Page 25 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

My penthouse feels colder than ever, like a shrine to austerity, where every surface bears witness to silence. Stainless steel counters reflect the moonlight that filters through blackout shades. Barely a book or a photograph disturbs the emptiness. Here, I am both king and ghost.

At the center of it all stands the surveillance wall.

Ten screens, glazing off into separate slices of reality: Vera’s apartment, Finch Industries’ lobby, Jason Trent’s office, Julian Mallory’s server cluster, the rooftop helipad file dump. They flicker in rhythm, pulsing data into memory.

I fix my gaze on her, still in the gala footage, sitting at that clandestine table. I watch her fingers twist the stem of her champagne flute, see the flash of something in her eyes as she hears Jay’s urgent whisper.

I replay her catch of breath, hear the faint gasp from the live audio feed. Over and over. She doesn’t collapse. She collects herself.

The database lights up beside me as Rourke’s report pings breach analysis ready. I tap the command console.

“Rourke,” I say without turning away. “What’s the verdict?”

Rourke steps in quietly; always efficient, always professional.

“The deletion came from Vera’s old login credentials. Credentials she hasn’t used in years. Then layered through four VPN nodes, including Ridgehollow’s.”

A pause from me.

“Someone used her history to mask sabotage.”

Rourke’s expression remains neutral. “That’s correct.”

My lips curve, but not in triumph. “Whoever they are, they have access to her vulnerabilities. They’ve tested her boundaries with global reach.”

I turn to face Rourke.

“Deploy the digital cloak. Create false login patterns tied to her old credentials. Trace the chain. I want confirmation: Did it terminate in her proximity or someone colluding with her?”

“On it.”

I nod and walk away from the screens.

***

The undercity beneath Manhattan is a different world, the bones that hold wealth and ambition above, twisting into tunnels and dry wells, servers humming beneath feet unaware.

I navigate it swiftly. My driver never speaks. The doors open into damp corridors, where the smell of ozone and aged concrete tangled.

I reach the terminal room, my old command center, where I’d earned survival and watched identities vanish.

Fluorescent tubes hang overhead. Racks of hardware glow in green hues. The faint echo of encrypted bundles scuttle through the vents.

I recline into the chair marked with my initials, etched years ago, and exhale.

“Run an array on that deletion trace,” I instruct the technician, a former intelligence black-op who now works in metadata for me. “I want obfuscated origin IPs decoded, batch login timelines, VPN endpoints mapped, and potential social-engineering footprints.”

Without waiting, I retrieve a slim tablet, begin marking files.

Old case notes. Records of Ridgehollow’s suppressed inquiry. The file of Julian Mallory, including dog-eared childhood images. A login portal list tied to Vera’s initial firm resume.

I move down each file, beneath sealed recollections: Ridgehollow incidents, foster volatility, early internship contradictions, the missing group photo with Julian, the therapy note read line: “I don’t like people knowing what I feel.”

Rourke’s message pings silently.

I read the result: Deletion initiated from an offshore proxy routed through a data warehouse tied to Julian Mallory’s current employer: the rival consulting group.

I lean back, thumb tapping the desk.

Julian Mallory. The foster brother. The silver-toned ghost in her memory.

My eyes drift to the screen showing Julian’s photo, an office ID shot with a mild smile and eyes focused off-camera.

I won’t kill Julian. Not yet. But I will make him rewrite the script.

I stand, walk out of the command center, and climb the service ladder up through the utility shafts. Emerging near the rooftop helipad annex, I watch the city ripple with rain-reflections. Lights blur on the Macadam below.

I answer my phone.

“Rotate support to secure Julian Mallory’s digital assets. Make it look like internal IT flagged encrypted traffic. Have that leak picked up by Holloway & Gallagher’s public services desk. Let them feel justified.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hang up and reopen the vertical city map on my tablet, lines tracing in and out of digital borders. I lay the deletion network against it.

Their web intersects.

Vera’s old credentials touched Julian’s hidden pathway.

Someone is weaving themselves between their lives.

Is it Vera? Not likely. She trusts no one. Remembers little.

Is it Julian? Perhaps, but less probable.

It has to be someone testing me and testing her.

Someone curious enough to use her name as a weapon.

***

Back in the penthouse, I return to the surveillance wall. I select the live feed of Vera in her apartment. She stands by the window, phone pressed to her ear.

I zoom in, listening: “…I have it. Now you listen to me. If any of this gets out, I can reverse the deletion. In public domain. You’ll lose more than your campaign.” She hangs up. Her face tightens.

I see the residual tension around her shoulders.

I had expected her to rise to the fight. Not retreat, but refine her offense.

I clear my throat.

“Rourke, send post to the usual news platforms highlighting Julian Mallory’s research bused into political intelligence. Use erasure-deletion cover story. Make Mallory the fall guy for Finch’s server deletion.”

“Acknowledged,” Rourke replies.

I end the interaction and sit back.

I watch Vera in real time as she walks to her desk, sits, opens a laptop.

I notice the blue light reflecting in her glasses as they tilt downward, the quick breath she takes before typing a response.

I lean forward.

“Time to adjust the game board,” I whisper.

I open a new document entitled: OPERATION MIRROR NAME.

I type:

Trigger: Julian leveraged as scapegoat. Vera watches truth unravel with dead strokes.

Phase One: Fund ghost litigation fund tied to Finch secure compliance audits.

Phase Two: Reveal logs in alternative news—”Whistleblower sources” statement referencing Julian Mallory.

Phase Three: Send encrypted key to Vera—granting access to trace logs if she wants justice.

Phase Four: Offer secure broker meeting—amnesia safe—with $10M NDA condition.

I pause.

My finger hovers.

This is bigger than surveillance. It’s chess. I’m not stabbing at her fragility. I’m protecting it, until she breaks not by error, but by precision.

I hit save and sit.

And in the hush of server hum, I feel something within me twist, like tension wound in over decades.

I’ve designed worlds. Built systems to rule them. Twisted data to kill careers. I keep everything in my pocket: truth, half-truth, lies, silence.

Everything…except her.

I press a hand to the cold glass separating me from them all.

I close my eyes.

I allow myself to feel fear for once, not of the world, but for her.

Because she is no longer a file.

She is a variable.

And for the first time in years, my calculations are personal.

I descend into Manhattan’s subterranean arteries, beneath the veneer of glass towers and luxury high-rises, toward the underground where the city’s dark economy thrives.

The elevator opens onto a plain door marked only by a black hashtag “#WCK,”a digital code more precise than any name.

I knock in the sequence: three short, one long, two short. A steel bullet-slit slides open. No words. Just the cold hum of expectation.

Inside is the lair of Wick, a spectral whisper in the identity-laundering world, one of the few men I trust with erasure.

The space smells of stale machine oil and ozone. Holoprojectors spin ghosted financial records. Tiered console banks flash command lines. Servers are stacked like obsidian bricks, humming quietly in the semi-dark.

Wick emerges from the glow. He’s tall, lean, with a leaner face. His eyes narrow in anticipation.

“You don’t summon me in person,” Wick observes, arms submerged in a tangle of cables, “unless it’s serious.”

I step past the servers, remove my jacket, hang it on a peg, then turn to face Wick.

“It’s serious,” I reply quietly.

Wick shuts off a holoscreen. The lights dim to bare cool blue.

“What’s at stake?” he asks.

My brow tightens.

“She’s become bait.” I say the word slow. Bait.

Wick’s lips thin.

“For whom?” he asks.

I shake my head. “That’s what we need to find.”

Wick frowns and leans back on his stool.

“I’ve been tracking her identity signatures,” he says, voice low. “Someone’s rewritten her history. Her birth record. Dates shifted. Addresses reflagged. She’s got ghosts in her system. Deep ones. Not random fraud, this is surgical. They’re building a network around her.”

I nod, my mind pitching forward.

“Who?” I ask.

Wick shakes his head again. “I can’t say yet.

Whoever did this has connections in the underground nexus.

High-level. They fingerprinted her digital passport, cloned the profile, overlaid it…

. This is deep surveillance, purpose-built.

But the twist? Whoever owns that data can control it.

Impersonate her. Publish damning proof and force events. ”

“You mean they’re using her as a weapon.”

“More like a vector,” Wick corrects. “Once you’re in the system, you become the initial node in a spread. Vera’s not just a target. She’s the vessel.”

The words hit me like bullets.

“Have you stopped it?”

Wick taps keys. Data streams scroll.

“It’s contained for now. I have shards of identity locked under inactive masks. But I can’t undo it entirely without triggering a cascade.”

I close my eyes.

Wick rises and holds out a data drive. “Encryption factory. You’ll need it.”

I take it wordlessly.

***

As Wick watches me ascend back to the street, I pause outside in a side alley. Rain drips from the pavement just enough to hiss. The penthouse lies above, unreachable through concrete unless invited by elevator.

In that wet hush, my memory flickers.