Page 38 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

There’s something terrifying about quiet that hangs in the air, not because it’s peaceful, but because it’s been engineered, calibrated like a corporate strategy.

I walk into Finch this morning prepared for a bloodbath. A dozen retorts in my head. Chin up. Shoulders squared. I’d imagined the shame, the side-eyes, and the cautious whispers slicing through the glass corridors.

Instead, I’m met with…nothing.

No hushed tones. No accusatory glances. Just blank stares that avert mine. Colleagues who nod, but don’t speak. A silence that feels less like forgiveness and more like a void.

I step into the elevator with a pit nesting low in my gut.

The mirrored walls reflect a woman I barely recognize with glossed lips, structured blazer, and composed rage. I don’t trust the stillness. I’d been taught to survive storms, not the moments that followed them.

Beth is already in my office, pacing like she wants to walk a hole through the carpet. She looks up the moment I enter, eyes sharp.

“You saw the internal statement?” she asks.

“No.” I shrug off my coat and toss it over the chair. “Let me guess. Something about policy breaches, maintaining institutional integrity, reassigned oversight….”

“Pretty much. Turner resigned this morning.”

I freeze. “Just like that?”

Beth nods. “They rolled it out at 6:00 a.m. PR called it a shift in direction. Legal signed off. They’re saying the PAC conflict was overblown. That an internal miscommunication led to certain flags, but no wrongdoing was found.”

“They’re walking it back.”

“No,” she says slowly, her voice dropping, “They’re walking you back in. Without explanation.”

I sit behind my desk, fingers twitching over the trackpad.

My screens light up with project dashboards, board memos, and press roundups. All cleaned up. Sanitized. The firestorm that nearly swallowed me whole has been sucked into a controlled burn.

Not erased.

Redirected.

Beth hesitates by the door. “Vera…someone pulled strings.”

I meet her gaze. “I know.”

After she leaves, I sit still for ten minutes. Breathing. Counting each inhale. I can’t afford to spiral. Not here. Not yet.

But I’m not going to let it go.

By noon, I’m standing in HR.

The woman behind the desk looks like every polished compliance officer in every soulless firm I’d worked at—impeccable suit, calm smile, eyes that never blink too long. Her name tag says Maris.

“I’d like to know the final resolution on my internal review,” I say evenly.

She gives me a soft blink. “We’re not permitted to discuss closed matters regarding internal investigations.”

“You discussed them when I was under fire.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Calloway.”

“No, you’re not.”

She doesn’t respond. Just folds her hands neatly and waits for me to leave like I’m some intern throwing a tantrum.

As I step out of HR’s glass shell, my phone buzzes.

Internal memo: Finch HQ Departmental Oversight Initiative Subject: External Consultant Assigned Effective immediately, Mr. Lucian Dane will serve as Senior Advisor on Security Oversight and Risk Management.

I stop walking. My skin turns to ice.

He isn’t done.

He’s drawing closer.

I stand there, in the middle of the hall outside HR, reading those lines again and again as if they might change. As if the name Lucian Dane isn’t now etched into the company’s internal architecture.

A few months ago, he was a rumor. A man with whispers behind him and too many sealed records. Then he was a presence. Then a threat. Then a touch I couldn’t forget.

Now he is here.

I walk back to my office in silence. The chill of the memo still clings to my spine, and every corner I pass feels darker. I don’t want to sit. I don’t want to think. So I pace. One loop around my desk. Then another.

He’s orchestrated all of it, hasn’t he?

The fall. The silence. The “recovery.”

I stare at the glowing screen in front of me, heart pounding like a war drum.

I’m not angry because I didn’t know how. I’m angry because I do know. I’d lived with this pattern all my life, of people deciding my fate behind closed doors. Stepfathers. Caseworkers. Wardens in expensive shoes.

But this isn’t just about being handled.

This is personal.

Lucian Dane doesn’t want me exonerated. He wants me indebted. Dependent. His.

I click out of the HR portal and open a blank page. My fingers hover.

There is no safe place to document anything anymore. Every word feels traceable. Every thought already monitored.

Still, I type three words.

He’s inside now.

And save them to a private offline archive, buried inside a hidden directory I coded years ago.

Because if I’m going to survive this war, I need to remember something critical.

Not just that I’m being watched.

But that I’m being rewritten.

And I will not go quietly.

***

They think I can’t see the subtle shifts in posture, the careful avoidance of eye contact, the way everyone’s suddenly too busy to meet. I see it all.

The silence says more than gossip ever did. Not judgment. Not sympathy. Just…clearance. Like they’ve all quietly agreed to let the storm pass without asking why it stopped.

But I know.

Beth’s whisper had been enough to confirm what my gut already screamed: Something happened behind the scenes, something sharp and unnatural.

A redirection. The kind that doesn’t come from luck, or policy, or timing. The kind that comes from control. Influence. Lucian.

I sit at my desk, but I don’t log in. My fingers hover above the keyboard, then pull back. What’s the point?

My name is still on the door, but I don’t feel like I belong here anymore. Not when my survival was engineered. It tastes like theft.

“Beth,” I say when she walks by my door again. “Close it.”

She does. No questions. Just quiet compliance.

“I need to ask you something, off record.”

She glances back toward the hallway, hesitates, then shuts the blinds too. “What is it?”

“Why did Turner resign?”

Her face shifts. “Vera….”

“Don’t ‘Vera’ me. You owe me more than company protocol. I took the fall for something I didn’t even do, and now I’m still standing while the man who tried to crucify me is gone. I need to know how that happened.”

Beth lowers her voice. “All I know is someone leaked internal documents, real ones, proving Turner misused clearance levels for personal political advantage. Once that went public, Legal didn’t have a choice. He took the fall.”

My skin prickles. “And you don’t find the timing convenient?”

“I find it terrifying,” she says. “Because I know you didn’t leak it.”

My chest tightens. “But someone did.”

She nods once, then glances toward the door. “Just…be careful. Whatever happened, it was clean. Professional. Not the kind of leak you trace back.”

I want to scream. Instead, I thank her, let her go, and sit in the silence again.

I push back from my desk hard. The wheels squeal against the floor. I don’t care who hears. I storm out, not toward the lobby, not toward Legal, but into the stairwell, where I can scream if I want and no one will hear it.

I slam my fist against the cold concrete wall. The pain is instant and bright, blooming through my knuckles. It barely registers.

He did this.

He rerouted the scandal. Removed the threat. Installed himself at the heart of my world like a goddamn virus. And somehow, everyone’s thanking him for it.

The burn in my throat isn’t grief or fear. It’s rage. I survived this far without him. Without his help. And now, the narrative has twisted so far that I’m seen as the fragile one, the woman who needed saving.

I am not weak.

But I’m being made into someone who looks like she is.

And that’s the most infuriating part. No one else sees it. No one sees the leash tightening, not around my neck, but my options. My future.

I press my forehead against the wall. Close my eyes.

He did this.

And the worst part is that he thinks I should be grateful.

I press my palm against the cold stairwell wall, letting the sting anchor me. It isn’t enough.

Not enough to level the rising flood in my chest. I want to scream, but the echo will carry. And I refuse to give anyone the satisfaction of hearing me unravel.

Lucian Dane.

I haven’t misread the name. It is right there in the internal memo, bold and bureaucratic. “Independent Consultant for Systems Integrity Review.” Cloaked in language that sounds neutral, even helpful. But I know better.

I always know better.

The logic clicks into place like tumblers in a lock. HR isn’t talking because there’s nothing to talk about. The investigation has been scrubbed, sanitized, and buried.

Turner is gone. Legal has gone silent. PR has been redirected. Every trail that once led to me now winds toward empty corridors and resigned scapegoats.

Lucian has done it. No one says it, but I can feel it.

The power vacuum around me tells the truth. I’ve been rerouted. Not saved. Redirected like a liability they couldn’t afford to burn publicly. Like I belong to someone else now.

I lean back against the wall, trying to breathe evenly. The fluorescent light above flickers. The stairwell is supposed to be sterile, private. But even here, I feel like I’m being watched.

Because I am.

Because I always am.

It is getting harder to separate my paranoia from my instincts. But then again, paranoia is just pattern recognition with a bad reputation. And all my patterns point to one name.

Lucian.

I can almost hear his voice again—velvet-smooth and calm, like he’s talking someone off a ledge while nudging them closer to the edge.

“Next time, you’ll come to me.”

I hadn’t even realized I was already there. Already inside the game. Already dancing to his cues.

I shove off the wall, grabbing the railing for balance. My knuckles are white from clenching too hard.

My stomach knots at the thought that I am here at Finch Industries, still playing along. Still showing up. Still pretending this is my life, when the truth is…I haven’t owned it for weeks.

Maybe longer.

Maybe never.

I take the stairs two at a time. I need air. Noise. Something real. Anything that doesn’t feel like one of his orchestrations.

But everywhere I turn, there he is, in the silence that follows me into meetings, in the locked folders on the company drive, in the way people smile too tightly and leave rooms too quickly.

I am being managed and controlled.

By a man who thinks he is saving me.

I burst through the side exit onto the back terrace of the building. A disused patio area that’s mostly used by interns and staff on coffee breaks. Today it is empty. Thank God.

I exhale hard, curling my fingers into fists to stop them from shaking.

He wants me like this.

Not broken.

Bending.

He wants me to feel the walls narrowing. He wants to strip me of my exits, my alliances, and control until the only place left to go is to him. Not out of desire. Not even out of fear.

Out of necessity.

He’s planned this too well and too perfectly. Like a man who’s studied the schematics of my mind and found every pressure point. Every fault line.

But he doesn’t know everything.

He doesn’t know I don’t bend forever. That I snap.

That I bite back.

A door creaks open behind me. I turn fast, adrenaline spiking. But it isn’t him. Just a junior from accounting, eyes wide and startled. I give a clipped nod and walk past her, my heels sharp against the stone.

I need to think. I need to breathe. I need…an edge.

Because that was what I was missing. That was what he’d stolen. He’d made me reactive. Reduced me to dodging, to surviving. Not strategizing. Not leading. That is over.

If Lucian wants a game, I’ll give him one. But I’ll play it my way.

He has influence, surveillance, and control. Fine. I have instinct, memory, and the fury of a woman who’s been maneuvered like a pawn and just realized she’s holding a blade.

No more asking questions behind closed doors.

No more hoping someone would hand me answers.

From here on out, I’ll stop waiting and start watching.

Just like him.

Let him think he’s pulling strings. Let him believe I’m still trapped. That’s what men like Lucian always do. They mistake silence for submission, and stillness for surrender. But the truth is I’ve never been quieter because I’m never more dangerous.

I make my way back to my office. Ignore the sideways glances, the hovering silence, the tension too thick to be accidental. They are all part of it now. Every hallway, every desk, every glass wall.

This is no longer my job.

It is my battlefield.

I sit at my desk, open my drawer, and stare at the empty space where the key had been.

A message.

A challenge.

A line crossed.

He wants everything I wouldn’t give anyone else.

And I’ll be damned if he gets it without blood on the floor.

I tap into my private terminal—not the one connected to Finch’s mainframe. One I built myself. Off-books. Legacy code from law school days. I am done looking for trails.

Now, I’ll start laying traps.

If Lucian wants to be close?

Then let him feel what it’s like to be watched.

By me.

Let’s see how he likes it when the prey stops running and starts hunting back.