Page 35 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The lights in Finch’s west wing always hum a little louder at night. Or maybe that is just me being hyper-aware, running on caffeine, adrenaline, and the thick, slow drag of suspicion I can’t shake anymore.

The elevator opens to an empty floor, the motion-sensor lights clicking on in segments like a slow reveal of a stage I no longer belong to.

My heels echo as I step out, sharp against the polished concrete. The air is cool, overly sanitized, but it cannot mask the unease curling in my gut.

I shouldn’t be here.

But I have to be.

I scan my badge against the side door. The green light blinks. Still works. Still allowed in. Technically. Which means they haven’t completely locked me out, but they’ve shut every door I actually needed.

It is almost midnight. Most of the building has emptied out before nine. No janitor carts. No guards in the glass security booth at the end of the hallway. Just silence.

I walk faster.

Beth had warned me not to come. She’d left a voice note, low and choppy like she didn’t want to say too much over company-issued phones.

“Vee…whatever you’re looking for, don’t go alone. And definitely not in the middle of the night.”

But I need to know.

I need to see the extent of the erasure with my own eyes.

I reach my office and pause, listening. Nothing. Just the distant hum of the ventilation system. I unlock the door, step inside, and lock it behind me.

My desk is exactly how I’d left it three days ago. Mostly. But not quite.

The paperweight—an antique brass lion my foster father once kept on his law books—has been nudged to the very edge of the glass. I always center it. My hand hovers over it a moment before sliding it back into place.

I sit. Boot my laptop. Pull out the encrypted flash drive from my coat pocket.

My heart beats faster as I navigate through my private folders, hidden in the back channels of the firm’s internal server. I used to keep everything mirrored locally—an instinct born from distrust even before paranoia took root.

I click through the PAC files. Strategy briefs. Donation tiers. Correspondence trails with political aides. All of it…gone.

No Vera Calloway in any of the access logs. Not in the metadata. Not in the signature sheets or edit histories.

I search again.

Nothing.

My name has been replaced by a junior associate I once mentored. Adele. Bright girl. Brilliant, even. But she hadn’t been anywhere near the project. She didn’t even work in political strategy.

I lean back in my chair, feeling like the air has been siphoned from the room.

They are rewriting history. Mine.

And doing it well.

My cursor hovers over a folder I don’t recognize—Clients\_Q4/Athenaeum—but before I can open it, the screen glitches. Just for a second. A flicker. Like the refresh of a stream, or a camera feed reloading.

I freeze.

Click back.

The feed flickers again.

I tap the keyboard harder this time, but my system is frozen. Locked in. Something is running beneath the surface and it’s an executable I haven’t launched. My fingers scramble over the trackpad, accessing the root functions. A backend log window pops open, cycling code too fast to follow.

Then the screen goes black.

And a second later, it lights up again.

This time not with my files.

But with video.

Footage.

Of me.

I blink. And blink again.

The grainy overhead view of my office. Of me. Sitting exactly where I am, right now. A live feed, angle wide, from somewhere I can’t place.

I turn slowly.

Nothing in the corners. No visible camera.

But there I am on the screen moving my hand to the mouse, just as I had a moment ago. Real time.

My mouth goes dry. I minimize the window. The background changes. Another video. This one is older. It’s of me at home, carrying groceries. The next is of me in the Finch elevators. Then another in the street café three blocks from here. Every angle subtly off, just beyond normal line of sight.

I click into the folder tree.

Dozens of videos.

Timestamps going back months.

A file name near the bottom of the list caught my eye:

“Finch: REDIRECT - ATHENAEUM CANDIDATE A”

My hands tremble slightly as I open it.

Black screen. Then text.

White serif font, center aligned.

“PAC Access Terminated. Redirect initiated per internal order 423L.”

Another screen loaded.

“Subject: Calloway, Vera J.”

“Risk Index: Escalating.”

“Status: Under Watch.”

That phrase again.

Under Watch.

The silence in my office feels suffocating. As if the room itself were leaning in to listen.

And then the screen glitches again, briefly flashing a different message in bold red:

“YOU ARE NOT ALONE.”

I stand so fast my chair scrapes back.

I am being documented.

Not just monitored. Not just investigated.

Documented.

I scan the office again. My gaze catches on the small vent above the door. The one no one ever notices.

I back away, heart hammering in my throat.

The fluorescent lights flicker above.

Just once.

But that is enough.

Someone is here.

Someone has been here.

My laptop pings again. A new notification.

A .txt file.

I click it.

Just one line.

“He’s still inside the building.”

I don’t breathe as the feed glitches.

Not the kind of glitch that comes with old hardware or weather interference. This one is surgical, clean, deliberate, and too perfect in its imprecision.

The frame freezes, pixelated for a breath, and then blinks. When it returns, the timestamp has jumped back thirty-four minutes. A half-hour ago, precisely. Before I’d even entered the floor.

I hover my finger over the touchpad, staring at the identical angle of the office hallway. Same angle. Same lighting. Same fucking flicker from the emergency bulb outside Conference Room A. But no sign of me walking past.

I am being erased in real time.

My throat dries up. I push back from the desk, the chair scraping too loud against the tile. The sound echoes like I am the only human left on the planet.

I snap the laptop shut.

The clatter jolts me. I almost expect someone to answer with a creak from behind the glass walls, a footstep in that goddamn hallway.

But nothing.

Just the hum of machines and the breath of a building pretending to be asleep.

I stand slowly, hand brushing the inside of my coat pocket where the burner phone now lives—the one I swore I’d ignore. The one that came with silence and secrets and threats masquerading as gifts.

I’d sworn I wouldn’t use it again.

But I couldn’t get the paperweight out of my head. The way it had moved from the center of my desk to the edge, as if nudged by a careless intruder or worse, someone too confident to hide it.

I pull out the phone.

The screen lights instantly. No password required. Just that quiet, waiting glow.

I tap into the message app, fingers shaking against the smooth glass. Type one line.

“How long have you been in my office?”

Sent.

No reply comes, but I don’t expect one. Not yet. That number isn’t about comfort. It is a mirror held up to my paranoia, and right now, the reflection is screaming.

I cross to the hallway, the overhead lights buzzing too faintly, like the building knows I no longer belong here. I pass the conference room door I’d closed earlier. Now open again. A crack only, but I can smell the trace of cologne. That same scent. Masculine, cold, and expensive.

I pause.

Was it my imagination, replaying what I feared? Or something real, lingering like a warning?

I turn back. Make for the elevators. My heart beats like a warning bell I can’t silence.

And there it is. An elevator, already waiting.

Its doors stand open. No ding. No mechanical whine. Just the quiet emptiness of a box I haven’t called. No floor button lit. No panel active. But it is running. Manual override. I can see it in the faint blinking pattern on the display.

The hair on the back of my neck stands.

Someone wants me inside.

My fingers tighten around the phone.

I don’t step in.

I stand there, breathing, watching, waiting for something to shift, a shadow to break, a voice to rise from nowhere, or a hand to reach across the threshold.

None come.

But the doors close on their own.

Quiet. Slow. Final.

I back away. Not out of fear entirely, but out of clarity. This isn’t about a scandal anymore. It isn’t even about my career.

It is about control.

The camera glitch. The erased file access. The manual elevator. The phone still warm in my palm.

They aren’t trying to destroy me.

They are trying to isolate me. Peel me off the herd. Make me question what I know and who I am—until I either turn to the machine for help or break clean in half.

I walk back to my office. The silence thickens.

I sit down again, pull the laptop closer, and boot it up once more. Not to check emails or log files. But to set a trap of my own.

***

There was a time I would’ve panicked. That moment when the hallway lights flickered behind me, when the hum of the server room faltered just slightly—as though something had moved where nothing should have—I might’ve bolted. But I don’t run anymore.

I breathe in the static air, shoulders squared. The chill crawling up my spine isn’t new. It is just familiar. Too familiar.

I walk back toward the server corridor, each step echoing against the polished floor, soft and sharp like whispers under breath. The door to the internal drive room is ajar.

Not wide. Just enough to suggest someone has entered…and hasn’t bothered to close it all the way.

I haven’t come this far just to flinch.

Sliding my hand inside the inner lining of my jacket, I pull out my ID badge and hold it up to the scanner. It blinks red once, then green. The lock disengages.

Inside, rows of blinking machines line the glass walls. Each tower is a vault of secrets Finch has buried deep. Only three people are supposed to have clearance here. I am one of them. Or used to be.

I approach the central terminal, keying in the override pass Rohan had taught me back when we were still allies. When I still believed loyalty could be earned.

The interface loads, hesitating. Not frozen, but sluggish. Like something is watching me work.

I scroll through the backup logs. Most are blank. Some have timestamps. But one…one bears no user ID. Just a blank line. Logged forty-six minutes ago. That was after I got in.

I open it. The screen stutters. Then a video window blinks to life.

It is me.

Walking into the conference room. Sitting. Typing. Touching my hair. Looking over my shoulder—because even then, I’d felt it. The pressure of a gaze I can’t name.

It loops.

Then reset.

But this time, I’m not alone in the frame.

A flicker. The edge of a coat. A blur of movement by the door, just before the camera glitches.

I press pause. Rewind. Freeze the frame.

It is barely visible, but the shape is wrong. Too large to be a shadow. Too upright. Too…deliberate.

He was here.

Not long ago.

Maybe he’s still here.

I back away from the terminal. My reflection in the glass looks alien—drawn, sharp-eyed, mouth tight. Not fear. Not quite. But the thrum of it pounds in my ribs, adrenaline braided with resolve.

I leave the room without touching anything else. Don’t log out. Don’t bother.

Let him know I saw it.

Back at my desk, I pull out the old encrypted drive I’d hidden in a carved-out copy of Paradise Lost weeks ago. Slip it into the port.

I open a blank message and type just one line:

“I see you.”

Then I send it to the number I’d used only once before, the number that doesn’t trace, doesn’t ping, doesn’t reply. But I know it is still active.

And I know who is watching.

***

The elevator chimes again.

I’d heard it once earlier, dismissed it as cleaning staff. But now….

The doors are open. Waiting.

I stand just outside the hallway’s reach. No one inside. But the interior light flickers like it has been overridden. Manual controls. That isn’t standard protocol after hours.

I don’t step in. I don’t even approach.

Instead, I walk to the stairwell and take each step down by feel. My pulse doesn’t slow. My eyes never blink too long.

***

Back in my apartment, I bolt the door. Check the windows. Turn the lights on—not for safety, but because I want him to see me lit. To know I’m not afraid of the dark.

I move to the bookshelf, pull the folder I’d assembled filled with clippings, printouts, screenshots, backups from the campaign’s early days, lists of names and ID numbers I hadn’t looked at in months. I start drawing lines again. This isn’t just sabotage. This is personal.

And I know how to fight personal.

The power balance has shifted. But not in the way he thinks.

If he wants to rewrite my story…I’ll write it back. I open a blank journal. Ink only one sentence. I am not a pawn.

Then I circle it twice. And underline it once, slow and hard.

If he is watching, he’ll understand exactly what that means.

Let him watch.

Let him think I’m losing ground.