Page 3 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

One glass of red wine. Two slices of roasted duck. Steamed spinach. A starch I don’t taste.

The plate is set by someone whose name I’ve never bothered to learn. She comes twice a week and leaves before I return. She’s not paid for creativity, she’s paid for consistency.

The table is bare, with no centerpiece, candles, or clutter. The light above it is recessed, casting a clean halo over white porcelain, black glass, and nothing else.

The penthouse is quiet except for a low strain of opera bleeding from the speakers in the ceiling. It’s Puccini, maybe. I don’t remember selecting it. Not that it matters. It’s part of the ritual.

I use real silverware. Not for the weight or tradition. For the control. Control is a man’s last luxury. That’s what they taught us in the program.

Not love, freedom, or even power.

Control.

Because once you lose that, you become reactive, weak, and predictable.

I don’t allow those things in my work, body, thinking, or in the system I’ve spent over a decade building quietly, ruthlessly, and without indulgence.

So I eat precisely and mechanically to maintain the machine.

One bite every twenty seconds. I don’t carry any phone or screens. Nourishing time requires no interruptions.

I keep my back to the skyline, floor-to-ceiling glass behind me, a silent painting of Manhattan’s wealth and rot. I don’t turn to look at it. The city looks better in reflection than in reality.

When the meal is done, I wipe my mouth, rinse the wine glass, and place everything in its designated order on the tray.

Then I walk the length of the penthouse with bare feet on obsidian marble, each step muffled by architectural silence. The air smells like citrus and iron. There are no personal photographs or childhood keepsakes. There’s nothing that breathes unless I permit it to.

My home is symmetrical. Black, slate, and chrome. Every surface reflects intention.

I unlock the security door with a four-digit code that changes every twelve hours. The steel door slides open soundlessly into my observation room.

Three walls are covered in matte screens of live feeds, historical logs, facial recognition grids, and flagged motion paths. One wall is mirrored with reinforced ballistic glass behind it, in case anyone ever tries to enter from the outside. They won’t.

I walk to the central screen.

She’s already waiting for me.

Vera Calloway. Today’s new variable and mistake.

Her face glows on the screen, paused mid-motion. Her head is tilted, eyes narrowing at the photo I left in her car.

The feed is grayscale, but I remember the blush that bloomed on her throat when she saw it. It was a shade that could easily be missed, but not by me.

I tap the screen, and it zooms in. First on her slim fingers that are steady even when she’s shaken. She doesn’t fidget by tugging her sleeve or brushing back her hair. Not unless she’s stalling. I know her tells. Catalogued them months ago.

Another tap. I isolate her mouth.

That sharp and controlled mouth. Often unsmiling but not always. I’ve documented every curve it’s made in the last two months. Most of them were neutral. Three were real. One was private.

That private one where she thought no one was watching, when her lips curved without self-consciousness, when her armor slipped for just a breath, is one I kept. I printed and circled it.

Tonight, I watch it again. Rewind. Pause. Rewind. Play.

There’s more reverence than arousal in the watching.

She’s a creature of precision like me. But she believes hers makes her untouchable.

It doesn’t. It only makes her interesting.

I swipe to another feed of her office earlier this afternoon. She sat at her desk in silence for twenty-three minutes after the arbitration. She didn’t check her phone or talk to her assistant. She sat there like something inside her had cracked.

I have the audio from that moment. I don’t need to play it. I know what she ordered for lunch. I know she didn’t eat much of it. I know she prefers oat milk in her coffee, but only when she’s going to see the press.

I know she tells people she doesn’t drink because they stop offering, but she keeps a single bottle of gin in the back of her freezer. Unopened. The seal’s been checked three times.

I know her old apartment’s security system had a four-second delay on the rear fire escape. I used to watch her sit on that balcony in the rain, thinking no one noticed.

Now she lives higher and she’s harder to reach. But not for me. Never for me.

A soundless ping lights up the corner of the screen. Motion near her building. A new driver pulls up to the curb contracted through a third-party ride-share company registered out of D.C. I already ran his financials last month. He’s clean. Mostly.

Still, I flag it just in case. I turn the opera off. Silence rushes back in.

Vera is still on screen. Her expression is blank, but I’m getting better at reading her. And soon, I won’t have to read at all. I’ll touch.

I’ve read everything she’s ever written that mattered.

Not the public-facing reports, the sterile press statements, or advisory decks sanitized by junior analysts. I mean the pieces she thought no one else would ever see.

Her undergraduate legal theory paper on the ethics of power consolidation in lobbying.

It read like someone older and bitter. She used words like “framework integrity” and “systemic rot” without apology. She quoted Foucault and footnoted a leaked internal memo from a foreign lobbying investigation. She was twenty.

I read her graduate thesis a month later. She’d cleaned up her voice by then. Less venom, more polish. But the anger still throbbed beneath it quietly like a storm with no thunder.

I printed both papers and highlighted the shifts in her tone. She doesn’t know she writes differently when she’s protecting herself or that her rage is the most honest part of her work.

I have her law school applications, too. All three drafts. The one she submitted, the one she almost submitted, and the one she wrote at 2:41 a.m. and never sent.

The last one was the most honest.

Her therapy notes were harder to get.

A digitized archive, stored in a third-party software suite. Accessed by hundreds of clinical professionals through rotating credentials. I found an intern, paid him more than he’s worth to shut up and disappear.

He’d already been fired. They always are.

What he gave me was thin—Vera doesn’t speak much in sessions. Not surprising. Women like her don’t trust rooms they can’t dominate.

But what she did say was enough.

“I don’t like people knowing what I feel.” “I was taught that silence is safer.” “No one ever stayed. So I learned not to ask.” She talks about her control like it’s armor. But it isn’t. It’s a cage.

She thinks she’s containing danger, but what she’s really doing is hiding the wound. She builds walls, but not the kind that keep people out. Her walls are mirrors. They trap her, reflect her worst thoughts back at her, and lock her in a room made of her own refusal to need anyone.

She’ll say she prefers solitude. But solitude is punishment for her.

Her silence isn’t strength. It’s a penance.

I’ve watched her spend entire weekends alone. No calls or visits. Just her with a stack of memos and a lamp that runs too hot for comfort.

I’ve watched her stare at her ceiling at night like it might answer back.

And I’ve watched her change subtly when someone tries to touch her. She freezes with calculation. As if she’s deciding whether vulnerability is worth the aftermath.

I know that, too. The aftermath.

I’ve caused it enough times to recognize it in others.

She interests me because she thinks she’s already safe, shaped, and the final version of herself.

But I know that’s not true.

People like Vera think they’ve outgrown their past. That they’ve built new skin over the old scars. But the skin is thin. All it takes is a careful cut—one incision in the right place—and everything underneath bleeds just as easily. She has no idea how sharp I can be.

I shift back in my chair. The leather sighs beneath me.

On the screen, she’s brushing her fingers over the photograph again. She’s still not afraid and trying to rationalize it.

She will. She’ll tell herself it’s nothing. That it’s a prank or a misstep in security.

She’ll write it off. Because the only thing more important to her than being in control is appearing like she never lost it.

That’s what makes her vulnerable. She’ll chase stability even if it leads her into the fire.

And I’m not a man she’ll recognize as dangerous until she’s already in the flames.

The world thinks she’s a hero. Strategic prodigy. Ice-veined genius. The kind of woman who dismantles billion-dollar coverups before breakfast and still has time to brief a senator before lunch.

They call her a hammer for good causes.

They’re wrong. She’s a weapon with no leash.

She didn’t even know what she was dismantling this morning. To her, it was just another offshore shell, faceless in its paperwork, and forgettable in its name.

Miriad Equities was an old skin I’d been wearing for twelve months. A quiet operation meant to shift capital from one continent to another without interference.

And she cut the throat of it with a sentence.

“Offshore movement in staggered subsidiaries is not only evasive, it’s criminal.” She said it cleanly, with perfect posture, as if it wasn’t a declaration of war.

She has no idea what she touched, who she humiliated, or that the accounts frozen under her name now connect to half a dozen interests that don’t forgive.

She doesn’t know that her win made enemies of ghosts. But I’m not going to retaliate with force. That would be too easy and obvious.

Besides, she’s more useful upright than buried.

Vera has power. And power, like heat, doesn’t always need to be destroyed. Sometimes it just needs to be…redirected.

I’ll do it the same way she wins her battles: with finesse, exposure, and seduction.

I’ll unravel her quietly. Inch by inch and thought by thought. Until her decisions belong to me. And when she starts to suspect, it won’t matter. She’ll already be too far in.

I rise from the chair and cross to the glass wall. The skyline unfolds in pale gold light leaking between towers, and neon veins pulsing below. People down there live like their lives mean something.

That’s what makes them useful.

I press one button on the secure line embedded in the control panel beside the mirrored wall.

It rings twice, and then a voice responds, “Dane.”

I don’t say hello.

“The consultant,” I say. “Vera Calloway.”

There’s a pause on the other end. Then he responds, “Understood.”

“I want it clean. Infiltration, not destruction.”

Another longer pause. “Protocol?”

“Start the arrangement,” I say evenly. “She’s not going to leave this clean.” I hang up.

She’s a variable I didn’t plan for, and that makes her dangerous.

But more than that, it makes her mine.