Page 1 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I remember the dark first.

It isn’t a peaceful kind of dark. It’s the kind that hums behind your eyes, presses down on your chest, and makes the corners of your mind turn in on themselves. The kind that breathes.

I’m not supposed to be awake, but the screaming downstairs doesn’t let me sleep. I press my face into the shoulder of Mr. Buttons, my rabbit. His fur smells like attic dust and lavender detergent, a scent that used to mean safety. Tonight, it’s just another lie.

The closet is small, but I’m smaller. Wedged between coats that smell like old perfume and something rotted—maybe from the boxes Mom never unpacked—I try not to move.

Try not to breathe. But my chest heaves like a pump leaking air.

The door has slats, and I can see shadows flickering past them like ghosts made of flame.

Mom screamed five minutes ago. Then came a thud that made the walls shake. Then silence.

Silence is worse.

The cassette recorder on the shelf above me crackles like something exhaling smoke. I forgot it was even there. It belonged to Mom. It used to play lullabies—tender, calm things I’d drift off to when the world wasn’t jagged. Tonight, it skips and sputters.

A lullaby begins, but it’s wrong. It’s slower, like someone dragging fingers across a piano while it burns. The melody twists through the air like a serpent, coiling around my neck.

“One for sorrow, two for shame…”

I whisper the rhyme back to myself, my lips trembling. I don’t know where I first heard it. Maybe a book. Maybe my head.

“Three for blood, four for flame…”

A floorboard groans.

Not from the closet, from outside.

The silence is broken by footsteps now. It’s not running and not frantic, but measured, calm, and coiled with unseen purpose. Each one lands like a countdown. I clutch Mr. Buttons tighter and stuff myself deeper into the corner. My back scrapes the wall.

The steps stop in front of the door.

I stop breathing.

The door creaks. It opens only halfway. But it’s enough to see.

He’s tall and dressed in black. Not like a man in a suit. Not like Dad. It’s like a shadow wearing clothes. His face is a mask—cracked porcelain and shaped like a doll’s, but the smile is wrong. It’s too high. And the eyes are black holes.

He kneels.

My rabbit falls from my hand.

“Celestia,” he whispers.

He says it like a prayer. Like he’s not looking at me. Like he’s remembering me. The voice is soft. Too soft. It slides into my skin and hooks there.

He doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t move. He just watches.

Then he stands and walks away.

Just like that.

Gone.

I don’t move for a long time. Maybe forever.

Eventually, the lullaby dies with a final, staticky wheeze.

My legs are jelly, and my hands shake. But the door’s still open, and I crawl out like something half-born. I leave the room and creep down the stairs, each step a breath held too long.

At the bottom, the world is painted in red. Blood stains the floor in jagged pools and smeared trails, as though something was dragged, or someone tried to crawl away. The silence here feels heavier, like it’s pressing against my skin.

Before I even register it, my foot slips in the blood-slick trail, and I lose my balance.

My body twists, gravity pulling me down faster than thought, and I slam onto the floor. My breath is knocked from my chest, and my knees smear through the blood with a sickening squelch.

My hands flail and land in shards of glass—what’s left of a picture frame. Pain shoots up my arm, but I barely notice. Mom’s face looks up at me from beneath the wreckage, her smile fractured through a spiderweb of cracks.

At the end of the hallway, I see a pair of feet. Bare. Pale. With one turned slightly inward, like she always did when nervous.

I don’t scream.

The world folds in on itself like a paper house set on fire.

My vision blurs at the edges, narrowing to a tunnel of flickering light. My body gives out, and the last thing I feel is the sting of glass in my palm before everything slips away.

And then there is only darkness.

This is the moment the fracture takes root. When my mind splinters beneath the weight of everything I wasn’t meant to see.

When I stop being a child and start becoming something else, something cracked but still breathing. This night carves itself into my bones like scripture.

The man in the mask. The one who whispered my name like it belonged to him. I don’t know who he is. And I won’t for years. But his presence settles over me like a second skin, one I’ll never fully shed.

This memory isn’t just a flashback. It’s a wound that never scabbed over. I relive it often, sometimes in dreams, and sometimes when the stillness creeps in and I feel the echo of that same suffocating silence.

I tell myself the man in the mask is gone, a ghost buried in memory.

But the way he looked at me—unmoving, unblinking—has stitched itself into the fabric of my fears.

I don’t know who he was, what he wanted, or why he whispered my name like a lullaby.

All I know is that night marked me. That look marked me.

And sometimes, I still feel it, like it’s watching.

This was the first time I saw a monster.

And the last time I believed I could ever be safe.

It’s been twenty-three years since that night. I don’t remember the days that followed, only the way the paramedics’ gloves felt cold against my skin, and how my aunt’s voice cracked when she called my name from across a sterile hallway.

The house was condemned, and the files were sealed. No one ever found the man in the mask.

Now, I wake up every morning with the memory tucked behind my eyes like a splinter. I run a clinic, I make decisions, and I look composed. But the past is never really gone. It’s just quieter sometimes. Until it’s not.

Earlier today, I stood in front of the mirror and saw the crack in my smile. Not from age, and not from exhaustion. From him. From what he left behind. And I know, deep down, this fracture in me never healed. It just learned how to wear skin.