Page 33 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The screens hum with the quiet buzz of inevitability, with each pixel a point of data, and each moment playing in loops of cold digital silence.

I stand motionless, eyes fixed on the footage from the parking garage, fists curled at my sides. Not a muscle twitches, yet beneath the polished veneer, my pulse roars.

I watch again.

The attacker’s hand gripping Vera’s wrist.

The brief flicker of fear in her eyes.

How quickly it hardens into calculation.

My jaw clenches.

“Engage,” I order softly into the mic clipped to my collar. “No witnesses.”

The image blurs. Tactical operatives pour from the SUV, swift and clinical. A ghost team, their faces masked, their movements choreographed like a dance rehearsed a thousand times.

The man who touches Vera doesn’t even have a chance to resist before he is face-down, neutralized, zip-tied.

But I’m not watching the attacker.

My eyes stay on her.

The way she steadies herself. The subtle quiver in her fingers as she accepts the burner phone. The disbelief. The way her shoulders lift in something more than relief—something close to realization.

She is understanding now.

Faster than anticipated.

More dangerously aware than she should be.

“Run a cross-check,” I instruct calmly, eyes never leaving the screen. “Identify this asset immediately.”

Behind me, Rourke nods and keys commands silently into his console. Moments pass in stark quiet.

I step closer, eyes narrowing as Vera’s reaction replays. Each pass deepens the tension in my muscles, coiled tighter beneath my suit. It is like watching myself years ago—her recognition of danger sharpening her edges, not dulling them.

Rourke speaks softly from behind me. “Asset linked. Dominic Hale.”

I don’t turn. “Athenaeum,” I say flatly. “He was flagged as monitor-only. Explain the escalation.”

Rourke hesitates, then continues. “Hale’s last comm indicated panic. The contract moves faster than anticipated. He reacted prematurely.”

My hands tighten, knuckles white. “Deactivate Hale. Tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rourke withdraws quietly, leaving me alone again with her digital ghost. On the screen, Vera straightens her spine, walking toward the SUV with poise unbroken. She doesn’t run. Doesn’t cry. Doesn’t collapse.

My chest aches in ways I don’t want to acknowledge.

I move to my secure operations console. In cool silence, I enter my encryption codes, digits tapping softly on glass. The screen unlocks, unfolding file after file, until one glows prominently in the center.

Asset Redirect: Calloway, Vera E.

I open it almost reverently.

Inside: timestamps, promotions, performance evaluations—all the carefully curated stages of her life at Finch Industries. Every career move meticulously engineered by my hand.

I scroll deeper. Personal data, flagged relationships, strategic interruptions, controlled promotions. Her ascent isn’t random; it’s sculpted and precise.

My eyes trace the familiar patterns:

College internship sabotaged. Redirected.

Her first serious relationship dismantled quietly, cleanly, and with minimal emotional scarring.

Promotion to senior associate granted two years ahead of schedule. Unquestioned, seamless.

Security clearances enhanced without her knowledge. Access to confidential files subtly expanded.

Every step she’d taken professionally has been part of my blueprint. Her victories, her failures, all engineered. Controlled. Each calculated manipulation has led her precisely where I wanted her. Until now.

The most recent notation stands in stark red letters:

Risk Profile Updated: YELLOW—Awareness Risk Escalating

I stare at it, the letters glowing like hot embers.

“She knows,” I murmur softly, my voice barely audible to myself. “Not everything. But enough.”

Enough to be dangerous.

Enough to start questioning.

I replay the footage once more. This time, focused purely on her eyes. They’ve changed. Not just alert but wary, aware, and strategic. There is an edge to her now that thrills me as much as it unsettles me.

I lean back against the console, one hand sliding across my jaw. The lines are blurring faster than I’d planned. She isn’t merely unraveling but also getting sharper. It fascinates me. It frightens me, too.

This isn’t the victim I’d once calculated into existence.

This isn’t the passive observer I’d spent years curating.

This is someone stronger. Fiercer. Capable of damage, if unchecked.

The words from Mira echo suddenly, uninvited:

You’re the noose around her neck.

I dismiss them immediately. That isn’t true. Cannot be. I have always been her safeguard, the unseen hand guiding her away from danger. I’d promised myself she’d remain untouched by the ugliness that shadowed my world.

Yet now, that ugliness has reached her doorstep. Not only reached—breached.

I stand, steeling myself. I tap the screen, enlarging Vera’s image until it fills my vision entirely. Her expression burns into me: defiant, unbroken. Beautifully stubborn.

“You never learned how to back down,” I say quietly. Almost proudly.

I hesitate, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

Then, almost involuntarily, I access a private vault. A folder older than any others, labeled only in binary. I unlock it with my personal code.

The screen shifts.

An older file opens. The footage is grainy and slightly distorted. It is a flash of memory rendered digital. Vera, years younger, alone in her office at Finch. Crying quietly, her head buried in her hands. A brief, hidden vulnerability she never allowed again.

I’d recorded it. Kept it. Watched it more times than I would ever admit.

Because it was real. Raw. Hers alone.

It was the first and only time I’d seen her truly unguarded, completely exposed. I’d wanted to own that vulnerability, protect it, even as I’d carefully ensured she never felt it publicly again.

Now, watching the newer footage, her strength—a strength I’d painstakingly cultivated—has finally become dangerous. Her sharpened instincts are now a blade that could turn against me. Or worse against herself.

I close the vault, fingers trembling faintly.

She is no longer a project. No longer an asset. She has crossed over into something much more volatile that I’d never let myself consider.

My voice comes, quiet and cold, into the silence of the room:

“Raise security status to RED,” I instruct softly into my comm. “Asset Calloway is now active liability.”

I pause. Then add, quieter still:

“And alert all teams. Vera Calloway is no longer to be considered a passive participant. She’s a direct threat—one who will fight back. Assume nothing. Contain everything.”

I end the transmission.

For the first time, I feel a fracture forming deep in my chest.

She was supposed to have been controlled. Curated. Carefully maintained.

But instead, Vera has done something no other target had done: She’s broken free from my script.

And I know, in the silent depths of myself, that this is exactly what I’d always wanted.

And what I fear most.

***

The lights inside my secure suite have dimmed to a programmed hush, casting the room in gradients of silver and gray. Screens glow like portals along the curved wall, each one feeding me a different angle of Vera’s spiraling world. She is still awake.

The camera in her bedroom shows her sitting at the edge of her mattress, frozen. Not from exhaustion. From the revelation. From knowing someone has watched her and is still watching her.

I don’t move. Don’t blink.

The footage from the garage incident still plays in slow rotation. Her body turning sharply. The attacker’s grip on her wrist. The whisper in her ear. The SUV pulling in like a scalpel slicing into chaos.

My silent, brutal, and efficient operatives neutralize the threat without fanfare. But even with her unharmed, I see what they hadn’t been sent to fix: The breach isn’t just physical.

It is narrative.

Vera was supposed to remain unbroken. Untouched. And now, the narrative has cracked before I am ready.

I swipe across a panel embedded in the desk. It unlocks the deeper system, a drive beneath the drive. The one labeled:

Asset Redirect: Calloway

No passcode required. Just my fingerprint. And a pause.

The folder opens. Files cascade across the screen—cold, clinical, dispassionate in their order. Her Finch Industries personnel file. Internal memos tagged with my assistant’s routing notes.

Her college psych evals. A sealed court record dated ten years ago. The mugshot is grainy, but unmistakably Vera. Smaller then. Angular. Eyes full of something I recognize now as defiance-in-training.

I tap the mugshot and bring it closer to the light. “I should’ve burned this,” I mutter.

I move to the next file. Screenshots of Vera’s text messages. Some are real. Others have been…modified. I remember the edits.

Rourke had flagged her boyfriend’s surveillance logs as high-risk with too many mentions of quitting the firm, moving cities with her. I had sent the message that ended it myself.

A perfectly simulated screenshot from Vera, cold and cutting: “I never wanted any of this. You were just convenient.”

It had taken forty-seven seconds for the man to block her on everything.

I exhale slowly. The control has been precise. Calculated. At the time, it had felt necessary. But tonight, as Vera sits bathed in the glow of a camera she hadn’t installed, it feels like a game that has run too long.

The monitor to my left lights up. Echo’s voice crackles through the comm.

“Three shell corps traced. The attacker in the garage was paid through a Seychelles intermediary, but the trail ties back to Dominic Hale.”

My jaw twitches.

Echo continues, “And the encrypted folders Vera’s been accessing? They’re being mirrored. Someone else is watching what she watches.”

My hands still over the interface. “Mira?”

“Possible. But if it’s her, she’s not alone. Someone with deep architecture access is feeding from her feed.”