Page 39 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

I arrive just after eight.

No fanfare. No press. Just a black car with tinted windows and a security badge that opens every door. The lobby has already been scrubbed of last week’s headlines.

That’s the thing about Finch Corp: Its image is always more fragile than its infrastructure.

I don’t need a corner office or a title on the door. I need proximity. And now I have it.

The compliance meeting is already underway by the time I enter. A dozen nervous executives seated around a glass table, their postures stiff with performative alertness.

The usual suspects are there: internal legal counsel, risk oversight leads, and the regional heads who’d been tasked with fixing the leak crisis. But I don’t care about them.

I care about the woman sitting two seats from the end, spine rigid, chin high, face a mask of composure I’ve learned to read far too well.

Vera Calloway.

She doesn’t look at me. Not once.

That amuses me. She’s the only one in the room who doesn’t shift when I enter, doesn’t adjust her seat or clear her throat or smile like her job depends on it. She doesn’t need to acknowledge me to let me know she feels me. Her stillness is a shield. Her silence, a war drum.

She’s angry. Still standing. And just damaged enough to be pliable.

Perfect.

I stand at the back of the room, arms folded, saying nothing. The new director of internal integrity, my own handpicked proxy, runs the meeting.

A clean-cut man named Dimas, who owes me more favors than he could repay in ten lifetimes. He’s good at what he does. Efficient. Charmless. Predictable. The kind of man who could dismantle a department and make it look like restructuring.

The kind of man Vera would see coming a mile away.

That’s the point.

She shifts once in her seat when Dimas mentions the PAC audit. Subtle. But I catch it. Her leg crosses left instead of right. A tell. I log it.

The others try too hard offering reports, projections, shallow fixes for reputational management. I tune them out.

My focus stays locked on her. On the way her fingers tap twice against her thigh when she is holding back a comment. On the flick of her eye when someone brings up “policy breaches now closed.”

She knows the truth. Or part of it. And she hates being spared.

Good.

She’ll understand, eventually, that survival was never a clean thing.

The meeting drags another twenty minutes before I slip out through the side corridor. I don’t need to say anything. My presence is the statement.

The reshuffling will begin in hours. The legal advisor in Vera’s division will resign. A new systems manager, mine, will arrive on Monday. Quiet changes, tucked beneath policy memos and press releases.

I move through the halls like a phantom, nodding at people I don’t care to remember. They part for me. They always do.

When I reach the temporary executive suite they’ve assigned me, I don’t sit. I stand at the window and wait.

Exactly seventeen minutes later, she comes to me.

The knock is polite. Controlled. But her entry is not. She pushes the door open like she wants it off the hinges.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she says, voice low, tight. “You being here.”

I turn slowly, hands still in my pockets.

“No,” I reply. “You didn’t.”

She takes three steps into the room, then stops. Her blazer is too tight across the shoulders. Her lipstick darker than usual. A battle face. She wears it well.

“You rerouted the investigation,” she says. “You made Turner fall on the sword.”

“He was guilty,” I say flatly.

“He was convenient.”

I tilt my head. “And you weren’t?”

She flinches. Barely. But I see it.

“I was handling it.”

“You were drowning.”

“That wasn’t your call.”

“It was always my call.”

Her breath pitches at that. Just a fraction of a second. But her fury turns sharp. “You don’t get to say that like you own me.”

“I don’t say it.” I step closer, voice even. “I prove it.”

She doesn’t move back. I’m not sure she could. There is something in her curled tight beneath the surface that’s feral, cornered, and magnificent.

“You’ve manipulated everything,” she spits. “The PAC brief. The press. My colleagues. My file.”

I say nothing. Let her list the crimes like confessions.

“You installed your people,” she continues. “You made sure I couldn’t quit even if I wanted to. You made this job, the thing I built, your pawn.”

My tone is measured. “You’re still standing.”

“That’s not the same as being free.”

Silence spins between us like a wire pulled taut.

She’s shaking, I realize. Not in fear. Not even in rage. But in something between betrayal and belief. Like a woman who saw the blade and still reached for the hilt.

“Why?” she asks finally.

“Because you’re not meant to disappear,” I say.

She laughs once. Cold. “You mean I’m not allowed.”

I let that sit.

Then I step back. Sit behind the desk. My voice cools.

“You’re still standing,” I repeat. “That’s all that matters.”

She stares at me.

And leaves without another word.

But I know something has shifted. The anger hasn’t burned her out. It has set her alight.

She’s fighting again.

And I will be the only one left standing close enough to catch her when she falls.

If she falls.

No. When she falls.

Alone in my temporary office that is essentially a sterile, glass-enclosed suite overlooking the city, I lock the door and lower the lighting.

The screens hum to life with a wave of my hand. Not Finch’s security terminals. Mine.

Encrypted. Isolated. Untraceable.

And there she is.

File: Calloway, V. A.

Not the official one. This is mine. My accumulation of everything the world thought unimportant. The details they missed because they weren’t looking through the right lens.

Photos, some public, some not.

Screenshots. Behavioral timelines. Risk matrixes overlaid with psychological inflection points.

The jacket she wore the day she won her first arbitration—creased in the left sleeve because she’d ironed it herself.

The note she wrote to herself the morning after her foster brother overdosed.

The email draft she never sent of her resignation letter, dated a year ago today.

She doesn’t know what I see when I watch her.

She doesn’t understand that it’s not about ownership in the way she fears.

It’s about necessity.

She needs to stand. And the world will knock her over, again and again, if I don’t keep building the walls around her.

But not chains. I don’t want her in chains.

I want her in a world where every door leads back to me. Where every option runs through my hand.

I want her reliant.

Not grateful. Not obedient. Just…realigned and shifted.

Where my presence stops being an anomaly and becomes background noise. The constant. The only fixed point.

She doesn’t love me.

Good.

Love is fleeting. Love bends under pressure. But dependence? Dependence becomes doctrine.

She’s still fighting it. That’s fine. The ones with fire take longer. But the end is always the same. The storm can rage, the glass can break, the walls can shake, but when the dust settles, I’ll be the only one left standing beside her.

The difference is…she’ll think she walked there on her own.

I sit back, fingers steepled, watching her image flicker on the screen.

Her body is curled in a chair in her office, lit only by her desk lamp. She thinks no one’s watching.

She thinks the war is external.

But I am not at war with her.

I am at war for her.

She just hasn’t figured that out yet.

***

The boardroom is a pantomime.

Polished walnut table. Brushed steel chairs. Floor-to-ceiling glass that presents transparency while concealing the quiet rot behind every decision made here.

They call it a “strategic update.”

What it is, in truth, is a ceremony. A silent acknowledgment that power has shifted, and no one dares say it aloud.

The directors glance my way when they speak now. Even the ones who pretend not to. Finch Corp is a labyrinth of pride and pedigree, but everyone here knows how fast an empire collapses without its secrets guarded.

And I am the one holding the locks.

I don’t speak much during the meeting. I don’t need to. My presence is the signature. My silence, the stamp.

Every time Vera’s department is mentioned, every time a new compliance hurdle is raised, I feel her pulse across the room.

She doesn’t look at me. But I know she’s listening. I know her better than they do. Better than she does.

They say she survived the scandal.

But that’s the mistake; she didn’t survive it.

I pulled her through it.

And now, the noose she thought was loosening has only tightened. Not to strangle. Just to tether. To remind her where the limits are.

The meeting ends with applause. Hollow and rehearsed.

***

Back in my office, I remove the blazer I wore like armor. The room is quiet. The blinds are drawn, the lights are low, and the temperature is set precisely. Not for comfort. For control.

No personal photographs. No books. No distractions.

Only the tools I need: a data terminal, a biometric safe, a monitor angled just enough to catch the eastern wing of the building where Vera’s office sits.

The screen pulses once, then stabilizes. She’s still there. Still processing.

It’s not love that drives me. Not even lust. That would make this simpler, some base need, a thrill, a hunger. I could manage that. Quarantine it. Cure it.

This is design.

A lifetime of studying structure, of mastering systems, of eliminating chaos before it ever has the chance to spread, and then she walked in.

Not with disorder. With variance.

She doesn’t belong to any algorithm I’ve built. And that’s what makes her vital. That’s why she had to be redirected.

They wanted to break her. The PAC, the board, the opportunists circling like blood-slick wolves.

I watched. I intervened. I replaced the landmines with walls, shifted the threat lines until she stood at the center of a maze only I can navigate.

She thinks she’s still moving freely.

She isn’t.

I adjusted every variable. I rerouted allies. Controlled damage. Crafted silence around her name like a shield.

This wasn’t reactionary. This was calculus.

And if she resents it, so be it. Resentment is a sharp tool. It cuts through weakness.

I saved her. That’s not a favor.

It’s a contract.

Unspoken, unwritten, but binding.

Because when the world turns on her again, and it will, they won’t remember the press releases. They won’t remember the HR statements or the staged accountability.

They’ll remember that she was untouched.

That she walked through fire and didn’t burn.

And when they wonder how, they’ll look for me.

They’ll see me.

And eventually, so will she.

Not with admiration. Not even with acceptance.

But with understanding.

She was never meant to survive the way they expected.

She was meant to survive my way.

And now the board is mine.