Page 41 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The storm doesn’t come in thunder or flame. It comes in silence.

I sit in my upper penthouse study, not the control suite hidden in the city’s spine, nor the den that buzzes with screens and blinking data. This room is stripped of noise.

Nothing here hums. Nothing dares breathe without permission. Except me.

The file on my desk is old. Worn. Pages curled at the corners from too many reads. The first dossier I ever built on her. The spine cracks somewhere between the sixth time I revise it and the twentieth time I memorize it.

Each tab is labeled in fine graphite script—school reports, psychological evaluations, interviews from her group home staff. The kind of personal history no one volunteers but I’d learned to extract anyway.

A thousand hours of surveillance, and still, she finds ways to surprise me.

Last night was one of them.

She had sat in her parked car for thirty-four minutes. Idle. Unmoving. Lights off. That wasn’t fear. That was a tactic. Processing.

When she finally entered her building, she didn’t turn on her living room lights. She sat in darkness. Listening, perhaps. Preparing.

I have not touched her since the rooftop night. I haven’t breached her apartment again, not physically. But she still feels me. Still looks over her shoulder like the air carries fingerprints.

That is control. Not the kind built on force but one sewn carefully into her perception. A presence not always seen, but always sensed.

And yet, she isn’t breaking. She is adapting.

The old Vera, the one from the early PAC files, would’ve called the police. Would’ve blown it all open. But this version of her? She stays silent. Studies the pattern. Traces the edges of the trap.

She is learning the rules. Mine.

I close the file and lean back in the chair, letting the city pour through the panoramic windows. Finch Corp’s tower rises in the near distance, hollow and gleaming under the moon’s disinterest.

Soon, it will be entirely mine. Not through inheritance or brute acquisition—but through slow, surgical infiltration.

I already own the most critical systems. HR. Legal. Internal affairs. All the veins.

And Vera?

She’d been preserved. Not by accident. Not by grace. But by my hand—exact and brutal.

A soft knock interrupts my thoughts.

“Enter,” I say without looking.

Rourke steps in, dressed in charcoal gray and purpose. He never wastes time with pleasantries.

“She’s requested access to the internal PR threads,” he says. “Claims it’s for her division’s cleanup timeline.”

“She knows,” I murmur.

“She suspects.”

I nod. “Let her access them. But feed her the mock threads we created last week. The ones that confirm the leak was pinned on Turner and that Legal acted independently.”

“She’ll see through that eventually.”

“Eventually doesn’t concern me. Only now does.”

Rourke hesitates. “You’re letting her play.”

“No,” I correct quietly. “I’m letting her feel like she’s playing.”

We stand there for a breath, the space between us tight with unsaid things.

Finally, Rourke adds, “There’s chatter among the board. Some don’t like that you’ve embedded so deeply without a formal transition plan.”

“They’ll like me when their stock value doubles. And if they don’t, they’re replaceable.”

His lips twitch at the edge. Approval. Or fear. I don’t care which.

As he turns to leave, I add, “Keep her under visual until midnight. No audio unless she initiates contact.”

“Understood.”

The door clicks shut, and I return to the view.

There is no pleasure in this anymore. Only necessity. Only outcome.

The part of me that used to enjoy the game, the quiet dance of masks and mirrored moves, has thinned into something sharper. Less poetic.

I don’t want her to look at me with admiration.

I want her to understand there is no world where I don’t exist beside her.

And if she wants freedom, she’ll have to ask me how much it costs.

***

The city is a grid of controlled chaos beneath me. From this height, the movements look orderly—predictable even. People crossing streets. Lights changing. Cars weaving.

None of them know they’re being watched. Controlled.

I sit alone in my terrace bunker, a black folder open on the sleek table before me.

Vera’s file.

She thinks she’s taken a breath of freedom. That she’s navigating the storm with sharpened instincts. But what she doesn’t see, or what she refuses to see, is that the calm around her is not natural. It’s designed. Maintained.

By me.

I trace my finger over a grainy scan of her scholarship application from the foster group home. The essay in her own words was stubborn, sharp-edged, and already cloaked in armor.

She was young, but already building walls. I’ve read it more times than I’ll admit.

The intercom clicks. No voice. Just a soft chime. Rourke.

I don’t move. Not yet. Let him wait.

I flip the page. Her performance review from Finch Corp, two years ago. Handwritten compliments in the margins, none of them mine. All of them dismissed.

She doesn’t remember that she was almost overlooked. That it took one anonymous push to land her the PAC oversight.

That push was me.

When I finally buzz Rourke in, he enters like always: efficient, unreadable, and already mid-sentence.

“Your system flagged a ping on Vera’s ID badge, boardroom access, forty minutes past closing.”

I don’t look up. “She’s not reporting in.”

“She’s…just sitting there.” He says it carefully. “Hasn’t touched her laptop. No sign of calls.”

That makes me pause.

I stand. My knuckles rest on the table’s edge as I look toward the far wall where her most recent live feed flickers. Her figure leans back in the boardroom chair, eyes half-lidded, unfocused.

She’s not plotting.

She’s spiraling.

And it’s my fault.

I told myself she’d adapt. That pressure would forge something unbreakable. But I underestimated the human cost.

Not because I care, at least not in the way normal people do. But because I need her functioning and sharp, furious even.

Not…like this.

“She’s off pattern,” I mutter.

Rourke nods. “Want me to pull her out?”

“No.” I finally look away. “Pull everyone else in.”

He hesitates. “You mean—?”

“Yes.” I close the file and slide it into the drawer. “Tighten the leash. Move up the integration timeline.”

There’s silence between us. He knows what this means. I’ve stayed out of her physical space since the rooftop. But this isn’t about indulgence. It’s about containment.

“She thinks she’s winning,” I add. “Let her. For now.”

Rourke turns to leave, but pauses. “Sir. What if she tries to leave entirely?”

My jaw tightens. The idea sits like a shard beneath my skin.

“She won’t.”

“And if she does?”

I walk to the edge of the terrace and grip the railing, knuckles white. The wind is sharp tonight. Far below, Finch Corp’s tower glows like a monolith.

“If she runs,” I say quietly, “I’ll burn the map she thinks she’s using.”

I stay up there long after Rourke’s gone. Watching her. Not through screens this time. But in my mind, tracing the angles of her and mapping out every step she might take.

And I won’t lose.

***

I watch her.

That is all I can do, for now.

Not through glass. Not from above. But from the shadows of a system I built and the veil of control I’ve tightened around her world like a noose sewn with silk.

From the surveillance feed embedded discreetly behind her new office’s lighting panel, Vera sits at her desk with her chin high and hands composed while the rest of the department flinches with performative courtesy. Their glances skim over her like she is a ghost that has outlived its burial.

She is no longer disgraced, but she isn’t embraced either.

Good.

She isn’t meant to belong to them.

Not anymore.

I lean forward slightly, forearms pressing into the polished steel of my temporary operations desk, eyes fixed to the center monitor where she types with the calm of someone trying to pretend she still had a choice. She doesn’t.

Every file she accesses has already been mirrored. Every email parsed through filters I’d designed. The language of her autonomy remains—but the meaning has shifted.

I haven’t done this out of cruelty. I haven’t moved the chessboard just to topple her pride. No, this is how you protect something as volatile, as extraordinary, as Vera Calloway.

She doesn’t know what to do with the way I’ve embedded myself into her world. But she’s stopped pretending she’s not aware of it.

She’s stopped pretending I’m not there.

And something about that…something about that makes me reckless.

I stand from the console and move to the drawer beneath the central terminal.

The folder sits where it always does—cream, smooth, bound in leather. Labeled not with her name, but with a symbol. A symbol I’d used since long before I ever spoke to her. Since I first read her file. Since I first learned how much they’d taken from her, reshaped her, discarded her.

Asset files were meant to be clinical.

This one isn’t.

Inside, I keep no photos. Just observation notes, sketches of behavioral patterns, and transcripts of every unsent message she wrote at 2 a.m. and deleted.

I’d memorized them.

Especially the ones where her doubt bled through the screen like cracked glass.

“I hate this building.” “I keep thinking the walls are thinner than they look.” “Some days, I wonder if I’ve already been replaced.”

She hadn’t been. She’d been reclaimed.

And that difference is the thing she hasn’t yet accepted.

I close the folder and straighten, stretching out the kink forming in my shoulder from too many hours seated in the hum of my system. The cameras pan on silent cycles, each one synchronized. No glitches. No hitches.

And yet…I can feel something off.

Something beneath the surface.

Not from her. From the system itself.

Rourke is late reporting in. The usual daily scrub hasn’t triggered a full memory sweep on our last loop—an error margin of exactly two minutes and seven seconds.

Insignificant to anyone else.

But I don’t tolerate misfires.

I tap in a direct override code and force the internal memory buffer to expand. Every packet of data floods forward, screen by screen, until a brief spike in latency confirms my suspicion: Someone has attempted to probe the system.

From inside Finch.

The access point comes from one of the legacy legal terminals Vera’s department had been banned from three weeks ago.

Not her.

Someone else.

I straighten.

My pulse doesn’t quicken. I don’t panic. I simply calculate.

This isn’t a breach, not yet.

It’s a warning.

Someone is fishing.

Someone with enough clearance to know where to look, but not enough precision to do it without leaving tracks.

That narrows it down to three possibilities.

None of them acceptable.

I reach for my phone and dial the secured line to the backup enclave beneath our city shell.

“Code Violet. Scramble tier-three protocol. Target priority: internal leak. Quiet audit. Ten-hour window.”

“Confirmed,” comes the reply.

I end the call.

Against better judgment, I return to the surveillance feed.

Back to her.

Vera is gone.

The office is empty. Her chair is pushed slightly back, her mug is missing, and her laptop is closed.

I check timestamps. She left three minutes ago.

No itinerary.

No visible trigger.

I switch feeds. Catch the faint trail of her heels disappearing down the lobby corridor.