Page 9 of Dark Soul (Tainted #1)

The city hums below like it belongs to someone else. I let it.

From the forty-ninth floor, Manhattan looks tamed. Light flickers across steel towers, neon signs blink without urgency, and traffic moves like veins beneath skin—steady, pulsing, and unaware.

It’s beautiful in the way all systems are beautiful when they don’t know they’re being observed.

The penthouse is silent.

The space is immaculate with obsidian floors, brushed metal fixtures, and backlit art that means nothing except it cost enough to be asked about. Every room here is cold, intentional, and controlled.

The bedroom sheets are changed daily, though I rarely sleep. The kitchen is stocked with precision, though I rarely eat. There’s nothing out of place. Nothing human.

Except one room.

I unlock it with a code that changes every twelve hours, slide open the steel door, and step inside.

The surveillance room isn’t part of the official floorplan. It never was. It sits behind the main study, soundproofed, shielded, and digitally invisible.

Three walls lined with matte screens. One wall of ballistic glass, with an urban mural layered over it from the outside.

Twelve screens live-feed different corners of her world.

Vera’s apartment. Vera’s office. Vera’s elevator lobby. Vera’s street-facing window. Nothing graphic or crude.

Everything is reverent.

And right now, the main screen holds a still frame: her kitchen, 12:41 a.m. Her hand rests beside the note. Her fingers twitch once. Then she steps back and walks away.

I rewind it. Watch her place the paper down. Watch her body motion and tone. Her shoulders aren’t slumped, and her jaw isn’t clenched. Her posture says everything.

She’s not scared.

She’s engaging.

The note is brief. Ink on torn paper.

You’re changing things. Not hiding them. That’s how I know this isn’t about fear. This is about me. And I want to know why.

I read it once. Then again.

I whisper the words under my breath, slower the second time. My voice fills the space like ritual.

“‘This is about me…’”

My fingers trace the edge of the screen. My voice comes out quieter.

“‘And I want to know why.’”

My lips curl slightly into satisfaction without softness.

This is not a woman begging for rescue. This is a woman inviting war.

I turn from the screen and cross to the corkboard mounted on the far wall.

It spans nearly five feet. Covered in layers. Photos. Post-its. Highlighter marks. Timestamped printouts.

Everything about her life is mapped in clinical order.

A red string connects her apartment to the cemetery upstate where her foster father was buried, a grave she visited only once since the funeral. She stood in silence for twenty-four minutes and never returned.

One thread leads to Finch Corp’s secure server of captured keystrokes decrypted from a VPN flaw I paid a Belarusian security firm to install.

Another line pins her gym route.

Her wardrobe is catalogued. Her preferred shoes for battle days. Her hair pattern across rain forecasts. How often she tucks a curl behind her ear when cornered.

A woman’s life, reduced to code.

But Vera resists reduction. That’s what makes her different and dangerous.

I sit back at the console and open another feed.

Audio only.

A clip from three nights ago at 00:19 a.m. of Vera brushing her teeth. Soft humming beneath the water.

I play it through noise filters. There’s no lyric. Just her voice moving through her own silence.

I listen three times. Then catalog it.

Next, I open a still-frame archive and pull a freeze of her sleeping in a curled posture with her mouth relaxed, and one hand beneath the pillow.

I crop the image, brighten it, and adjust contrast. Then slide it into a locked folder labeled: Calloway: Subject File | Tier One | Private Reference.

The folder is encrypted with two keys.

I don’t label it obsession.

Obsession is chaotic. This is structure.

Structure is how I see patterns. How I find the edges of a puzzle before placing its center. It’s how I’ve undone governments, firms, reputations of people, with fewer tells than she’s already given me.

Yet Vera isn’t folding.

She’s unraveling on her own terms.

Which means my next move has to be earned.

I rise, stretch once, and walk to the glass wall. The skyline glitters against the storm. She’s somewhere beneath it. Alone in an apartment she now knows is compromised. And instead of running, she left me a message.

It wasn’t defiant or desperate. She seems curious and more calculating than I expected. She left me the type of note a person leaves when they know they’re no longer in control and decide not to back down.

I run the footage again.

She writes slowly and doesn’t rush. The camera angle catches her face in profile.

She’s not smiling, but there’s a softness in the stillness. As though she’s acknowledging something quietly for herself as much as for me.

A moment later, she walks away and turns off the light.

And I stay still in this room, surrounded by screens, high above a city that fears me, and feel something I haven’t felt in a long time.

I feel matched. She won’t outmaneuver or threaten me, but she’s a refreshing challenge.

Finally.

I glance back at the screen and recite the note again. Slower this time. I let the syllables settle in the room like a spell.

Her resilience is undoing me.

I’ve studied hundreds of faces, tracked fear in real time, watched men squirm, women lie, and corporations collapse under the slow burn of exposure. I know how people respond when power tightens its grip.

Vera writes me notes. Vera closes her closet door like she’s making a point. Vera goes to sleep.

I scoff.

Now I’m restless and undone by the quiet of her resilience. It isn’t obedience. It’s something purer and rarer. She’s choosing not to react because she knows I want her to.

That strength is a conversation I’m ready to answer.

I press two keys on the console. My screen splits. One feed shows her living room, empty now. The candle she lit still flickers stubbornly. The other feed is paused on her expression just before she turned away from her note.

There’s something in her face I haven’t catalogued yet.

I study it and find the faintest shadow of a smile of acknowledgment.

That settles it.

I reach for the secure line, press the digit that routes directly to Dorian. He answers in one breath.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll send a package to Finch Corp. Anonymous courier. Same protocol as before.”

“What’s inside?”

I pause. “Find a first edition of The Secret Garden. Dust jacket intact. Minimal wear.”

Dorian says nothing for a moment..

“That’s not in her professional profile,” he replies carefully.

“It’s not meant to be.”

He understands. He always does.

“And inside the book,” I continue, “you’ll place a photo in a plain envelope. No message or markings.”

I swipe the console screen until I find the image I captured six hours ago of Vera, asleep on her back, mouth barely parted, her hand curled beneath the pillow. Her face at rest.

I pull it up, adjust the resolution, and lighten the shadows.

“This one,” I say.

“Understood.”

“Have it delivered to her office. Morning delivery. No delay.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hang up before he can say anything else.

I don’t need his concern. I built him to function, not to question.

***

I stand at the far window again. The skyline flickers in the distance. The storm has cleared, but the city still shines like it’s been soaked in secrets.

Below me, people move through their lives with urgency. They chase subway schedules and deadlines and minor validations. They think their lives are untouched and unstudied.

But everything they do leaves residue. Every habit is an invitation for someone like me.

And yet, for all my systems, my access, my reach, I’m here, watching a woman who should have cracked by now…and hasn’t. Not once.

I know her schedule, passwords, and private search history.

I know she listens to Coltrane when she’s angry but plays Chopin when she’s trying not to cry.

I know she hasn’t logged into her therapy journal in nineteen days, even though she rereads her old entries once a week.

I know her favorite coffee mug has a faint chip near the handle. I know she presses her thumb against it when she’s anxious.

But none of it is enough anymore.

I want more.

I want the breath just before she speaks. I want the thought she won’t say out loud. I want the version of her that sits in silence, afraid to need anyone, and I want her to need me anyway.

Not because I threatened or broke her.

Because I became the only thing she couldn’t shut out.

Back inside the room, the feeds continue their slow, sacred loop.

I walk to the console and run the clip of her again. The way she turned her head. The deliberate calm. The note still glowing faintly on the kitchen counter.

This is about me. And I want to know why.

My thumb hovers over the screen.

I whisper, “I’ll show you.”

I leave the surveillance room at 2:14 a.m.

The rest of the penthouse is dark. I don’t bother turning anything on.

In the bedroom, I strip down to nothing and sit on the edge of the bed. The sheets are cold. The room is colder.

I don’t sleep here often. I don’t like how beds encourage softness. I don’t like how silence here feels different like something deserved.

But tonight, I stay seated.

The window near the foot of the bed frames the skyline. Manhattan, half-alive. And somewhere in that grid of flickering buildings, she sleeps.

Unaware that a book from her childhood is already being wrapped.

That a photo of her at her most unguarded is being slid between pages that once taught her what love might look like. Unaware that I haven’t just studied her.

I’ve chosen her completely. And I’m not waiting for permission.

I sit in the dark. Scarred and bare with my spine straight, breathing steadily.

My eyes close for a moment.

And into the dark, I breathe her name.

“Vera.”

***

The screens breathe around me.