Page 31 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The lock hasn’t been picked; it has been memorized. Four turns, a slight hitch at the third, a click too late on the fourth. I slip the tension rod out and shut the door behind me with the kind of stillness that echoes.

Vera’s apartment greets me with warmth she never means to share. Something citrus lingers in the air. Her perfume. Worn into fabric, soaked into pillows, rising from the walls like breath.

I don’t touch the light. I don’t need it.

Every step is methodical, reverent, calculated not to betray sound. She is gone, I confirmed that from the timestamped camera feed earlier. Still, it doesn’t stop my eyes from scanning every corner like it might whisper her back to me.

The coffee table is cluttered. Files with corner creases. News clippings with fingerprints. A red string once used to tie something now unraveled across the wood like a lifeline pulled taut and cut.

I move past it.

Her bedroom is half-shadowed. The curtains are open just enough to cast a ribbon of city light across the unmade bed. I stand there. Not as a ghost. Not as a god. But as something in between. The watcher who has crossed the threshold.

I should’ve been gone already. In and out to confirm what she knew, what she didn’t. But something slows me.

Her pillow still bears the impression of her head.

I reach out, take it with both hands, and press it gently to my face. Not to inhale but to remember. Her shampoo. Her night sweat. Her quiet. I don’t lie in her bed.

I kneel beside it, like a mourner at a shrine. My knees on the floorboards. Fingers wrapped around cotton that still holds the heat of her.

Beside the pillow: her journal. I don’t open it. Not because I couldn’t, but because I already had. Weeks ago. Digitized. Archived. Studied. But seeing it now, pages dog-eared and spine cracking…it feels like something else. Intimate in a way I couldn’t scrub clean.

I stand. Cold now. Focus razor-sharp.

I walk out of the bedroom like it has cost me something. I cross to the kitchen counter where her laptop lies charging. Open screen. Encrypted drive.

I don’t touch the keyboard, I already know what is there. I watched her open it the night before, that folder labeled June 2013 trembling in her hands like it might bleed.

She is getting close. Too close.

I exhale slowly. My control doesn’t slip. But it thins.

From my coat pocket, I withdraw a slim, flat device: black, unmarked, and magnetic. I affix it beneath the counter. It will do what my other cameras couldn’t: track when she logs in. Record the sound of her breath while doing it.

I step back. One final sweep. Not to check what she’d missed, but to remember her as she is.

The apartment pulses with her.

Then I leave.

The surveillance command is a steel vault beneath street level, twenty-seven floors below the city grid. Even the walls have no memory of what occurs inside. Rourke is already there, backlit by a glowing map of data flags and wireframe overlays.

“She’s circling names,” Rourke begins. “Mira sent out two encrypted packets. One landed in the inbox of The Cut. The other…we don’t know yet.”

I remain silent. Not from surprise. From disappointment. I’ve allowed Mira too many exits. That ends tonight.

“She also flagged Vera’s juvenile record,” Rourke adds. “The one you had sealed. There’s a leak in the courthouse. We’ve got a list of seven staffers who had level-five access. We’re vetting them.”

I blink once. “Clear the list. Everyone on it. I don’t want root access, I want their browser histories. Home networks. Who they sleep beside. Who they owe money to.”

Rourke hesitates. Then nods. “Yes, sir.”

1:00 a.m.

Mira’s hideout is a repurposed artist’s loft—all industrial steel and oil-slick paint. She sits cross-legged on a torn sofa, chain-smoking clove cigarettes and pretending not to be afraid.

I don’t knock. Don’t ask.

I am inside before she looks up.

“Well, well,” Mira drawls. “The ghost shows up in person.”

I don’t speak.

She smirks. “What’s the matter, Lucian? Vera not behaving? She starting to look at you like you’re the thing under her bed?”

I close the distance in three steps. She doesn’t flinch, but the smoke from her cigarette shakes. I take it from her mouth. Flick it to the ground. Ground it under my boot.

“I’m not here to argue.”

“No. You’re here to warn. Threaten. Same old notes, Dane.”

“This is your last one. Disappear.”

Mira laughs, but not with joy—with jagged defiance.

“Too late. That girl? She’s already unraveling. You saw it. I saw it. She doesn’t know who she is anymore. You keep calling it protection, but you’re the noose around her neck. Tightening.”

I don’t move.

Mira leans forward. “But here’s the real kicker. She still wants to believe someone’s watching out for her. Even now. You think that makes you special?”

I stare.

“It makes you the most dangerous lie of all.”

My voice, when it comes, is colder than silence. “I don’t lie. I erase.”

I walk away.

Mira doesn’t follow.

The door shuts behind me like a tombstone.

When I leave Mira’s loft, I carry nothing but purpose. The silence outside is punctuated by distant sirens and the low hum of neon-lit intersections.

The city never sleeps. But inside, I move through the night with the precision of a predator who knows exactly where the vulnerabilities lie.

Back in the surveillance command, a steel temple of data and digital ghosts, Rourke awaits me, screens flickering with Mira’s traces: bank accounts, IP connections, aliases layered like sediment in a geologic record.

I don’t speak. I stand behind the desk, watching as Rourke isolates her accounts. When the zero-balance flags blink red, I nod and move in closer.

“Clean all traces,” I say. My words are soft, not loud, but they carry authority. “Complete wipe. Identity scrubbed. Insert new vectors to create ghost profiles. We can push blame toward PAC X, of course.”

Rourke pauses. “That will take some time.”

“Do it over the weekend. When she wakes, she’ll have nothing. No money. No access to her network. No communication footprint of who paid her.”

Rourke shuts down windows, then commits the erase. As servers parse commands, I stare not at her, but past her. At the place where data and human intentions crash into each other.

Mira becomes collateral. Not collateral sacrifice. The weapon forged, quick and silent.

Too late to sleep, I return to Vera’s apartment just after 3 a.m. I reenter with the same lock code. No alarms tripped.

The place welcomes me like a memory. The scent has shifted, night air carried in through a window she’d left slightly open. The air smells of rain-soaked streets.

I go to the laptop. The secure drive I’d planted earlier still hums. I reach into my jacket and pull out a black case, identical to the first. Metallic sheen, secure port.

I set it beside the laptop.

A record hums in the background, the soft tread of my steps earlier, now erased by silence. I create a new folder: Lucian_As_Provisioner. Inside, I copy files from the command server:

Mira_Juno_Associations.pdf: bank ledgers connecting Mira to Vera’s scandal.

IP_Trace_FinchLegal.: router logs showing Mira accessed Vera’s juvenile records.

Drive_Skeleton_Key.js: the code I used to unlock her first sealed folder.

Encrypted Archive: tax documents, shell-payment routes, politician bribes.

I arrange the files in a folder titled “Your Choice.” I type a single text file:

“I’ll end them. Or you. Your choice.”

The message is simple. Intimate. Vessel-tight.

I don’t expect her to read. I expect her to react.

In the lamp’s glow, I hover, kneeling, yet again, beside her workspace. I smooth the paper’s edge, as though touching her skin. I press the message into the folder, seal it, and close her laptop.

I rise. My shadow, for a moment, looms across the desk over her journal, over her lamp, over the photo where she circled my face. Then I leave.

Back in my penthouse, I remove my jacket. My hand trembles as I loosen the cuff. Not from urgency. From the chaos setting alight under my skin.

A whisper of obsession has always been there. It is the current that shapes the man. But now? Now it engulfs me entirely.

I don’t rest. My eyes flick to steel screens showing her apartment. All lights are dark. I’m not God. I am the architecture. Designed to fold what I built.

I think of Mira. I think of Vera. The data purge is done. The drive is delivered. The threat is made.

Victory, in my mind, will be the choice she makes. But victory comes with consequences. Trust, even forced, alters blood. I swallow.

I move to the wall of screens where her surveillance feed pulses—heartbeat in pixels. One screen shows the pillow where I knelt earlier. Another the wound in the sheets. Another the coffee-stain ring on the table.

I press my palm to the glass.

“I will protect you,” I whisper. No reply. She could have chosen to murder me. She could have chosen to run. She hasn’t chosen yet.

I touch my lips to the glass, not to kiss but to promise.

Minutes later, I sit in the command center. Rourke watches me. The servers hum with quiet violence.

Rourke says, “Her access log shows 3:17 a.m. File copy. And a new power cycle—she shut down after that.”

I nod. “She saw it.”

“They didn’t see the drive. Or did they?”

My expression hardens. “They may not yet know. If she opens it…then we begin.”

“Begin what?” Rourke asks.

I don’t answer.

I retreat upstairs. The penthouse feels hollow now. I move through the empty rooms. Every surface wiped clean. No trace of her scent remains. Not intentionally. It is just…absence.

I close my eyes and listen to the city. Traffic hums far below. A siren wails. A distant argument.

But inside, silence mutes everything.

I walk back to the audio room where her voice sometimes still echoes. Not now. Terminal logs show no playback.

I stand at the threshold, take a breath I don’t need. Every plan, every drive, every threat depends on one thing:

She still has a choice.

Tomorrow, her silence will break.

I can sense it.

I will ensure she makes the right one.

Because I’ve already given her the only two paths I could: a destroyed network or a protected future—one that bears my signature, my scale, my dominion.

And once she chooses…I’ll surrender the illusion of her freedom entirely.

But until then, I let myself believe I am still in control.

***

Across town, Mira’s hideout is already dark. Not from blackout, but retreat.

Her monitors flicker faint blue. Half the screens have gone blank after my exit. Her chipped, lipstick-stained coffee cup is still warm, and untouched. The Red Bull can beside it has tipped over, dribbling sticky residue onto a desk now emptied of its digital arsenal.

I have scrubbed her.

In fifteen minutes, her identity has gone from guerrilla hacker to ghost. No accounts. No trace. No record of employment, address, or birth. She’ll live off-grid now. If she lives at all.

I haven’t raised a hand to her.

I haven’t needed to.

When she’d spat her venom—”She’s already doubting herself. And you…you’re the noose around her neck”—something inside me shifted. Not because she was wrong. But because she was close.

Too close.

***

Back inside Vera’s apartment, I linger.

I touch the edge of her vanity table. I see the cracked powder compact she’d dropped two nights ago. The lipstick she rarely wears. The hairpins scattered like a constellation across the marble surface.

I want to stay.

I can’t.

But before I leave, I turn one final time toward her mirror—the one she had stood in front of when she dared me to watch. I remember the silk clinging to her hips. The way her lips had parted without shame. The plea she hadn’t spoken aloud, but that lived in her breath.

I whisper it now for her. For myself.

“You were never made for secrets, Vera. You were made for fire.”

The mirror catches my reflection. Harsh. Tired. Unforgiving. A man stripped down to obsession.

The mask is gone. There is no distance anymore.

I belong to her.

Not the other way around.

And as I disappear into the hallway, door silent behind me, the camera in the corner resumes its quiet blink recording nothing but absence. Nothing but want.