Page 14 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

I sit in the dark, my hands steepled beneath my chin, the glow of the monitors washing my skin in cold light.

On the center screen, Vera stands before her mirror.

Her apartment is dim, warm-toned, and deceptively soft. She hasn’t turned on the overhead lights, just the vanity, and it creates a halo around her body that makes my throat tighten.

She wears red lipstick. Not the subtle type or the one she wears for work. This is lacquered, deliberate, and leaves marks.

Her dress is short, black, and clings to her luscious body. It has a slit at the thigh. Spaghetti straps barely hold her divine boobs up.

She hesitates in front of the mirror, adjusting her earring, the neckline, then her breathing.

I watch without blinking. I have watched her dress before, hundreds of times. But tonight, everything feels different, as though she is performing for someone who isn’t me.

But it is for me. I am certain of it.

No matter how far she tries to run through polished arbitrations, through late-night walks, through childhood bedrooms and stiff motherly silence, she always lands where I can still see her.

Tonight, she is going out with another man.

I lean forward, click the feed from her apartment hallway.

She steps out, keys in hand, the sway in her hips contained, but not casual. She is trying to look like someone who does this often. She doesn’t. I know.

The earpiece in my right ear crackles once.

I stand.

By the time her cab turns the corner of East 52nd, I am already seated across the street from the lounge, tucked inside an unmarked sedan with tinted windows, silence bleeding into the space.

My binoculars hang around my neck, untouched. The surveillance has already been done. Her reservation has been made through her executive assistant, which is easily tracked.

The man she is meeting goes by the name Nolan Reid. He’s 34 years old, works in the finance sector, graduated from Harvard, and smiles too much.

I watch her step out of the car.

The gold heels match her stride as she tugs at her hem because she feels the wind touch places I have already memorized.

I exhale through my nose. My hands are still on my lap, fists curled so tightly the leather of my gloves creaks.

She walks into the lounge without looking back.

Inside, ambient jazz plays low and smooth. I can hear it through the parabolic mic trained at their table.

The date begins with pleasantries. A joke followed by her laugh that sounds forced, and too high-pitched. She isn’t enjoying it, but she stays.

She lets the man lean in.

She nods when he compliments her dress.

My jaw tenses.

I watch every frame as though it were a crime being committed in real time. Her legs cross slowly. Her hand reaches for her wine glass, brushes her date’s knuckles.

She doesn’t pull away fast enough. And when he says something that makes her laugh again, genuinely, this time, I feel something burn down the back of my throat.

She is forgetting. No, worse. She is pretending to forget.

Her date leans forward, speaking softly. She leans forward, too. Her lips move like silk. The red still perfect.

I click another camera angle.

Her hand slides under the table. Her shoulders move subtly.

My ears ring as I blink rapidly. The leash snaps.

I reach for my phone, dial without looking.

“I need a face ID check on Nolan Reid,” I say calmly. “Send me a family contact, home address, work address, and any off-the-book debts. Within the hour.”

The voice on the other end hesitates. “Sir, we already—”

“Update it,” I say. “He’s just become relevant.”

I hang up.

Back inside the lounge, her date says something that makes her tip her head back, laughter sliding out like it belongs to her.

My fingers twitch.

For a second, I imagine the man’s face caved in under my fist. I wouldn’t break his face, but I’d ensure it shattered. Something slow and earned.

I don’t breathe again until she pulls back slightly. The moment her date reaches for her hand across the table, she hesitates. The spell cracks.

My body barely relaxes.

The night hasn’t run out, but my patience has.

And someone needs to be reminded who she belongs to.

She is mine, and she knows it.

I sit alone in the car, my world reduced to the quiet chaos of flickering screens and soundless loops.

I watch her across a dozen angles. The red lipstick she’d chosen still gleams under the lounge’s low lights.

Her laugh, as it reaches my earpiece, is light and unfamiliar. Too rehearsed. Too free.

It makes something coil inside my chest.

Vera leans forward as her date whispers something close to her ear. She smiles wide enough to show she is pretending to be charmed. And then she tilts her neck.

A gesture I have seen before. Dozens of times. Usually in private. When she stretches after a long day. When she is alone, loose, and unaware of how much her body says without needing to speak.

But tonight, she offers that neck to someone else.

I don’t breathe or move.

She touches her wine glass again. The third time in less than two minutes. Her hand lingers too long around the stem. Nerves. She is trying to pace herself.

I zoom in.

Her date, Nolan, leans in again. This time, his fingers brush the back of her hand. It is deliberate. He is testing and measuring how far he can go.

I already know the answer. She won’t stop him tonight.

She needs to feel reckless and untethered. As if her skin doesn’t already belong to someone, and she hasn’t already been claimed.

He watches her lips move in a slow arc, forming some empty, forgettable line. The man laughs loudly. His teeth are too white.

I study him the way a surgeon might study a tumor. Then I check my watch.

8:47 p.m.

Nolan rises from the table, gesturing politely as he excuses himself to take a call.

I move at the same time swiftly and methodically. I’d memorized the building layout hours ago.

The alley behind the lounge is narrow, choked by fire escapes and shadows. Just enough room for something to go unnoticed.

I arrive before Nolan does.

I make sure I don’t make a sound and allow the subtle drag of shadow along brick as I press my back to the wall and wait.

Thirty seconds pass. Forty.

Nolan steps outside, phone to his ear, already mid-conversation.

I move without hesitation.

My gloved hand grips his shoulder, yanks him back into the recess between two dumpsters.

Before the first breath of protest leaves Nolan’s throat, my other hand drives the tip of a blade behind his ribs—not deep enough to cut, just enough to terrify.

The phone clatters to the concrete.

“You don’t know me,” I whisper, voice like glass under pressure. “But you just made the worst mistake of your life.”

Nolan freezes.

I press the blade forward, grazing cartilage.

“Touch her again, and I’ll carve her name into your spine.”

“I—I didn’t—” Nolan stammers, struggling to focus and speak.

“She’s not for you.” I lean closer. “You were background noise. White static. But now you’ve made yourself memorable. That was stupid.”

I adjust the angle of the knife, subtle but undeniable. Nolan winces.

“I could leave your body here, and no one would find it for hours. I could call your mother from your phone and let her hear the way you scream. You don’t know how close you are to never breathing again.”

Nolan’s legs begin to tremble.

My grip doesn’t falter.

“But I’m merciful tonight. Because she’s watching. Even if she doesn’t know it.” My voice lowers to a whisper. “Walk away. Forget her. If I hear your name near hers again, your bones will hum my name every time it rains.”

I let go.

Nolan collapses to one knee, gasping, disoriented. He doesn’t look back as he stumbles down the alley, blood running from the place where my blade kissed skin.

I step into the shadows and disappear before he reaches the street.

By the time I return to my car, the feed is still live.

Vera sits alone at the table now. One hand cups her wine glass, and the other grips the hem of her dress.

She looks smaller as she sits still, waiting for a date that wouldn’t dare to dream her name now. Her phone rests on the table, untouched.

Her gaze moves to the entrance. Once. Again.

I mute the mic and simply watch.

The silence between us grows louder.

She leans back in her chair and presses her fingertips to her temple. Her lips part, then close. Her breathing changes, becoming slower and heavier.

I zoom in again.

Her eyes don’t water. Her jaw doesn’t clench.

Instead, she exhales. And there, in that single breath, it becomes obvious to me that she knows.

Not fully or consciously. But something in her recognizes the presence behind the absence. The hand in the shadow. The leash she tried to snap, now pulling tight.

I take off my coat and toss it on the back seat.

I sit back, breathing through my nose, steady now. The heat is gone, and my rage has cooled. What replaces it is darker and calmer. She’ll remember now.

Nolan will become a speck, but she’ll remember the disappearance and space where a kiss should have been and wasn’t.

That absence is me.

And tonight, it has whispered louder than any scream ever could.

She sits there still, wine untouched, her fingers running idly along the edge of her dress as she waits. The slow build of worry in her eyes, layered under pride and defiance, is fascinating to watch.

I have watched her for years.

But I have never felt her this way, gnawing beneath my skin, rearranging my own patterns. Her silence now speaks louder than any of the screams I’d coaxed from people before.

Unlike the others who had been clients, enemies, and disposable mistakes, I couldn’t punish her into obedience yet.

But oh, how close she is.

My gloves lay on the seat beside me, blood barely dried at the fingertips. I haven’t bothered to change. There is no need to hide from her. She won’t see the evidence directly, but she’ll feel it.

That is the beauty of it all. Violence, when done properly, doesn’t need a stage.

I lean forward, rewind the footage, and watch her again, frame by frame.

The moment her smile falters. The slow blink. The downward flicker of her gaze. She is putting it together unconsciously, and the nerves have begun to sing. The string between us is growing taut.

My breathing deepens as I start the car and drive myself home.

I keep my attention on my phone until I get to the surveillance room, where I can watch her on multiple screens.

Tonight has changed something. Tonight, I have touched the real world to rearrange it.

I have stepped out of the shadows, if only briefly. And the taste of it and of her is still raw on my tongue.

I don’t regret the alley. If anything, it has grounded me.

I have seen the man’s fear, seen the stumble, the breath caught between pain and confusion. It has been precise, and efficient. A message written into skin, not stone.

But what stays with me isn’t the violence. It’s her expression when she realized she’d been left.

It thrills me.

I rise from my chair, walk to the far side of the room, and stop in front of the glass wall that overlooks the Manhattan skyline.

The city is alive, pulsing with noise and light, but here, this high up, it is quiet. The rain has smeared long streaks across the pane, turning the skyline into a watercolor of steel and shadow.

I press a hand against the glass, palm flat.

She is out there, somewhere beneath it all. Unaware of how completely she’d been folded into my world.

She tried to escape me tonight. Tried to erase me with red lipstick, short dresses, and forced laughter.

None of it matters because I’m the frame around her canvas. The lens through which she will eventually see the world.

I turn from the window and return to my chair.

On screen, she is rising now slowly. She checks her phone, finally. A flicker of irritation in her brows. She doesn’t leave right away. She lingers, unwilling to admit she’d been stood up.

I smirk. Abandonment is its own form of possession.

It carves itself into people. I know the shape of it intimately.

I minimize the video feed and pull up her file again—the digital grid I’d designed months ago. It has all her routines mapped, every contact of hers logged, and every location she’d visited in the last six weeks is plotted with timestamps and environmental data.

I click open a folder labeled Triggers.

Inside are photos that seem ordinary to anyone else. A building she never enters. A man she looks at twice.

The grave of a father she never talks about.

Patterns.

She is unraveling, and I am charting the thread.

What disturbs me and flickers like static behind my temples is the pleasure I’d felt tonight. Both in control and in the release.

I hadn’t really needed to touch Nolan. A threat would have sufficed.

A message could have been sent another way. But the moment I saw the man’s hand near hers, saw the way Vera tilted her chin without flinching, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay out of it.

I needed her to feel me. To understand that her body belonged to me even when she offered it elsewhere.

Even if she didn’t understand why. Especially then.

My fingers twitch. There is a danger in that. In the way the leash had slipped from my hand tonight.

I’d always prided myself on control and precision. My obsession was clinical and strategic. It served a purpose. I told myself that often.

Tonight tasted like something feral.

I stand again, restlessness building beneath my skin like heat trapped under glass.

I walk to the smaller desk at the back of the room and open another drawer. Inside, nestled among meticulously organized files, is a single velvet box.

I lift the lid, revealing the ring inside—gold, simple but heavy.

It isn’t a gift yet or even a plan. It’s a symbol and a promise. I stare at it for a moment, then shut the lid and slide it back into the drawer.

I’m not ready to offer it now. She is already wearing me in her thoughts, her routines, and her restless sleep. That is enough for now.

I sit back down. The monitors cycle. Footage of her now walking down the lounge’s marble steps, looking over her shoulder twice.

She senses it. I know the signs. That flicker of breath. That subtle clench in her jaw.

She isn’t just anxious. She is aroused by the fear, the unknown, and by me.

I smile to myself.

Control is slipping, and in its place, something deeper, darker, and more intimate is blooming.

The pleasure of marking and altering her path so thoroughly that she can no longer remember where her own shadow ends and mine begins is slowly beginning to consume me.