Page 23 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

Ridgehollow. Why now? Why ping the server that holds my private case files, not on Vera but on the men who had once tried to silence her?

A quiet, dangerous thought whispers through my skull: This isn’t about Vera anymore. This is about me.

The buried operations. The redacted deals. The experiment. Someone has accessed the Puppet Room without a key.

My jaw flexes. I turn off the main feed, and for the first time in weeks, I feel something twist in my gut.

Not anger.

A slow, corrosive anticipation. The wire is tightening.

And someone else has found the strings.

The chill in the private server chamber is deliberate and clinical. I have always found it easier to think in cold environments. Warmth softens precision. I don’t need warmth. I need clarity.

The monitors blink in a steady rhythm, soft blue pulses illuminating the geometric sharpness of my cheekbones, the firm line of my unsmiling mouth.

I sit, unmoving, fingers steepled before my chin, my reflection barely visible in the black gloss of the screen before me. Behind my gaze, Vera’s face lingers.

She’s not the woman I’d broken into, nor the girl from the case file. Something between us now is ruptured and reforming.

I replay the footage again, and again.

Her hand brushing a scar on her ribcage, one only I know is there. Her hesitation before answering the call from Legal.

The tremble in her voice as she speaks to herself aloud, not realizing the baby monitor-sized mic embedded in her kitchen vent caught every syllable.

“I’m not crazy. I’m not. This is targeted. Someone’s coming for me.”

Yet she hasn’t folded.

I blink, once. She hasn’t folded.

I lean back. The chair whines beneath my tailored frame, a rare sound in a space designed to be silent. A disturbance. Just like her.

On the screen to my right, Mira Juno’s face flickers into clarity, paused mid-step at the glass door of a luxury hotel.

She doesn’t know it yet, but her bank account has already been seized for “audit.” Her email credentials have been revoked. The keycard she holds? Deactivated twenty-one seconds before she attempts to swipe it.

My doing. All of it neat and untraceable.

Still not enough.

I turn to the interface beside me, bring up the second layer of Vera’s daily log: movement heatmap, comms traffic, external surveillance feeds. Her entire life, coded and color-mapped, spinning before me like a planet I’ve shaped.

But even now, with this omniscience at my fingertips, something in my chest pulls taut, like a string winding tighter around a spool of dread.

Because the ping from earlier hasn’t just come from Vera’s group home.

It’s come from the sub-basement archives. A place buried under layers of time, old records, the sort no one should have accessed without authorization.

Records that include her name. My directives. Things I’d buried years before she ever walked into Finch Industries with a confident handshake and an airtight resumé.

I stand.

The room feels smaller now.

Not because it is. Because she is outgrowing it.

Across the wall, the words SECURITY VIOLATION: TRACE INITIATED glow a dull red. I dismiss the alert with a flick of my hand, but not before committing the IP echo to memory.

Whoever has routed through the group home server has done so with skill. Not amateur work. Not Vera, unless she’s grown teeth I hadn’t anticipated.

I don’t like not anticipating.

I walk to the glass wall behind me and stare out. Below, the city pulses with its usual indifference, cars bleeding light into intersections, figures moving like data packets in a living network of power, want, and distraction.

How many lives have I reshaped without leaving fingerprints?

How many systems have I rerouted, careers I’ve redirected, threats neutralized before they knew they’d ever been threats?

Still, her mind eludes me.

I return to the central console. Open the encrypted file marked SUBJECT: V and hover my cursor over the newest entry.

Video footage. Timestamped. Thirty-three minutes ago.

Vera. Sitting in her apartment. Still in her blouse from Finch, but with bare feet tucked beneath her on the couch. One hand on her temple. A glass of wine sweating beside her, untouched.

She isn’t crying. That would’ve been easier. She’s thinking.

The kind of thinking that leads to rebellion.

My jaw ticks once.

She still hasn’t listened to the voice memo I sent. The first one. I haven’t sent the second.

Yet.

A flick of the wrist, and a second screen flares on, revealing an old photograph in colorless grayscale. Vera, age nine. Arms crossed, face scowling, chin held like she dares the world to break her and hates it for trying.

Behind her, a row of other foster kids. Most of them forgettable, but one Julian Mallory, now a threat.

I zoom in.

The way Julian’s hand had hovered near hers, even back then. The mirrored posture. Had it started that early?

I don’t remember Vera ever mentioning Julian during her vetting interview. She left that detail out.

Or maybe she’d forgotten.

Or maybe, I think with a flash of fury, she hadn’t trusted me enough to offer it.

I reach into the drawer beside me and pull out a folded photograph. Physical. Unlike me. Yet I keep it anyway.

Vera, at twenty-three, laughing mid-motion, head thrown back, the sleeves of a too-big blazer pushed up past her elbows, a legal pad clutched to her chest.

She doesn’t know I’d been there that day. Doesn’t know the photo exists.

Doesn’t know how many nights I’ve unfolded it, smoothed it out, studied the shape of her mouth like scripture.

I hate this part of myself.

The human part.

The part that has no utility. No leverage.

The part that stays up nights cataloguing her smiles.

I slide the photo back into the drawer and shut it with force. Stare down at the line of blinking lights on the server tower.

And then I make the call.

Direct line. Highest encryption. No trace.

“Rourke,” I say. “We need a presence at the group home. Full lockdown. Quiet. I want a full extraction of any hardware touched in the last forty-eight hours. And burn the login trails. Don’t leave ashes.”

Rourke’s voice comes filtered through a white-noise encrypt. “Understood. What are we expecting?”

I don’t blink. “Uncertainty. And I don’t tolerate that.”

I end the call. Let silence rise again. Let the weight of the moment pass through me like voltage.

Vera is becoming unpredictable.

Worse, I’m beginning to get emotional about it. And that is a liability no encryption can hide.

I stare at her on the monitor again. She hasn’t moved. Still thinking. Still processing. She will come to the truth in her own time. That she was never really alone. That freedom is a shape I allow her to believe in, for her own comfort.

That she belongs, utterly and completely, to me.

I turn off the screen.

And in the sudden darkness, I smile. Not with satisfaction. Not with triumph.

But with the quiet, crumbling knowledge that control is no longer enough.

I want her.

And I don’t know what it will cost me.

Not yet.