Page 19 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The morning comes like a knife through fog, slicing quietly into the windows of my penthouse. Storm-gray light blurs the Manhattan skyline, softening the sharp lines of the city, but not the man standing in the middle of it.

The silence isn’t accidental; it’s curated, cultivated like the rest of my life. No staff. No ambient news playing in the background. Just me and the screens.

She’s still asleep.

I watch her on the central monitor. Vera lies curled on her side, one hand beneath her cheek, her breath slow and even. The duvet barely covers her shoulder. A whisper of hair clings to her lips.

She looks peaceful, unaware of the hundreds of invisible threads tethering her to me.

I watch for a full minute without blinking.

The security briefing begins to scroll on the monitor beside her feed. Timestamps. Footage. GPS logs. I have everything.

Every step she’s taken the day before. Every person who comes within fifteen feet of her.

The algorithm flags anomalies in bold red type. I swipe through them slowly, methodically. Nothing unusual…until one alert flickers and stays.

A name.

I freeze.

Not a stranger. Not a casual threat.

This is someone from her past, a former foster sibling. The sealed record has been accessed from a secure database, something that should have stayed buried.

The alert comes with a secondary ping: location coordinates from a VPN-masked IP bouncing off New Jersey and Queens.

My eyes narrow.

“Threats don’t always walk in the front door,” I murmur, voice low, clipped. “Sometimes they remember your real name.”

I file the information without visible reaction, but a thin crack spreads in the stillness around me. I don’t like unpredictability. Vera’s past has been carefully reconstructed, cleansed where necessary, and archived like a crime scene, waiting for closure. Now it bleeds.

But that isn’t what bothers me most.

No. What gnaws at me and presses behind my ribs like something living is the way she’s changed.

She’s been off for days.

Different.

I lean in, fingers tapping a command into the keyboard. The audio stream from her phone loads in a secure panel.

I rewind, then play back a clip from forty-eight hours ago: her voice, clipped and purposeful, carried from the receiver as she paces her kitchen.

“I’m not here to play safe anymore,” she said. Her tone was taut, barely above a growl. “If he’s watching, let him. Let him see everything.”

I stop the audio mid-sentence.

She’s testing me.

I stand still, hands behind my back, the muscles along my jaw ticking once. Twice.

“She doesn’t realize yet. Safety isn’t a game,” I whisper. “It’s a privilege I provide.”

A tremor of emotion passes through me, too brief to name.

I pivot from the console and walk the length of the surveillance room, moving like a man built from silence and purpose. This isn’t about paranoia. It isn’t even about control.

This is closer to worship, and wrath.

She’s beginning to break the rules. Not just the ones I’ve set, but the ones that keep her safe, from the world, and from myself.

I pass through a biometric-sealed door and descend into the heart of my bunker.

***

The secure office lies below the penthouse, insulated by reinforced steel and soundproofed concrete. Rows of encrypted servers hum along the walls, pulsing like heartbeats beneath the LED lighting.

At the center of it all: Rourke.

The man sits hunched in front of six monitors, fingers flying over the keyboard.

Once a codebreaker for the NSA, Rourke now works exclusively for me, feeding from the depths of the dark web and dissecting the digital traces others left behind.

“Morning,” Rourke mutters without looking up. “Got your flags pulled. Wanna see the pattern shift on her route from yesterday?”

I nod. “Start from 6:17 p.m.”

The footage loads: Vera exiting her office, tote bag in hand. She’s moving faster than usual. Not anxious, but decisive.

“She detoured,” Rourke says, pointing at the blinking cursor. “Should’ve taken 58th, turned on Lexington instead. No scheduled meeting there. But”—he taps again, zooming in—“stopped outside a bookstore café. Sat for forty minutes.”

I say nothing.

“Wanna guess who sat down beside her?” Rourke pulls up a still.

The man is smiling. Handsome and too casual.

My face doesn’t move, but a heat creeps behind my collarbone.

“Identified him. No serious priors. He’s clean. Tech startup. Married. Probably just a coincidence,” Rourke adds, scratching his neck.

“Nothing’s a coincidence,” I say.

Rourke shuts his mouth.

I step closer to the screen and stare at the image. Vera is smiling in the picture. Or trying to. Her hand rests near her mouth, her eyes downcast. That isn’t comfort. That is performance.

I can read her better than any surveillance log.

“She didn’t want him,” I say quietly. “She just wanted someone to block out the silence.”

I reach past Rourke and key in a command.

On another screen, Vera’s apartment appears again, this time in near real-time.

She is awake. Moving in slow, unhurried steps around her living room. Waters a plant. Sits down. Opens her laptop.

But her face….

It isn’t calm. It’s hollow.

I step back.

“No contact,” I order Rourke. “Not yet. But monitor all outbound messages. And flag any pings from Queens.”

“Done.”

I turn and walk out without another word, the steel door hissing shut behind me.

I need air. Not from the street. From her.

Back in my surveillance room, I drop into my chair and sit in the dark, the flickering blue of her image my only light.

She rubs her eyes. Folds her arms. Buries her face in her knees.

I exhale slowly.

We’re growing distant. Not by location. Not by time. But by threads, thin, invisible strings that once bound her to me in silence and instinct.

Now they are stretching. And I have always known that when strings stretch too far, they either snap…or pull everything else apart.

I won’t let that happen.

Not with her.

Not with the only thing that ever felt inevitable.

***

The war room is nearly soundless, save for the soft hum of the encryption servers and the low, regulated beeps of live feed monitors.

I move through it with the kind of quiet that disturbs men into remembering their posture. Stark white light reflects off the polished floors. No windows. No distractions. Just data, precision, and control.

Rourke stands waiting—tall, bony, the collar of his black shirt buttoned tight like discipline stitched into cloth. His posture betrays nothing. His face even less.

“Status report,” I say, without slowing.

Rourke turns, already cueing up the holographic schedule mapped against Vera’s last seventy-two hours.

“She’s attending lobbying meetings with the Fair Urban Zoning group. Two of her contacts have soft links to the Kellen Initiative—anti-corporate, fringe-backed. Nothing actionable yet.”

My eyes narrow.

“Pressure points?”

Rourke taps a point on the projection. A web blooms outward from Vera’s image, nodes blinking into visibility.

“There’s a mid-level senator’s aide, Marcus Bell. He’s been flagged twice in our Blackedge index—bribery whispers, nothing concrete. He’s tied to one of the developers Vera’s representing. If he folds, the project folds.”

My silence thickens.

I already have enough on Bell to make the man disappear into legislative purgatory, but that isn’t the priority.

Rourke clears his throat lightly. “Do you want us to deploy leverage?”

My eyes remain fixed on the node web. “Not yet. Let her think she’s winning something.”

A pause. Then Rourke’s tone shifts, like stepping carefully over shattered glass.

“If I may ask, sir, strictly from an operational standpoint, is Ms. Calloway a risk or an asset?”

I turn. “She was my asset,” I say evenly. “She’s now my variable.”

Rourke absorbs that. “Understood.”

I move to the far console, fingers ghosting across the surface until a digital timeline folds open, showing Vera’s meetings, messages, environmental scans.

A name blinks red: Julian Mallory.

“Who’s this?” I ask, voice clipped.

Rourke’s brows dip.

“Senior advisor. Mallory-Keene Group. Crossed paths with her during a closed-door zoning roundtable last week. Didn’t speak directly, but proximity was logged. Do you want—”

“Yes,” I interrupt. “Background sweep. Everything. I want his security clearance downgraded by tomorrow.”

Rourke nods.

“If he so much as Googles her after that, I want to know what brand of whiskey he drinks and where his wife thinks he was last night.”

Rourke gives no visible reaction, only types faster.

I don’t look at him again. My mind is already fracturing sideways.

***

A memory drags itself into the present, unbidden, but vivid.

Four years ago.

The first time her name crossed my desk, it hadn’t been in bold. She was just another résumé in a stack of second-tier applicants for the firm’s high-stakes lobbying division.

Her record looked too clean, GPA immaculate, references glowing, personal statement sharp as a scalpel. It felt false. I didn’t trust perfect.

So I looked deeper.

And found what she hadn’t written.

Former foster child. Five homes in eleven years. Two sealed juvenile incident reports. A suppressed family history I had to use three off-book channels to unlock.

It should have disqualified her.

Instead, it drew me in.

She wasn’t perfect. She was manufactured. Reinforced. Like me.

I’d made one call. Pushed one file to the top. Quietly greenlit her partner track.

Let her believe she earned it. She could.

I just kept her from bleeding out before she got there.

The memory shifts again.

She had been crying. Alone in the fire escape stairwell—year one. Midwinter. Late night. She thought no one was watching.

She hadn’t sobbed. Just sat there, trembling, shoulders caved in. Silent tears. Resignation.

That was when I installed the first camera.

Back in the bunker, the present clicks into place again.

Rourke has stepped out. I’m alone with the noise of too much data and the silence of my own unraveling thoughts.