Page 20 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

I exit the surveillance room and make my way back upstairs to the penthouse.

Night has blanketed the skyline. Rain slicks the glass, bleeding the lights into long vertical smears. Manhattan pulses below with ambition and rot.

I stand at the floor-to-ceiling window, untouched glass of bourbon in hand. I don’t drink it. Don’t need to.

I haven’t slept properly in a decade. Power has replaced sleep. Strategy has replaced comfort. But even now, with everything under my thumb, something in me…slips.

“She dreams,” I murmur.

“She forgets. That’s dangerous.”

I turn back toward my console and play a new camera feed.

Her office.

The ceiling vent micro-drone shows her in real time. She sits at her desk, barefoot now, hair knotted into a hasty bun. Her blazer has been draped over the back of a chair, sleeves rolled, collar open.

She rubs her temples, staring down at some memo that doesn’t matter.

I zoom in until I can see the spot on the side of her neck where that man had kissed her.

A flash of something visceral twists inside me, cold and sharp.

I should’ve marked her harder. Should’ve taken that moment from her entirely. Not left it half-finished.

The sound from the drone comes through—ambient office hum, light keystrokes. A tiny, exhausted sigh.

She doesn’t know she is being watched.

But she feels it.

I lean forward.

“She’s slipping,” I say aloud. Not to Rourke. Not to anyone. Just to the air. “Testing her leash.”

I watch her glance at the window as if expecting something. Someone. Her eyes hold the weight of dread, and something closer to yearning.

I smile faintly.

Let her tug and strain.

The more she tests the edges of her world, the more she’ll discover they are lined with my fingerprints.

And soon, even her rebellion will be something I’ve designed.

I watch her for ten silent minutes.

She’s still there, hunched over a file that has long since lost its meaning, her hair twisted into a loose knot, the edge of her blouse slipping down one shoulder as if gravity itself is exhausted.

The tip of her pen rests on the corner of her lips. She’s rubbing at the corners of her eyes as if trying to scrub away exhaustion with skin.

The surveillance feed flickers faintly, casting her image in a dull monochrome blue, and I sit there with my back rigid, fingers pressed together in a steeple beneath my chin, watching like a priest at a confessional.

“I should walk away,” I murmur, the words flat, dead. Then softer, “I won’t. I can’t.”

I lean back, allowing my eyes to shift to the pane of glass that doubles as my office wall. My reflection gazes back at me with clinical detachment.

A hard jaw. Sleepless eyes. And that thing hollowed out beneath the cheekbones—something no plastic surgeon could fix and no self-delusion could ignore.

This isn’t what falling in love looked like.

This is watching my experiment grow teeth.

At 2:47 a.m., I make the call.

Not to her. Never directly. That would break the order. And the order is everything.

The first line is to her building’s security head.

“I want a full shadow placed at her exit point tomorrow. Visual contact from the lobby to her car, then transfer coverage to the driver. You’ll have the credentials sent in thirty seconds. No contact. No trace. No failure.”

The second call is to a telecom specialist, her cellular provider’s sub-contract manager, buried in a division whose name doesn’t exist in public records.

“Activate the ghost SIM trace. I want her GPS tethered to my channel from 7 a.m. onward. If she turns it off, I want tower triangulation. Battery or not.”

The third line goes to the financial backers of her landlord’s shell entity, a string of digits and LLC paperwork that ultimately traces back to a boardroom I control.

“Confirm building access point logs from 5 p.m. today. Cross-reference elevator traffic. If you see anything irregular, you call me directly.”

Three calls. No names or pushback.

I exhale through my nose and finally turn toward the desk. I pick up the burner phone, one of dozens, sleek and black and soulless in my palm.

My thumb hovers over the recorder.

Then I speak.

Not in the way I usually do, not as the strategist or the watcher. But low, and measured, like a man trying not to feel too much.

“You don’t know me. But I’ve known you for a long time.”

I stare at the screen as if it were her face.

“You’re walking into something that won’t end the way you think. Walk away from the client. Now. I won’t warn you again.”

A pause. I hit encrypt-send.

The screen goes dark.

No confirmation tone. No blinking notification. Just absence.

I stay still for a long moment, elbows propped on the arms of the chair, chin tilted toward the monitors. One hand flexes tightly, then loosens. An involuntary twitch of muscle memory.

I glance back toward the largest screen.

Surveillance feed. Her apartment.

Vera stirs.

The sheets shift like tides beneath her, crumpled from too many restless hours. She drags herself upright, bleary-eyed and slow, pressing one palm to her lower back. Her head turns toward the window.

Nothing there. Just rain.

But she pauses.

She blinks into the darkness beyond the glass, like something has whispered against her neck and vanished before she could place it.

I don’t blink.

“You feel it now, don’t you, Vera?” I whisper. “The shift. The wire tightening.”

She moves to stand.

I power down the mic feed.

The room is suddenly very quiet, filled only with the faint hum of the servers, the soft crackle of encrypted signals rerouting, and the impossible thud of my own heart.

The glass reflects me, once again showing me the same face, same jaw, and the same hollowness.

But something in my eyes has changed.

This isn’t control anymore. This is closeness.

And closeness is always the beginning of collapse.