Page 60 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

Twelve nodes down.

Two missing.

The map stretches across the screen like a neural net of human failure, each shuttered data point marked in red. Bangkok. Mombasa. Tashkent. Cairo. Every one of them an auction site dressed in synthetic anonymity—trafficking lists coded as “inventory,” children stripped into metrics.

I’ve burned them all.

Wiped them from their servers. Ruined their handlers. Left their investors with nothing but fear.

But the last two…they don’t go dark.

They disappear.

There’s a difference.

Disappearance implies intent. Strategy. An adversary that knows I’m watching and knows how to vanish.

I stare at the empty gaps on the global overlay, one hand resting on the glass table in front of me, the other curling slowly into a fist. The hum of the bunker around me—the subdued buzz of encryption crawlers, live satellite feeds, server cooling systems—is a familiar kind of silence now.

The kind that comes before something breaks.

Behind me, the war room’s lights shift to deep amber as a fresh datastream comes online.

Another signal spike. Another bait trail. Another goddamn ghost.

Rourke stands by the door, tablet in hand, face stiff.

“They scrubbed Marseille,” he says. “Everything. No traces. No heat signatures. Warehouse empty. Burned after evacuation.”

I don’t look at him. “Time?”

“Eleven hours before our arrival. It was scheduled.”

“Any survivors?”

“None.” A pause. “But they left something behind.”

That makes me turn.

Rourke extends the evidence bag—sealed, thermally insulated.

I take it.

Inside: a single photograph.

It is old. Faded. Glossy in the way only printed photos from the early 2000s ever were. There is no timestamp. No metadata.

Just an image.

Vera.

Maybe eight. Maybe younger.

Standing on a cracked sidewalk in front of a weather-worn government building. Her arms hang stiff at her sides. Her expression blank.

Her face circled in red ink.

Below the circle, handwritten:

#1093—RQ STATUS: VOIDED

My throat goes dry.

I stare at it, unmoving. Every breath slows to a knife’s edge.

It isn’t a warning.

It is a message.

They’d seen her before I ever did.

Before I watched her in the boardroom. Before the charity galas. Before the files in the foundation’s corruption case. Before the obsession took root.

This isn’t just about trafficking.

This is about her.

I clench the photo tighter, the plastic crinkling under my grip.

“Where was this left?” I ask, my voice low.

“Pinned to a wall,” Rourke says. “Next to an exit gate. It was the only thing not burned.”

I say nothing.

Because everything in me has gone cold.

Back at the main terminal, I pull up her childhood record. Group home admissions. Foster movement logs. One address pings Marseille—six months, undocumented transfer, buried in a missing year.

They’d had her.

Or they tried.

And then…voided.

My head drops. Not in defeat. Not in exhaustion. In calculation. Because someone inside the network knew her value. And someone else had erased the transaction.

That means someone still wants her or, worse, has plans for her.

“Keep this off the intel grid,” I say. “No digital trail. No AI flags. Not a whisper.”

Rourke nods. “And Vera?”

I don’t answer.

Because I cannot.

Because I still haven’t decided.

She’s suspicious. She’s already looking. I can feel her pushing against the boundaries I’ve laid down like velvet traps.

She’s smarter than I wanted her to be.

And she’s closer than I ever meant to let her come.

But this changes everything.

I slide the photograph into my inner coat pocket.

She doesn’t know yet.

But she will.

And when she does, the fire I’ve tried to keep her from will find her.

I flip the image.

On the back, scrawled in jagged, deliberate handwriting: She was always the prize. But you stole her first. The Crown never forgets.

I stare at the words for a full minute. Then another.

Time in the bunker warps. My breath thickens. The light in the room seems to retract.

She was always the prize.

Not random.

Not a byproduct of a broken system I happened to intercept.

The Crown is an invisible but powerful body of human and material assets that have their tentacles in every sphere of power I have tried to dominate.

'The Crown' is the only identifying factor that these assets share.

I kept a list of every asset affiliated with them I could find but have had no luck finding the head of 'The Crown'.

Here they are yet again, clearly not coincidence.

She was known, marked, and hunted. Long before I ever found her. Long before she ever knew who she was.

And I took her.

I didn’t mean to. But I did. I swept her into my world. I installed surveillance in her home. I monitored her voice, her breath, the tilt of her head when she couldn’t decide what to say. I turned her life into my own private domain and called it love.

But someone else had circled her first.

Someone else thought they owned her before I ever laid claim.

And now they are reminding me.

You stole her first.

I stand still. Let the heat build in my jaw, my spine, my gut.

The monitor next to me pings with another silent feed alert, another blinking access flag.

Without looking, I step forward and punch through the screen.

It cracks with a thunderous pop, shards spraying across the steel floor. Sparks sputter from the impact point. I don’t flinch. The pain in my knuckles doesn’t register.

The Crown never forgets.

I stand over the wreckage like a man who’d just opened his own coffin.

My blood drips onto the console. One drop. Then another.

Footsteps echo down the corridor.

Rourke enters. “Sir—”

I don’t turn. My voice comes low. Controlled. But beneath it: rage volcanic enough to shatter nations.

“Kill the list.”

He hesitates. “Sir?”

I turn now. Slowly. My gaze finds his like a trigger being pulled.

“One by one,” I say. “Every name tied to the original chain. Full ledger. No survivors. No mercy. No negotiation.”

His mouth opens slightly. “Even the diplomatic flags? The Crown-level accounts—”

“Especially them.”

He nods. And leaves without another word.

I pick up the photo again, fingers smudged with blood. I stare at it. At her.

Someone had circled her and voided the claim. But she isn’t voided; she is mine now.

***

Hours later, I sit in the surveillance lounge—lights off, only her feed playing.

Vera lies curled on my bed, tangled in the sheets. One of my black button-downs clings to her like ink across porcelain.

She sleeps restlessly, as she has for weeks now with her shoulders shifting and jaw clenched even in sleep.

I study the faint movement of her chest. The twitch of her fingers. The way her knee bends in toward her stomach, like she is protecting something only her subconscious remembers.

She doesn’t know what they’d once planned for her or why they’d circled her.

She doesn’t know what voided really meant. That at some point, someone inside that sick empire had marked her unusable. Discarded. Or hidden.

She doesn’t know I now hold the ledger where her name once sat, redacted.

And she will never know.

Not if I finish what I started.

Not if I burn every name on that list until no one left remembers why they ever looked at her in the first place.

I whisper to the screen.

“I’m not protecting you from monsters.”

“I’m becoming one for you.”

And I will not stop.

***

I enter the clearance code for the final directive.

A secure program blinks open: CRN-0X4.

My finger hovers over the EXECUTE key.

Once triggered, there will be no walking it back. No press leaks. No extraditions. No cells.

This won’t be justice.

It will be erasure.

Rourke enters behind me. “You’re really doing it.”

I don’t look at him.

“She was on the list,” I say. “As a child.”

He exhales slowly. “Do you think she knows?”

“No.”

“And when she finds out?”

I turn now. “She won’t.”

“And if she does?”

My jaw tightens. “Then I hope she never forgives me.”

I sign the first strike order.

A Crown broker in Jakarta. Asset flagged under five pseudonyms. Known for his collection preferences. One of the original investors in “AdaCode.”

Two hours later, he is found face down in a koi pond, wrists slit vertically. No sign of forced entry. Authorities rule it a suicide.

I know better.

My second name is already marked.

And there will be more.

I watch the red dots on the screen begin to blink out. One by one.

The purge has begun.