Page 66 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The sky looks too quiet.

I watch the clouds blur against the plane’s window, a translucent hush stretching over the Atlantic. Altitude and silence are the only places I feel remotely in control these days. But even that illusion cracks when the alert pulses red across the embedded seat monitor.

My knuckles whiten against the leather armrest. I don’t speak. Don’t flinch. But a hairline fracture splinters down the spine of my calm.

I don’t ask who. I already know. This isn’t random. It is calculated and symbolic.

They aren’t just attacking my network, they are mocking it.

I lean forward and open a new feed. Satellite drone footage. A modest villa—Montenegrin stonework, coastal view—now a charred crater with black tendrils of smoke curling skyward. I recognize the outline of the courtyard tiles. I’ve walked them myself. I remember the women we’d hidden there.

Sera and Leila. Rescued six months ago. No families. No traceable identities. Vera had video-called them last week.

Now they are names in a body log. The smoke rising from their roof is the only mourning they’ll receive.

The pilot’s voice filters in over the intercom. “Zurich approach in seven. Prepare for descent.”

I mute him.

Instead, I type four words into the encrypted channel: “No press. No traces.”

Then one more message, only to my inner circle: “Run facial reconstructions. Full spectrum. No survivors.”

***

Zurich is chaos.

I enter the command hub beneath a defunct art gallery. High ceilings. Cold floors. Rows of analysts barking over blinking monitors. Red pulses. Multiple pings. Burned servers. Leaked relays. My empire is bleeding.

Rourke meets me at the door, jaw clenched, fingers bruised from punching a terminal earlier. He doesn’t speak. Just hands me a tablet. Live stream of the site’s aftermath. And adjacent to it: satellite stills of two figures leaving the perimeter six minutes before detonation.

I zoom in.

Unmarked faces. Hazy distortion tech. But the gait—military. Trained.

“The Montenegro girls?” I ask.

“Gone. Almost instantly. No medical response window. No identifiers left.”

“What about Vera’s comm records?”

“Already deleted. They erased her from the logs before the blast.”

I feel it then—not rage. Not grief. Precision. The enemy is targeting vulnerability, memory, softness.

They are sending me a message.

And then the second blow hits.

“Sir,” one of the analysts says. “You need to see this.”

He turns the screen.

brEAKING NEWS: SENATOR PATRICK RENN FOUND DEAD IN HIS DC HOME.

Apparent suicide, sources claim. Gunshot wound. No note found.

I don’t sit.

Don’t blink.

Renn had once offered me unofficial protection. A weak-spined moderate with just enough power to matter and just enough guilt to keep his hands half-clean.

He hadn’t known everything, but he’d known enough. Enough to be dangerous.

And now he is dead.

“Time of death?” I ask.

“Two hours ago. Before the safehouse.”

I nod. It makes sense. This isn’t escalation.

This is decapitation.

“They’re cutting off the heads,” I say quietly.

Rourke turns to me. “Yours is next.”

I don’t disagree.

I tap my fingers against the cold metal table. A rhythm to remember what mattered. There are only three options now: dismantle everything, hide forever, or scorch the earth.

I’m not good at hiding.

***

I return to the penthouse past midnight. It is raining. The streets of Zurich gleam like bruises under glass.

Vera meets me at the threshold of the hallway. She is barefoot, in one of her oversized sweatshirts, hair pulled into a half-bun, eyes slightly puffy from lack of sleep. She’s waited up.

I stop a few paces from her. She studies me.

“You look different,” she says.

I don’t answer.

Just remove my jacket. Hang it slowly on the brass hook. My hands move like they belong to someone else.

Then I walk past her. Into the darkened bedroom. Alone.

***

She follows me. I hear her footsteps stop behind the door. She doesn’t say anything.

Neither do I.

The room is dim and lit only by a faint glow from the screen where I’d left the last surveillance loop running. Vera curls into one side of the bed as I sit at the edge, palms pressed together.

We stay in that silence for minutes, maybe hours. Me thinking of detonated rooms and dead allies. Her, perhaps, of things she’ll never be told.

There was a time when I would’ve lied. Softened the sharpness. Now? There isn’t room for mercy. I don’t need her comfort, I need her alive.

Because the war isn’t coming anymore.

It has already started.

***

Later, when she’s fallen asleep, I turn on the hidden monitor. Footage of Renn’s apartment. Blood soaked into carpet. No gunpowder on his hands. It is staged. Sloppy, if you knew how to look.

And beside it, the bombing. Infrared sequences. Shockwave radius. No civilian alert. Someone had silenced the alarm systems.

The enemy is inside. Deep inside.

I stare at the footage long enough for my vision to blur. Then I key in a new protocol: Phoenix. A purge cycle. It will begin deleting non-essential nodes. Everyone not vetted twice will be disconnected. Cut loose.

I stare at Vera’s name on the whitelist.

Hover over it and move on.

I’m not ready to lose her. But if I keep her close now—she’ll die.

Not quickly. Not painlessly. But in pieces. Like the girls in Omega-9. Or the senator, lips still warm when the cameras found him.

I need to decide. And fast.

Protect her, or release her. Control her, or set her free.

I close the file. Lie beside her. Watch her chest rise and fall.

Her body is soft. Still trusting. Unaware of the funeral pyre building beneath our lives.

I don’t touch her. I cannot.

She turns in her sleep and whispers something I cannot hear.

But I think it’s my name.