Page 43 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The buzz of the surveillance feed is usually white noise to me because it is constant, predictable, and manageable. But tonight, it feels intrusive, like the hum of insects crawling beneath my skin.

I sit in the leather chair in my temporary Finch Corp office, deliberately removed from the penthouse where I usually keep her world under lock. This space is smaller, colder. More exposed. I’ve chosen it on purpose.

Vera has been quiet all day.

Not emotionally silent—that is never her. She carries herself like a storm dressed in law and silk, defiant in a way that makes most men wilt. But she hasn’t fought me. Not really.

She hasn’t spoken to me, hasn’t marched into this office to demand my exit like she used to. That is what unsettles me.

Silence, from Vera Calloway, is rarely peace. It is preparation.

I lean forward, eyes locked on the muted footage of her floor. She hasn’t returned to her office since the boardroom meeting. Instead, she’s locked herself in one of the smaller legal lounges, the one with poor lighting and no camera access.

I respect the move. She remembers my blind spots. Or maybe she’s testing whether I still have them.

I don’t.

The corner of my mouth curves slightly.

Rourke’s voice filters in through the secured earpiece. “The audit list is compiled. Three in her division flagged as security risks. One of them is the Beth girl.”

“Redact Beth’s name,” I say calmly, not lifting my gaze from the screen. “Vera trusts her. That’s leverage I can’t afford to burn yet.”

“You’re protecting her?”

“No. I’m using her.”

I mean that. Emotion has no place here. Vera is not a lover. She is not a goal. She is a moving equation that I have spent years solving.

But the longer she stays quiet, the more my certainty fractures.

I stand. The tailored fabric of my shirt clings to my back like tension made tangible. I walk toward the glass window and look out over the city.

Just like me.

Except I am tired of reflections.

I want presence. Contact. Tension that crackles in real air, not on a monitor.

My phone vibrates.

Anonymous number. I don’t need to read the message; it is encrypted in the pattern I designed for her. Vera’s code.

I open it.

"You’re tightening the walls. I see it.

But I don’t choke easy."

God.

I close my eyes and let the pulse behind my jaw slow. She is speaking to me in riddles again. Warnings disguised as defiance. And yet, beneath it all, an invitation.

She hasn’t blocked me or deleted the burner line. She wants to be heard.

I move back to the console, fingers flying across the keys. I pull up audio from the last twenty-four hours of her apartment.

The sound is low, private, intimate. The pop of a wine cork. The drag of fabric over skin. A sigh, frustrated and tired. Her voice, a whisper in the dark.

“I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid of me.”

That.

That’s it.

I lean back in the chair. That’s the shift I’ve been waiting for—not obedience. Not collapse. Honesty.

The fear she didn’t want to admit wasn’t about the cameras or the manipulation or even my presence. It was about her. What she wanted. What she couldn’t stop wanting.

I tap into the private drive and pull up her psychological profile that no one else has access to. Compiled over four years. It isn’t a file. It is a confession. Every look she gives others. Every moment she thinks she is alone.

I’ve catalogued her tells. Her patterns.

She unravels when she feels cornered. But she comes alive when she chooses to enter the cage.

A voice buzzes at the edge of my comm system. It’s Rourke again. “Do you want to pull her in tonight? Or wait?”

I pause.

“No,” I say finally. “Not yet.”

Let her pace in the lounge. Let her simmer. Let her feel my silence, her isolation, the impossibility of the maze around her.

I don’t want a trapped woman.

I want a willing one with nowhere else to run.

***

Later that evening, I return to my surveillance wall.

I dim the lights, pour a measure of scotch, and pull up the footage from Vera’s visit to the restricted stairwell yesterday.

There she is, alone. Clutching the railing like it might keep her from snapping. She’d screamed, once.

No words, just fury. And then silence, her hand pressed over her mouth.

I don’t sleep. Not the way others do. When the world turns off its lights, I switch to a different frequency—quieter, darker, sharper.

Tonight is no different. Except the darkness no longer hums with power.

It thrums with her absence.

She’s pulling away.

I feel it.

It’s not physical—she’s still within reach. It’s worse. She’s building internal barricades. Emotional fortresses, silent alarms.

I saw it today when she passed me in the hallway at Finch. She didn’t flinch, didn’t falter; she looked through me.

A ghosted woman. Controlled fury disguised as poise.

That’s not rebellion. That’s preparation.

I watch the security feeds in silence. Vera’s apartment is dim. She’s brushing her teeth. The mundane intimacy of it slices through me. Her hair is pulled back, revealing her jawline, firm and defiant.

She spits, rinses, and stares at her own reflection for a second too long.

I see her thoughts in the small tightening of her brows. She’s doubting herself.

I can work with doubt. Doubt is a crack. And cracks, if you’re patient, widen.

Rourke’s voice cuts into my focus through the comm channel. “We’ve completed the network patch in legal. Wiped all traces of the proxy documents. Forensics would call it clean.”

I nod slowly, eyes still fixed on Vera’s mirror reflection. “And Finch’s board?”

“They think the breach was a systems vulnerability tied to a former vendor.”

“And Vera?”

“Do you think she bought it?”

“No.” I lean forward, folding my hands. “She didn’t buy it. But she can’t disprove it. That’s enough.”

She’s brushing her hair now. Long, deliberate strokes. Not for vanity. For control.

I know that ritual. I studied it in her file. I watched it replay for years.

When her foster father died, she brushed her hair thirty times every night.

When Finch denied her first project proposal, she did it again. When her name was plastered across leaked reports two weeks ago, she brushed her hair for thirteen minutes straight.

She’s trying to stay sane.

But she’s still looking in the mirror.

She wants to see what I see.

I rise, stripping off my blazer, folding it with surgical precision. The hum of the surveillance room fades behind me as I enter the adjacent space, what I call the “replication cell.” It’s identical to her apartment in dimensions, lighting, and layout.

We modeled it from heat maps and optical depth scans. Not because I needed it to mimic her world.

Because I wanted to rehearse mine.

Every move I make is calculated down to how close I should stand when she speaks, how long I can pause before she looks away, how fast her pupils dilate when I step too close.

The collar still rests in the velvet box on the replica table.

She didn’t destroy the one I gave her.

That’s enough of a signal.

I move to the table and open the file I keep here, not the one on the cloud, not the encrypted mirror drive, but this: the original dossier. The one I built before Finch knew her name. Before I knew mine.

Page after page, layered with annotations, voice scans, scent markers, and memories. A childhood photo, grainy and curled at the edges. Her unjust middle school suspension letter. A poetry notebook entry written at sixteen.

“Don’t let the silence between two people become a graveyard of truths they never buried.”

I read that line once every week.

I flip the page to her recent threat profile. Her social circle has shrunk. Beth is her only constant. Jay’s loyalty is wavering.

And Damien Strathmore…a dangerous wildcard. Entitled, crude, and predatory.

Exactly the type Vera would choose if she wanted to provoke me.

And I know she will. Soon.

I set the file down and enter the final access code into the secure comms console. A static screen blinks to life. It’s linked to a mobile relay unit positioned just three floors below Vera’s building.

I never leave her unguarded.

Not really.

“Do not intercept,” I say quietly to the man on the other end. “But keep eyes on the sixth floor. I want timestamped footage of anyone who enters.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even her.”

Especially her.

I kill the comm and sit at the edge of the replica bed. My palms rest on my knees. My spine is straight. But my head…my head is tilting.

Why do I need to be this close?

She’s not asking for protection.

She’s not asking for anything.

And that is what unspools me.

If she begged, I could ignore her.

If she fought, I could dominate her.

But this?

This silence?

This restraint?

It cracks me.

I think of her voice when she whispered, “You don’t get to play god….”

She was wrong.

I don’t decide.

I design.

It’s not the same. One is force. The other is devotion.

She doesn’t see the difference yet. But she will.

My phone buzzes—coded alert.

New calendar entry just appeared in Vera’s company schedule. Location: Ravelle Lounge. Time: Tomorrow at 8:30 p.m.

And the reservation name is Damien Strathmore.

I close my eyes.

There it is.

She’s baiting me.

She wants a reaction. Public or private, she doesn’t care. She wants to see if she still has claws beneath my skin.

She does.

But I won’t give her the scene she’s expecting.

I’ll give her the reckoning she deserves.

The softest kind.

The kind that comes dressed in a tailored suit and silence, watching her laugh at another man’s joke while calculating every weak tendon in his wrist.

She doesn’t understand the kind of war she’s just declared.

I admire her for it.

I press my thumb into the scanner, and the lights dim further, switching to night surveillance. On the far wall, Vera’s sleeping form fills the screen. Curled in the center of her bed like something waiting to be touched, but never daring to ask.

I stare at her face.

Not out of longing.

Out of certainty.

She thinks she’s testing me.

But every move she makes—every breath, every betrayal—only sharpens my plan.

And tomorrow night?

Tomorrow night, I answer.