Page 67 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

I wake up to silence, the kind that doesn’t comfort, but warns. The sheets around me still hold the heat of sleep, but not of him. Lucian is already gone. Or perhaps hiding behind the usual walls he calls “routine.”

I slip from the bed and pad barefoot across the chilled floor, drawn toward the low glow coming from the living room.

His tablet is still on, resting on the edge of the marble table like it has been placed there with haste or forgotten altogether.

I shouldn’t look.

But I do.

And the screen is already awake, already screaming.

brEAKING: Whistleblower Leak Connects Anti-Trafficking Activist to Victim Exploitation Scheme.

My name.

My face.

In bold. In italics. Framed in red.

I stare like I don’t know who I am. The headline bleeds into an article—dozens of paragraphs lined with surgically manipulated screenshots. Emails I have never sent.

Photos taken at humanitarian events where I’d spoken on stage or posed beside donors, now contorted into narratives dripping with implication.

My arm around a survivor reframed as grooming. A dinner handshake spun into collusion. Even the lighting in the images feels darker—as if the truth itself has been smudged, corrupted, rewritten.

I back away from the screen like it is venomous.

My first instinct is to call Beth. She’d know what to do. She always does. But my phone refuses to load. No signal. No network. I check the router. Restart. Nothing.

Panic takes the shape of movement. I run back to my room, flip open my laptop, and try to log into my private email.

Access denied.

Account frozen.

Security credentials invalid.

A second attempt.

A third.

Nothing.

I feel it before I even see him.

Lucian.

I find him downstairs, tightening the silver links of his cuff in front of the window. He is the picture of calm, framed by morning light that doesn’t dare touch him.

“You blocked me,” I say. The words come like splinters. “You shut down my accounts.”

His head doesn’t turn. “You’re being hunted,” he replies, voice granite. “You’ll do nothing. Say nothing. Let me handle it.”

I laugh. Dry. Bitter. “That’s not protection. That’s a cage.”

He finally faces me. The shift is slow. Deliberate. His eyes are unreadable, voids dressed in steel. He walks closer but doesn’t touch me.

“I’m keeping you alive.”

“By making me disappear?”

Silence.

There is a flicker in his jaw that’s rage or restraint, I can’t tell.

Then he turns his back and walks away.

Just like that.

And I am left to pick up the ashes of my name, alone.

-----

The house feels smaller with every step I take. I open the encrypted forum where the whistleblower and I had last exchanged files, pings, code drops.

Offline.

Account deleted.

History wiped.

A dead silence pulses through the server space like a held breath that never gets released.

She is gone.

Not just unreachable—erased.

Lucian doesn’t even flinch when I ask, “What if she’s dead?”

“She knew the risk,” he says, as if that were answer enough.

I don’t argue. I simply leave the room before the scream in my throat can turn into something uglier.

I retreat to the guest bathroom—farther from the cameras I suspected were hidden in the master suite. I stare into the mirror and see someone I don’t recognize.

A woman accused.

A woman burned.

Hashtags flood the internet. Whole digital movements frame me as the hidden hand behind victims’ disappearances. I read the words over and over—words I can never erase.

\#RecruiterVera \#FraudInHeels \#TheFaceOfDarkness

My fingers shake as I wipe the steam off the mirror. The reflection remains warped, like even the glass no longer trusts me.

I step into the shower and let the water scald me. It doesn’t cleanse. It peels.

I sob into the tile. Not for guilt, but for the loss of voice. The complete erasure of who I thought I was and the dawning knowledge that Lucian had seen it coming and chose silence.

I thought I had clawed my way out of the shadows.

Turns out, the darkness had only ever changed shape.

***

Night falls like a curtain soaked in oil. The kind that smothers, not comforts.

Lucian stays in his private study, the one he never lets me near. I watch the hall from the corner of the stairwell, counting his footsteps, listening for the telltale pause of him locking the inner drawer that held the root server drive.

Once his steps move past the kitchen, I slip down.

I still remember the passcode.

He’d set it two months ago, back when he still believed I could be protected with simplicity.

He never thought I’d remember.

The door clicks open on the fourth digit. I slide inside and close it behind me. My breath feels too loud.

His desk glows with terminal feeds, security data, internal activity logs. I ignore all of it and reach for the older communication server we used to sync our external accounts—back when he still trusted me.

I craft one message.

Short. Tight. Buried in soft code. Encrypted with a rotating cipher that will auto-erase after 60 seconds of inactivity.

To: A.Whittaker[secure] Subject: Whisper If you still trust your instincts, call me. Don’t forward this. Don’t trace it. Just you.

I sit frozen after I hit send, waiting for alarms to go off. For Lucian to burst through the door.

But there’s nothing.

Only silence.

The kind that precedes a storm.

I creep back to the room, heart beating in arrhythmic jolts, and lie in bed with my fingers curled into fists beneath the blanket. The glow of the tablet still reflects on the ceiling, flashing more headlines, more lies, more poison.

Lucian doesn’t come to bed that night.

And for the first time, I don’t want him to.