Page 22 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

I stand in the nerve center of my surveillance empire, what I call the Puppet Room. Beneath a Manhattan skyscraper, buried under layers of steel and silence, the space hums with the pulse of dark currents.

Screens glow in rows, cascading light over my face. There are no windows; the only echo comes from servers’ quiet warble and the soft click of encrypted streams.

This is not a mission but a ritual. A place I visit every morning, midday, and late at night, not to work but to witness.

I don’t need coffee. I wake fueled by the threat of chaos, the poetry of order slipping into entropy.

A central monitor map throbs with nodes: Vera Calloway at its center, blinking steadily. Red lines trace outward, spikes representing data breaches, media posts, server pings.

I’ve let the scandal break. I’ve let it fester on social media and bloom in outlets. That is the test. The screen shows red in pockets of coverage—national, local, digital blog posts, snide industry whispers.

My voice carries in the dim air: “Initial leak sequence?”

Rourke moves beside me, tablet in hand. The man’s face is sharper than the artificial light.

“We’ve identified three key sources. Primary node: Mira Juno. Former contractor from Black Chamber scalar ops, now working as strategic PAC liaison. She orchestrated early release of doctored emails.”

I nod without glancing away. “Secondary?”

“Anonymous internal account pinged from Finch IT subdirectory. Third was last night: targeted seed into campaign donor forums—hundreds reposted, mirrored.”

A challenge. Not a failure. Redundancy is always my safety net.

I turn my attention to Vera’s node. Her image flickers in a smaller window, hallway footage captured minutes ago.

She moves deliberately, stride unhurried. She looks collected but brittle; the faint tremor of her jaw suggests she’s still grappling with intrusion. She has not collapsed. Not yet.

With a deliberate motion, I pull up her private analytics: web searches, device location pings, outbound email volume. A ripple of panic has passed through. She is running.

I exhale quietly. Let her chase me. I’ll chase her.

“Track Mira’s location,” I instruct. “Engage quiet containment. Plant seeds of internal suspicion or maybe even initiate an internal audit under ghost funds. If we watch her fracture ahead of us, she’ll break before capital melts.”

Rourke blinks, then taps commands. A series of lights triggers: digital redirections in campaign funding forums, subtle whispers infiltrating her team.

I pivot. “And Vera?” My voice is soft, clinical, and curious.

“She’s active. Poking archives. Logging trailing logs. Engaging personal network. Tracking down external whistleblower IPs.” Rourke’s voice is careful, measured, respectful of the line he never crosses without invitation.

I give a half-smile at her stubbornness. I admire that.

“She functions when she’s fighting,” I say. “Let’s watch the gladiator wake.”

I lean in to another screen—my rooftop helipad feed. Rain has ended. Night lights reflect on its matte surface.

One of my remote operatives is approaching with a small payload, Mira’s laptop sequenced for remote extraction.

Within minutes, the quiet operation will infiltrate that hub and extract logs, turning her team’s support into dust. But the assault is only one part of the equation.

I switch to the concealed digital ops room feed, where a team preps a targeted news outlet ID. A planted op-ed, anonymous, dripping with carefully exposed manipulations of Mira’s campaign role.

External narrative manipulation is surgical: no overt threat, just implication. I clasp my hands behind my head. The silence stretches heavy.

“She’s alive,” Rourke notes. “She hasn’t folded.”

I look at Vera again, smaller window, bigger presence.

I’d expected her to crumble, but she hasn’t. Instead, she responds and takes initiative. Holds her claim. That’s dangerous

I lean forward. “Time for message two.”

Rourke nods and begins writing. Meanwhile, the stillness in the Puppet Room becomes theater.

I address the screens once more, “Strap in. Make sure we have circumstantial intel on her next move. Trace network analytics on donor gateway. Timer starts 24 hours from now.”

A silence follows, weighty, anticipatory.

I breathe. Not deep enough to slow the heartbeat throbbing behind my ribs. It’s the proximity, her fight drawing blood across distance.

I touch the cold glass. A phantom heat pulses beneath it.

It’s never been about her losing control. It’s about her wanting back in.

I record the second message myself, a whisper of kindness cut with steel.

“I saw how you responded. Good. But you’re playing into my maze now. There are exits, and there are traps. Don’t get lost. I’m not your enemy, but you’re not asking me to be your shield either.”

It will send later. Encrypted and invisible until the reveal.

I stand, moments later, and stride toward the rooftop helipad. The door slides open with a hiss at the top of a carpeted stairwell. Rain has stopped. Night is cool and calm.

The operative hands me a neat black case that contains a router accessing Mira’s network, preprogrammed for silent infiltration.

I place it in my Valise, thick and padded. The steam from the helipad evaporates into the still air. Nothing stirs besides my presence.

This is chess, not violence. Every move precise, measured, calculated. Risk is minimized and impact is controlled. Everything I touch turns to order.

But Vera…Vera has fractured the rules.

The scandal has shaken her, but she has answered with strength. With will. That’s the turn I’d expected. Still watch with approval.

I don’t need to rescue her. But I need to know if she’ll rely on me or defy me again.

I step back into the Puppet Room. Servers blink with activity. The pieces move. The world outside is beginning to mirror the war map I draw every night.

She’s in play. So long as she stays in motion, her fight will be my symphony.

I observe her one more time, hallway video, and speak the final line to the digital ether.

“Let the game begin. If you want to fight, know what it’ll cost. This is war. Not the kind you’re built for. But if you insist, here’s a weapon.”

The message is short, brutal, and encoded with a digital payload. I press send.

The “weapon” is an access key embedded within the message.

One that unlocks a mirrored archive of Mira Juno’s digital trail: bribe receipts hidden in travel reimbursements, falsified consultancy payments routed through shell accounts in Singapore, and an audio file of her bragging about how “easy it is to light a match if you hand the target a little gasoline.”

Let Vera follow the breadcrumbs. Let her think she is unearthing the truth on her own. If she wants blood, I’ll feed her a stream. But it will be my hand on the faucet, always.

I lean back from the terminal, the glow of a dozen monitors painting cold light across my face, and check the time. 10:12 p.m.

Wind pounds against the exterior glass, and for a moment, my reflection hovers over Vera’s sleeping figure on one of the screens, fractured by digital pixels, distorted and faint. I stand.

The rooftop helipad is silent except for the soft hiss of wind slicing across the deck. Glass walls frame the skyline, jagged architecture swallowed by night.

Inside the small command annex at the edge of the helipad, I dial a secure line. My voice, when it comes, is neutral.

“She took the bait?”

Rourke’s voice filters in. “Yes. Mira confirmed the meeting. She thinks it’s about neutralizing the second leak.”

I look out across Manhattan’s lights, vast and blinking like dying stars.

“What’s the location?”

“Upper West Side. An executive lounge. She requested privacy.”

“Let her have it,” I say. “And when she arrives, make sure she understands this isn’t a negotiation.”

I don’t need to say more.

Mira is a ghost from another chapter, once brilliant, then greedy, now careless. She has made the mistake of thinking betrayal was a currency without interest.

I pocket the burner phone and reenter the elevator, descending back into the private floor beneath the rooftop, a level that doesn’t exist on any blueprint.

The server room is my temple. No windows. No sound but the faint hum of machinery and pulsing power.

Monitors line the walls. Racks of data cores run blood-warm with surveillance logs, voice-to-text scripts, AI-tagged keyword flags. Every breath Vera has taken in the last forty-eight hours has been documented, indexed, stored.

I remove my jacket, hang it on the single hook beside the fire-retardant locker, and approach the main console.

A blinking red flag pulses in the upper corner of the screen.

I tap it once. The alert expands.

SECURE SERVER PINGED.SOURCE: MASKED IP TRACE LOCATION: RIDGEHOLLOW CHILDREN’S HOME, UPSTATE.

My hand freezes on the console in recognition.

The location carves through me like ice. Ridgehollow. The group home Vera spent six years pretending didn’t shape her.

A place absent from most of her files, buried so deep it had taken me months to find it, years ago, when I first drew her into my web.

And now it’s back. I open the trace fully. The signature is cloaked with amateur encryption, but not amateur enough. Someone is digging.

Someone has mirrored one of my sandboxed servers, one not connected to Vera at all, at least not on paper.

I stand motionless for five full seconds, letting the implications fracture open like glass under heat. This isn’t Vera. The pattern is wrong. She would dig methodically, lean on logic, preserve deniability.

This…is an invitation.

The past is surfacing too fast.

I open the footage from Vera’s apartment again. She’s reading something—Mira’s file, most likely. Her mouth is tight. Her fingers drum lightly on the couch cushion.

She looks small, but not scared. That worries me.

I reach for the encrypted thumb drive locked beneath the terminal and plug it in.