it happened. I hadn’t spoken once. I’d appeared behind him in the parking garage seven hours after he brushed against Vera’s shoulder.

The hit came fast, with a right hook to the ribs, another to the mouth. I hadn’t needed to say a word. Some boundaries didn’t need language. They were written in bruises.

I stand and drop the gloves into a plastic bag, sealing it neatly before tucking it into my coat pocket.

My shoes make no sound as I step over the crumpled figure and move toward the waiting car at the mouth of the alley.

Dorian sits behind the wheel. He doesn’t look back.

“Clean it,” I say as I climb in. “He’ll wake up in twenty minutes. Leave him with his teeth. He’s no longer a threat. But if he so much as Googles her name again or makes plans to stalk her for his sick pleasure, I’ll take his spine.”

Dorian nods once. Nothing else is said.

The car moves, tires whispering against the wet asphalt.

Back at the penthouse, the surveillance room is dark as always.

I strip off my coat, hang it precisely, and move through the space like a phantom. The rain has picked up again. It smudges the skyline beyond the glass in long vertical streaks, like the city itself is dissolving.

I walk past the monitors.

Vera has gone home.

She is in her apartment now, seated on the edge of her bed, reading.

A book I’d seen her open three times before. Once in college. Once during the week her foster mother died.

Tonight, she turns each page slowly, her lips moving faintly as she reads. There is a bruise on her arm, a small one gotten from bumping into a file cabinet earlier that morning.

I know it because I have the footage.

I know everything. Except why watching her tonight makes my chest feel hollow.

I should be at peace. The man has been handled. Her routine stays maintained, and the perimeter intact.

But something is off. She hasn’t checked her phone in the usual three-minute loop or closed the door all the way.

She is slipping because of me.

I turn away from the screens, jaw clenched, and step into the soundproof room adjacent to the surveillance core.

It is darker here and warmer. Only one thing ever plays inside this room.

I lie down on the padded bench, close my eyes, and tap the control panel by my head.

A soft, barely audible sound fills the space. The sound of Vera’s breathing captured from a night three weeks ago when she was asleep.

This is my ritual. This is what calms me.

I’d built the room to mimic the conditions of a womb-like quiet, complete with padded walls, no lights, no edges, and just the sound of her existing.

But tonight, the sound doesn’t work.

My chest aches with something dangerously close to longing.

I listen harder. The tape continues: her breath stuttering, then settling. A faint rustle of sheets. She sounds safe.

I should be relieved. Instead, I feel rage.

Because she sounds safe without me.

I rise abruptly.

The silence cracks.

I storm back into the surveillance room and yank open the drawer beneath the main desk. It is lined in velvet, perfectly clean, housing a single small photograph laminated for preservation.

Her kindergarten school photo.

Vera, age five, with gap teeth and her hair in mismatched puffs. She has her elbows out and a smear of jam at the corner of her mouth.

I hold it like scripture and run my thumb over the image with something almost like reverence.

She had always looked at the camera like that. Like she knew something no one else did. Even back then. There had always been defiance in her eyes. Even as a child, she’d refused to be made small.

That’s what I love. That’s what needs protecting.

Not her innocence. Her resistance.

I stand in the dim, glowing quiet, photo in hand, rain pounding against the glass.

My thumb trembles once.

“You’ve always belonged to me,” I whisper. “You just don’t remember yet.”

***

The monitors cast a dim blue haze across the room, throwing fractured light against my jaw as I sit in silence, fingers steepled beneath my lips.

All around me, her life plays in loops of old footage, new clips, muted audio waves spiking across thin horizontal bands.

It isn’t noise. It is communion of ritual and religion.

In one clip, she is laughing. It isn’t recent—perhaps from last spring, when she sat at a café window, talking to a friend I’d long since vetted. Her laugh isn’t loud, but it cracks open her entire face.

I play it again, and again. Until the friend’s voice fades and only Vera’s laughter remains.

I tap the console, and another clip plays.

She’s crying silent tears on the fire escape in winter, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes staring into the snow like it had done something unforgivable.

I watch the tremor in her hand. The press of her palm against her knee, trying to steady herself.

I don’t fast-forward. I let the pain play in real time.

To know her, I have to love all of it. To love her means watching even the parts she wouldn’t show anyone else.

I reach for the table and pick up the top sheet in a tall stack of printed transcripts. I’d labeled it by date, time, and temperature. It is her voice memo from ten nights ago. She’d been walking home.

“Did I leave the stove on? No, I didn’t. I checked. Okay. I’ll check again anyway. And I’ll lock the top latch this time. Just in case. This city’s getting louder. Feels like it’s leaning in.”

I have read it a dozen times, but now I read it again, whispering the words aloud like scripture.

I set the page down beside a carefully annotated map of her childhood neighborhood. Every coffee shop, bus stop, and childhood piano recital location has been marked. Some circled in red. Others starred in silver ink.

Structure and order, that is how I keep myself intact.

I glance down at my gloves; they’re identical to the pair I’d worn earlier that night in the alley. The fingertips were scorched and blood clung to the seams.

I’d burned them when I got home. Not to destroy evidence, but because they had touched someone who touched her.

Contamination. I cannot bear it.

I open the drawer beneath my desk and pull out the small wooden box inside. Inside the box are fragments of a life I do not own but do quietly and completely.

A napkin from Café Amélie, where she’d spilled wine on her blouse and laughed at herself.

A copy of a letter she’d written to her high school guidance counselor, folded four times, creased with teenage desperation.

She’d written: “I think I want to be a lawyer. Or maybe I just want to be right for once.”

I had found it in her old school records, accessed through a shell foundation my people had used to fund a new library wing.

She hadn’t become a lawyer, but she had still gone into a career where she proved that she liked being right all the time.

There is her first-yearbook photo, where she had braces, overplucked brows, and a wide smile.

And a Post-it note she’d scribbled at university, retrieved from an old textbook she’d donated: “I want something that feels like falling, but ends in flight.”

I press a hand to my chest. Her handwriting does something to me. Always has.

She’d written with a slant, as though she was leaning forward into the future, impatient for the now to be over.

I stand slowly, holding the napkin, the letter, and the Post-it all at once.

I look down at them, my hands trembling slightly.

She doesn’t know how long I’ve been building this. How long I’ve been watching not to consume her, but to be worthy of her.

This is devotion.

Obsession, yes, but rooted in a terrible kind of reverence.

I believe I am what the world has failed to be for her.

Unflinching, loyal, and constant.

I’m not some faceless monster. I am a man with need.

I fold the letter once again and tuck it beneath the Post-it. I seal them into a small envelope and press it flat.

This is mine to hold.

I need to feel the weight of her past in my hands.

Outside, the rain intensifies, streaking the glass in jagged sheets.

The city is collapsing into night.

I sit back at my desk.

Her breathing comes through a soft feed in the corner.

As the footage flickers in time-coded silence, I whisper once, low and certain:

“Eventually, you’ll know who you belong to.”