Page 16 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The glow of monitors paints my face in fragmented light.

She hasn’t moved in nearly an hour. Her body curls into itself, a bundle of limbs on her bed.

One hand grips the sheet, knuckles white. The other is limp by her side. Her eyes are open but unfocused. Red, wet, and vacant.

I lean forward slightly. My elbows rest on my knees, fingers steepled beneath my chin. I watch her chest rise and fall. I track the rhythm like a scientist charting breath rates in a lab rat. Except I don’t feel distant. I feel…inside her, under her skin, and beneath her bones.

The scarf still lies on the floor near her nightstand, knotted.

She hasn’t touched it since I left.

My voice breaks the silence like an echo inside myself. “I told her not to make me remind her.”

One of the screens flickers, switching to a hallway camera. Nothing. The hallway is still.

I shift focus back to the bedroom feed. Vera’s body moves slightly. Just a twitch, like a ghost passing through muscle. Stillness again. She hasn’t turned on the lights in the room or the closet.

Fear lingers in her apartment like perfume.

I lean back and close my eyes. “She wanted someone else’s hands.” My jaw clenches. “She got mine instead.”

But the words don’t hit like they used to. Not tonight. Not after I’d seen the look on her face as her body arched beneath my hand.

The contradiction between her response and her tears. The way her thighs trembled. The way she didn’t fight, but didn’t surrender either.

Something inside her is changing. Something inside me too. I stand abruptly. The chair wheels back and hits the console behind me. I don’t flinch.

A glance at the time shows that it’s 10:42 p.m.

My phone rings in that moment. “Dorian.”

Dorian blows out a breath. “Councilman Elridge has been waiting.”

Ah, right. I forgot all about him. I stare at the screen, imprinting the image of Vera in my brain before I speak. “I’ll be there.”

***

The private lounge is shielded behind a mirrored wall on the thirty-eighth floor of a Midtown skyscraper. You don’t find it unless you’re invited. And no one invites me; I let myself in.

Inside, it’s all velvet shadows and crystal decanters. Dim lighting, no music, and no staff visible.

Councilman Elridge sits alone at the table, his hands already sweating onto the black folder before him. He rises too quickly when I enter, knocking his wine glass with a soft clink. Red droplets stain the edge of his napkin.

I don’t sit immediately. I remove my gloves with quiet precision, placing them side by side on the table. Then I smooth my sleeves and finally lower myself into the chair opposite the politician.

“Mr. Dane,” Elridge says, voice cracking on the name.

I fold my hands. “We won’t pretend we’re equals tonight, Councilman. Speak clearly and sign quickly.”

The councilman swallows. “You said you had evidence. About my daughter’s school…the zoning funds—”

I slide a small device across the table. A single press, and the screen lights up with a series of images of documents, timestamps, and a video file. The man’s face drains with each passing frame.

“Let me be clear,” I say, voice low and polite. “I don’t care about your incompetence. I care about leverage. The kind I now have over you.”

Elridge stares at the tablet, his mouth opening and closing like a hooked fish.

“I’ll expect your vote in favor of the Harbor District reallocation next week quietly. No public statements or last-minute courage.”

I slide a pen forward with the same gesture someone might use to offer a bullet.

“Sign.”

The councilman signs.

I stand without another word, slip my gloves back on, and exit through the side corridor that leads to a private washroom.

I lock the door behind me. The light inside is cruel and clinical. The mirror is wide with silvered edges. I stare at myself for a long time. The suit is perfect. Black, with tailored seams so sharp they could draw blood. My shirt collar is pristine, and my cufflinks gleam.

But my eyes are off. Something in them looks warped, as if the reflection is bending around something unspeakable.

I splash water on my face. The coldness hits my pores. I don’t wipe it off. Instead, I reach into my breast pocket and draw out a folded print.

A black-and-white still shot of Vera, bound to her bed, her lips parted in confusion. Her scarf between her teeth. The softness of the moment frozen forever.

I should’ve thrown it out. Instead, I slide it back into my pocket. Then I return to the shadows.

***

Back in the penthouse, the air is different. A tautness hangs in it, as if the walls have learned to hold their breath.

I drop into my chair like gravity has grown teeth.

On the center screen, Vera is sleeping. The blanket has slipped off one shoulder, baring her collarbone, the strap of her nightshirt askew. Her brow is faintly furrowed, her lips parted.

She shifts in her sleep and moans softly, as if haunted. As if the dream holds echoes of something half-remembered. Or something she doesn’t quite understand yet.

I lean forward, my elbows on my knees, watching her.

I’ve always known desire, hunger, cravings. But this isn’t that anymore. This is different. There is a rage to it now, but also a worship. A kind of possession that goes deeper than flesh.

The way she stirred under my hand, the way her body reacted before her mind could. The way she gasped through the scarf, thighs trembling.

And yet her tears echo like bells in a cathedral.

I rest my head in my hands. The screens glare behind my fingers, and still, I can see her and feel her. Her breath, the arch of her hips, the bloom of shame in her eyes.

I’d told myself it was a lesson. A reminder and a correction to her defiance. But her tears cling to me. And for the first time in years, maybe decades, I feel something shift. A crack and a fracture in my perfect silence.

“I can ruin men,” I murmur aloud. “I can buy companies. But I can’t stop her tears from echoing in my skull.”

I stand. The air in the room doesn’t move, but it feels colder as I walk out. I have no destination; I just need escape.

I take the stairs instead of the elevator, passing the glass walls of my penthouse in near-darkness. The city blinks beyond me, too far to touch and too irrelevant to matter.

But she matters.

I find myself in the lounge room, where the liquor sits untouched, neat bottles lined like sentries. I don’t drink.

Weakness takes root in altered minds. I stare at the bottle of Oban scotch like it might answer something or the label might blink back.

The flashback hits me as a possession.

She had gasped beneath me. It was more subtle than fear. Her breath had quickened as I tightened the scarf behind her teeth.

Her shirt tore beneath my fingers, but it was her body’s betrayal that had nearly undone me. The way her hips had lifted before she caught herself. The flicker of heat in her skin before she buried it in guilt.

It wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t a refusal. It was a war. A quiet, shaking war between her mind and her flesh. And I had won.

Not because I overpowered her or because I tied her wrists. But because her body responded. And she hated that. She hated me for it. I hated myself for how much I loved that she did.

I drop back into the surveillance room sometime past midnight. My mind hasn’t found peace. My footsteps have carried me in circles.

Now I stare again.

Vera is turned toward the wall. A pillow is between her knees, one arm curled protectively around it. Her blanket is wrapped too tightly, as if she’d cocooned herself to feel something firm against her skin.

A defense or maybe an anchor.

My fingers hover over the mic switch. I could whisper her name. Just once. Let her hear it through the static, like a ghost sliding between sleep and consciousness.

I don’t press the button. Instead, I whisper only to myself.

“You’ll forgive me,” I say. “You always do. Even if you don’t know it yet.”

And maybe she will. Maybe she already has. That part of her that almost moaned, that trembled, and leaned into my touch before logic caught up.

I’m not delusional. I’ve seen it. The same way I see it now in the way she turns in her sleep restlessly. The way her fingers claw at the sheet, as if chasing something or someone.

I can’t explain it. Not even to myself.

I’ve orchestrated power plays across cities. Brought businesses to their knees with a single whispered threat. There isn’t a language of corruption I don’t speak. There isn’t a man alive who could stand against me without kneeling eventually.

Yet, this woman unmakes me. She doesn’t even know it.

God forbid I ever let her find out.

I tilt my head and let the moment linger, soaking in the flicker of the monitors. Her heartbeat, I imagine, syncs with the blinking of the red lights on the console.

I would burn cities if it meant hearing her whisper my name in that ragged, frightened, and heated voice. I would gut gods.

But tonight, her silence is louder than anything else. I watch until my own eyelids grow heavy, and sleep still eludes me. So, I lean back in my chair, her image blurred in the glow.

A storm is coming again. The forecast has promised thunder, and the air already pulses with static.

I welcome it. I need a reminder that I am still alive. That I still bleed. That beneath the control and the power and the calculated violence…something still hurts.

She is the wound and the cure.

At 2:07 a.m., she cries again. I sit forward, breath caught. She isn’t sobbing or even fully awake. A single line of tears slips down the bridge of her nose, vanishing into the pillow.

I watch her as if watching could hold her together or replace the bruises with something tender.

But the bruise is my doing. The scar, too. She is marked now. Whether she knows it or not. And that makes her mine.

I whisper again, as the rain begins to fall, “You’re not afraid of me.” I say it to the room, myself, and to her. “You’re afraid of how much you already want me.”

And even if she denies it, I will wait, watch, and make her say it eventually. I won’t need to force it. Deep inside, she already knows the truth.

The glow of the screens doesn’t waver, but my eyes have dulled.

I’m still staring at her, at nothing, and at myself reflected in the glass above her bedframe camera feed.

Her room lies dim and quiet. She hasn’t moved in thirty-two minutes.

That is how long I’ve sat motionless. A still frame in a room of surveillance.

My hands are clasped loosely between my knees, blood pressure low but pulse crawling under the skin like it has somewhere to be.

I should feel victorious. I crossed the threshold and left her trembling and breathless, claimed by memory and muscle. But the emotion hanging in the air isn’t triumph.

I lean forward, hands brushing the edge of the console. My knuckles tighten.

It should be enough, but it isn’t.

There is a sickness in me now. Not the kind born of guilt; I’d long abandoned that religion. But this is a fracture in the machine.

The taste of her still sits on my tongue, and the sound of her muffled cries has followed me, holding me hostage.

I look down at my reflection in the black surface of the desk. The man staring back looks composed and cold. But the shadow under my eyes has deepened. Something wild presses against the back of my teeth.

You went too far.

The thought flickers like static and is just as quickly extinguished.

I stand abruptly, the chair rolling backward with a low creak.

The echo of my footsteps follows me down the corridor past the frosted doors of the armory vault, past the biometric- sealed office, until I reach the bathroom at the end of the penthouse.

The light clicks on automatically.

I approach the sink and stare into the mirror again. This time, I don’t look composed. I look haunted.

I turn on the faucet, let water run over my fingers, then press them against the corners of my eyes. The skin there is too taut and tired.

I’m a man who can threaten governments with a glance, silence men with a nod. But none of that matters in this moment. Here, in this quiet tomb of polished stone and solitude.

Why did she cry?

I knew she would struggle. I expected the fear and disgust. Her tears stung. She hadn’t fought. Her body had betrayed her, yes, but she had collapsed inward afterward.

It’s stirred an unusual emotion in me. I dry my hands, though they haven’t been wet long enough to justify the act. Then I leave the bathroom without looking back.

I move toward the private lounge on the eastern side of the building. It’s lined with velvet walls, gold sconces shaped like dripping wax, and art so rare the insurers don’t know I have them.

A private space, hidden from even my closest circles.

I step inside. The guards stationed at the entrance offer brief nods but say nothing. I like it that way. Obedience without sound.

Inside, the room smells of clove and smoke. The air is thick with opulence. I cross the space and sink into one of the high-backed leather chairs, elbows resting on the gold-studded armrest.

The cameras are already positioned. Hidden in the moldings. All the angles stream directly into my encrypted network.

A silent server brings me a drink I won’t touch.

I stare through the glass.

My mind should be here, on the politician I dismantled earlier, on the leverage I now hold over four senators, on the shifting dynamics of the Manhattan underworld. But it isn’t. It’s on her.

The way she curled into herself after I left. The outline of her knees drawn tight to her chest, the light still on in the hallway. She hasn’t turned it off, hasn’t trusted the dark.

And I hate that. I want her to trust me. And that, more than anything, terrifies me.

I stand. The chair creaks softly in my absence. “You’ve always belonged to me,” I murmur into the space.

The phrase had been said before. But tonight, it tastes different. Tonight, it isn’t a declaration. It’s a plea.

I return to the surveillance room shortly after to be alone again.

She is asleep once more, arms wrapped around her own body like a self-formed cage.

My voice barely registers above a whisper. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

The silence that follows feels like a lie. But I stay. Watching is the only way I know how to love.

And destroying is the only way I know how to claim.