Page 11 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

The start of each day here feels like walking into a memory no one wants to recall they always have. The light is sharp, efficient—like everything else in this place. The walls don’t creak. They hum. And machines breathe for people when people forget to breathe for themselves.

Celeste walks past my door like a ghost in a well-pressed coat. Her steps are soundless but not cautious. More like someone walking through the edges of a dream they can’t fully wake from. She doesn’t see me.

And I don’t call out.

Instead, I watch her from the office window.

Her hair is pulled back too tightly, her posture perfect in that brittle way.

Every part of her screams composed, but I’ve seen her fracture in small, involuntary ways.

The twitch of a finger, the slight hitch in her breath when someone says her name without permission.

Yesterday, we sat together in the alcove—bare walls, flickering console, brief confessions. It was the most honest moment we’ve shared in weeks. Maybe even in the longest time. She spoke about a drawer left open. A detail so small that it shouldn’t matter. But it did.

Because she noticed.

And more importantly, she told me.

I’ve spent most of this morning reading her old research logs. The ones I wasn’t supposed to have. Reyes slipped me a drive on my first day back, discreetly, almost casually. He said it was just old material, backups he thought were lost during the tribunal purge.

I know he used to mentor Celeste. I think maybe he wanted me to see something she wouldn’t show on her own. It’s nothing illegal, technically. But definitely not sanctioned.

What I’ve seen so far unnerves me more than the way Kade watches her. I don’t know what he’s hiding—if anything—but the way his eyes linger on Celeste makes my spine go tight.

Celeste was brilliant before the fracture. She was obsessively meticulous. But buried in her early drafts are blueprints for something more dangerous than neural conditioning. Something that dances too close to override.

There’s poetry in the way she maps cognition, as if she wants to rewrite suffering without erasing the self.

But math doesn’t care about ethics.

And now that same precision is unraveling her.

I close the file and scrub my hands over my face. I haven’t slept properly in four days. Not since the last incident in trauma bay three—the one no one talks about. The patient didn’t die, but he won’t speak anymore either.

There’s a knock.

I straighten and say, “Come in.”

Harper leans in, wide-eyed. “Dr. Rennick, she’s in the observation suite.”

“She?”

“Dr. Varon.”

I stand.

“Is something wrong?” I ask.

Harper hesitates. “No. She’s just… watching. No screens on. Just sitting there.”

I thank her and head down two corridors and through a locked stairwell. The observation suite is usually reserved for long-term behavioral monitoring. It’s sterile, silent, and mostly unused. But it has one-way glass looking down into Lab B, where we run baseline memory scans.

I find her exactly as Harper said. Alone. Still.

She doesn’t turn when I step inside.

“Staring contests with empty rooms?” I offer softly.

Her voice is even when she replies, “Sometimes silence tells more truth than noise.”

I move closer. But not too close. Never too close.

“You think someone’s lying?”

Celeste tilts her head slightly. “No. I think someone is listening.”

The way she says it doesn’t rattle me, though it should. But not from her. From her, it feels… correct.

“And what are you listening for?” I ask.

She finally looks at me. Her eyes are exhausted but clear.

“Confirmation.”

“Of what?”

She doesn’t answer.

We just stand there for a while, watching nothing.

Then she says softly, “The drawer wasn’t the only thing that felt out of place.”

I don’t ask her to elaborate. Not yet.

Instead, I sit.

We wait.

And somewhere between silence and suspicion, I realize something deeply unsettling.

She isn’t spiraling.

She’s tracking.

And whatever she finds at the end of the trail, it’s going to change everything.

By noon, I’ve already reviewed three patient files and scrubbed into a case I wasn’t emotionally equipped for.

A fractured skull with embedded hardware, a relic from a failed neuro-interface trial.

The kind of thing that doesn’t make it into Miramont’s quarterly reports.

We fixed what we could and stabilized what we couldn’t.

It’s the kind of work that grounds me and forces my hands to remember what they’re good at. Trauma medicine doesn’t ask questions. It just expects solutions.

When I finally leave the surgical suite, the silence of my office feels heavier than usual. I sit, then I stand. And I pace. Then I stop and go back to my seat.

I open Celeste’s old logs again.

This time, I read more slowly.

I’m not looking for breakthroughs.

I’m looking for breadcrumbs.

Halfway through a fragmented entry dated two years ago, I find it—a reference to an unused baseline algorithm, one meant to detect micro-expressions in patients under deep cognitive regression. The entry is unfinished, trailed off mid-thought.

But the signature is unmistakable.

It’s not a name but a phrase.

“Truth is felt, not told.”

It’s hers. I’ve seen her write it on the inside of notebooks, once on the corner of a surgical glove, and once etched into the condensation of her coffee mug.

It’s not just her motto. It’s her shield.

A knock pulls me from the screen.

This time, it’s not Harper.

It’s Kade.

He steps into my office like he belongs there.

“You’re reading her logs,” he says without preamble.

My spine stiffens. “I’m catching up on old projects.”

He nods slowly. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

“No. And I’d like to keep it that way.”

He leans a hip against the edge of my desk, studying me like I’m a specimen. “You care about her.”

“I respect her.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

I don’t answer.

Kade smiles, and it’s not kind. “Just be careful where you’re standing when her foundation finally cracks. She’s not the only one with something buried.”

Then he turns like it costs him nothing, and moves away.

I sink deeper into my seat and stare at the log entry.

Truth is felt, not told.

God help me, I believe it.

The door clicks shut behind him, but the tension doesn’t leave with him. It stays coiled in the back of my throat and in the hollow behind my sternum.

What did he mean by she’s not the only one with something buried ? Was it just a jab? Or something more?

I hate the way his words hang in my mind, shapeless and sticky. He knew I was reading her logs. That means he’s either watching me or he knows Reyes gave them to me. Neither possibility sits well.

And then there’s the way he said care . Like it’s weakness.

The problem is, he’s not entirely wrong. I do care. More than I should, probably. More than I’m comfortable admitting. Celeste isn’t just a colleague or an old memory.

We used to be something tangled and fragile—lovers disguised as partners, or maybe the other way around. She’s a fault line I stepped over once and never quite recovered from.

But Kade… he strides over it like he owns the ground beneath it.

He unnerves me. Not because he’s aggressive in a weird way, but because he’s quiet and controlled. Men like that don’t lose control. They distribute it.

And I’ve seen how he looks at her.

It’s not lust, not affection, and not even curiosity.

It’s possession.

Like he’s studying a rare species that he’s already decided belongs in his collection.

I push back from the desk and walk to the window. The glass is cool beneath my knuckles. Below, the quad is empty. And beyond it are the upper floors where she works, where she thinks she’s safe.

She’s not.

Not from the people here.

And not from herself.

If Kade is circling her, I need to figure out why.

Not because I’m jealous.

But because I don’t trust what she’ll become if someone like him is the one who finally gets close enough to see all her pieces.

I find her later in the east stairwell. It’s the one people don’t use unless they’re avoiding something. She’s seated on the steps with her back against the wall and her long legs folded to one side like she’s forgotten she owns a desk. A tablet lies dark beside her, untouched.

She looks up as I approach, and the corners of her mouth twitch. It’s not a smile. Not quite.

“You okay?” I ask.

Her voice is dry. “Define okay.”

I sit two steps below her, not beside her. I’ve learned that proximity with Celeste has to be offered, never assumed.

“You talk to anyone else today?”

She shakes her head. “Didn’t feel like wearing the mask.”

Her phrasing strikes me. The mask. Not a mask. There’s a difference.

“Did you even sleep last night?”

A pause. Then, she says, “I laid down.”

That’s not the answer I’m looking for, but it’s honest.

We sit in silence, a draft curling up from the lower floors. It smells faintly of antiseptic and latex, and it’s too calm for a hospital.

I tilt my head back and rest it against the cold wall.

“What was it like when you left?” she asks.

I glance at her, caught off guard by the question. “Muted. Too muted. Like the volume of life got turned down and nobody noticed.”

She nods slowly. “Did you ever think about not coming back?”

“More times than I can count.”

Her eyes flick toward me, sharp but unreadable. “Why?”

“Why what?” I ask.

“Why did you leave? Especially if you were going to come back anyway.”

“Maybe mostly because I feel like this place doesn’t want to heal people anymore. It wants to observe them. To keep them broken just enough to study.”

“That’s not new,” she murmurs.

“No,” I agree. “But you’re seeing it more now, aren’t you?”

She doesn’t answer. But the way her hands curl slightly into fists is answer enough.

“You don’t have to be alone in this,” I add. “Not with me.”

She turns to look at me, and I see her expression soften.

“I know,” she says. “That’s what scares me.”

One breath, then two. She stands like it hurts to, brushes invisible lint from her coat, and says she has to run a few simulations before the end of the day. Her voice is calm, but I hear something else in it. I hear restraint.

She doesn’t ask me to walk with her. And I don’t offer.

I watch her go, the click of her shoes echoing down the stairwell like punctuation marks. Sharp and final.

Once she’s gone, I don’t move. I just sit there with my hands clasped and eyes trained on the dull gray floor. I should feel better after talking to her, but I don’t.

Because I’m lying to her.

Well, not directly. But lies by omission still rot the same.

I haven’t told her about Kade coming into my office. I haven’t told her that he saw the logs. That he knows I’ve been reading her private research. Because to do that would be to admit something I can’t spin back, something that makes me just as invasive as whatever she suspects is happening.

She’s chasing ghosts.

And I’m one of them.

It’s not guilt that keeps me quiet. It’s consequences. If I tell her about Kade, I’d have to explain what he saw. And that would mean revealing my own breach. Reyes might have handed me the drive, but no one forced me to open it, to read it, to keep going.

And I did keep going.

So I stay silent. For now.

My shift ends two hours later. I finish the last round in trauma bay, hand off to the night lead, and head toward the elevator. My limbs are heavy, not from fatigue but from the weight of things unsaid.

As I step outside, the corridor stretches long and empty. But near the far end, caught in the fading blue of security lights, someone moves.

Kade.

He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, unreadable as ever.

Our eyes meet.

But no words pass between us.

None are needed.

I walk away.