Page 55 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

Lucian is already in his office when I arrive. The door is cracked open, just enough to catch the dull blue glow from the monitors behind his desk. He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t glance. Doesn’t move.

Only his fingers shift slowly, and deliberately as they tap against the edge of his keyboard, as if time is counting down in his head and he is the one feeding it seconds.

I hover a moment, uncertain. “Morning,” I offer gently, keeping my tone light, but not unserious.

Nothing.

The silence throbs.

Eventually, he mutters without lifting his head, “Close the door behind you.”

So I do, not sure whether to read it as dismissal or protection. His voice isn’t cruel, just…frayed. Tight in a way I haven’t heard before. Like each word has been filtered through grit.

Back in my office, I try to shake it off, but my body has already read it for what it is. My shoulders stay tense. My heartbeat never quite slows. Something is wrong, not just between us, but inside him.

I wait an hour, then text.

Is everything okay?

He doesn’t reply.

At 4:57 p.m., his assistant knocks on my door and simply says, “Mr. Dane wants you ready to leave in ten.”

Right. The dinner. I’d almost forgotten. Marcus Roth—board member, snake in Brioni suits—and his third wife. Something about fundraising projections and philanthropic image alignment. I don’t care.

But Lucian does. Or at least, he did.

***

The elevator ride down is quiet. Not the usual quiet; this one has weight. Heavy with what isn’t being said.

He stands to my left, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his phone. He hasn’t checked it once.

His posture is impeccable. His face unreadable. A dark mirror.

I study him through the reflective wall panels, watching the lines around his eyes, the way his jaw clenches too tight, the pulse at his temple beating faster than it should.

“Lucian.” I don’t even mean to say it aloud.

His gaze doesn’t shift.

“If you don’t want me there…just say so,” I murmur, staring forward. “I’ll get out on the next floor.”

Only then does he move—slow turn of his head, eyes locking onto mine like glass pressed to fire.

“I need you there,” he says. His voice is low, like steel submerged in water. “Even if you hate it.”

I stare back, unsettled. “I don’t hate it.”

He doesn’t answer. And when I reach for his hand, he doesn’t notice.

***

The restaurant is glossy, overpriced, and soulless, just the way men like Roth like it. Bottles of vintage wine line the walls like trophies no one dares drink.

The lighting is golden and cold. Like an apology for something no one plans to fix.

Roth is already seated when we arrive. So is his wife, twenty years younger, all sculpted cheekbones and polished cruelty. I sit beside Lucian. Roth’s wife smiles at me like I’m a seasonal employee at best.

“Lucian,” Roth grins, raising his glass. “Good to see you’re still standing.”

Lucian gives him a sharp nod. “I’m not in the habit of falling.”

“Yet,” Roth says under his breath, amused.

The opening pleasantries are as hollow as expected. Wine flows. The waiter fawns. Roth’s wife says something about Milan and detox. I count how many times she looks at Lucian. Seven.

Then it comes.

Somewhere between the second course and the dessert menus, Roth’s wife cocks her head toward me and muses, “Office affairs are such delicate things. It’s wild how common they’re becoming these days.”

Her tone is syrupy sweet, like perfume hiding something rotted.

I blink. Slowly.

Lucian doesn’t move.

Roth’s lips twitch into something that doesn’t quite qualify as a smile.

“Well, the younger generation is…passionate.”

My throat goes dry.

But Lucian doesn’t snap.

He doesn’t flinch.

Instead, he lifts his glass and turns slightly toward me—no smile, just those haunted, electric eyes.

“To Vera,” he says, voice calm, poised, dangerous. “The only person in this room who doesn’t wear a mask.”

Silence. Clean and brutal.

Roth goes still. His wife looks like someone has slapped her across the cheek with a velvet glove. And me?

I sit there with heat crawling up my throat, my chest tight, my hand shaking just slightly where it rests in my lap.

Lucian drinks.

And I realize something that terrifies me more than any insult at that table.

He didn’t say it to defend me.

He said it to expose them and to remind me, with surgical precision, just how cold he could be when something inside him breaks.

---

The car ride home is lined in silence—the kind that wraps too tight around my ribs and dares me to break it. The air-conditioning hums low, blending with the quiet roll of tires across asphalt, but everything inside the cabin feels too still.

Lucian stares out the window, his jaw angled toward the glass, one arm stretched across his lap like it is holding something in. His other hand rests loosely near the center console—not clenched, not shaking, just there.

I watch him from my side. Watch the way his expression never softens, never cracks. Just layers of ice pressed together until they shimmer like control.

I clear my throat softly. “That was…brutal back there.”

He doesn’t turn his head.

I try again. “Was that about them, or about you?”

Still nothing.

Only when we pass the turn toward 72nd does he speak, voice low and razor-edged.

“What you saw tonight?” he says, eyes still on the passing lights. “That was polite.”

I flinch at the quiet venom in it. Polite? That? I’d seen boardroom war games, verbal flayings disguised as diplomacy—but whatever he’d done at that table…it hadn’t been defense. It had been a message.

“Lucian….” I shift slightly, folding one leg beneath me. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?”

A beat.

Then he turns—slowly, deliberately—and meets my gaze like he is staring through me, not at me.

“No.”

The word lands flat and final.

I blink. “Why not?”

His eyes don’t waver, but something behind them does. A twitch. A flicker of something raw and ugly and unguarded.

“Because you already think I’m too much,” he says quietly. “You don’t know what I’d become if I let myself go all the way.”

His voice isn’t angry. It isn’t defensive. It’s weary. Terrifying in its restraint.

I open my mouth, then close it. I don’t know what to say to that. Don’t know how to unravel a sentence that sounds like a warning and a confession in the same breath.

So I look at him instead. At the shadow under his cheekbones, the too-tight grip he keeps on himself. Not out of pride. Out of necessity. Like he’s holding back something that has claws.

The rest of the ride passes in silence again, but not the kind I can settle into. This one has edges. This one bleeds.

***

He doesn’t say a word as we step into the penthouse. Just pulls off his jacket, loosens his collar, and moves toward the bedroom like he is walking underwater. I follow—not to crowd him, but because something in me can’t let him drift further away.

He sits on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. His eyes stare down at the floor like the answers are hiding in the grain of the wood.

I stand across from him, arms folded. The distance between us feels harder than it had at the restaurant.

“You don’t have to protect me from everything,” I say softly.

He looks up and something cracks for a second. His face doesn’t change much, but his eyes…they go bare. Not broken. Not lost. Just…stripped.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

I walk to him, slow and careful, and kneel in front of him. Place a hand on his chest, right over the spot where I can feel his heart.

It isn’t steady.

It is racing. Wild and panicked, like it hasn’t had permission to be human in too long.

“Then let me carry some of it with you,” I whisper.

Lucian stares down at me, his throat moving with a swallowed response. His hand twitches like he wants to touch me or push me away.

Then he stands up.

Steps back.

Shakes his head once, hard. “If I give you even a piece….” He exhales, like the words cost him. “You’ll never look at me the same again.”

I don’t flinch. But inside, something reels.

Not from fear.

From the truth in his voice.

From the fact that for all the walls Lucian Dane had built, the real prison is the belief that no one could see him and still stay.

And I’m not sure what scares me more—that he believes it, or that he might be right.

He doesn’t speak again that night.

After the words fall between us—jagged and final—Lucian moves into the bathroom, closes the door gently behind him, and doesn’t come out for twenty minutes. I stay where he’d left me, standing in the dim bedroom light, hand still tingling from where it had touched his chest.

I can still feel the uneven rhythm of his heartbeat—not just in my fingers, but under my skin. Like my own body has registered his unraveling before my mind can fully admit it.

When he emerges, the armor is back on. Shirtless now, but somehow more dressed than before. His face is composed, his walk deliberate, his voice sealed behind silence.

He doesn’t look at me.

I want to scream.

Not out of anger, but out of desperation. I can see it now—the truth I’d been too cautious to name.

Lucian isn’t trying to hurt me. He isn’t pushing me away because he’d stopped feeling something. He is doing it because he still does. Because it is easier to lie, to bury it, than to let the rot in him spill out and stain me.

But he is bleeding anyway, just not where I can touch.

***

I follow him into the kitchen without a word, watch him pour a drink with the kind of precision that only men at war with themselves possess. One ice cube. No spill. No sound except glass on glass.

“You’re not made of steel, you know,” I say softly, leaning against the island counter.

He doesn’t reply.

I step closer. “You try to be. But I see it now. You’re…something else. Something that’s breaking.”

Still nothing.

Only a quiet clink as he sets the glass down, untouched.

“Lucian,” I whisper. “Whatever this is—whatever you’re carrying—it’s going to devour you if you keep trying to hold it alone.”

His head drops slightly, like the words hit a place he doesn’t want me to reach.

I move to him again, this time slower. Not to console, not to heal, but to see. To look past the curated control, past the composure and intellect and detachment. I need to find what he is so sure I’d run from.

And when he finally lifts his eyes to mine, I see it.

Just grief. Ancient and personal. Like he is mourning something that hasn’t even died yet.

“You think if I knew,” I say, voice steady, “I’d leave?”

He doesn’t answer.

But his silence tells me everything.

I touch his arm. He doesn’t flinch this time. Just stands there, breathing like it hurts. One breath at a time. Measured. Fragile.

I can feel the tremor just beneath his skin.

This isn’t the man the world sees—not the cold genius, not the CEO with cameras in every corner, not the monster they whisper about in secret boardrooms. This is someone unraveling. Quietly. Completely.

And still, he won’t let me in.

Not because he doesn’t trust me.

Because he doesn’t trust that anything human in him is worth surviving.

***

Later, when he finally lays down beside me—fully clothed, eyes on the ceiling—I don’t try to talk. I just rest my palm over his chest again and wait.

Wait for the silence to soften.

Wait for the armor to crack just a little wider.

His hand eventually comes up and rests over mine. Not tight. Just enough.

And in that small, wordless surrender, I understand something I hadn’t before:

Lucian Dane isn’t shutting me out because he wants to be alone.

He is shutting me out because he doesn’t believe he can be loved and known at the same time.

But I’m still here, and I’m not leaving