Page 13 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I’m halfway through my second cup of tea when I realize I’ve been staring at the same screen for fifteen minutes.

The cursor blinks at the top of the file like it’s judging me, like it knows I haven’t typed a single word worth saving.

My office is still and gray, filled with the soft hum of equipment and the delicate weight of early morning silence.

I close the file.

There’s no use pretending today will be normal.

My body is in the clinic, but my mind’s been trailing off ever since I left my apartment. I’m restless. There’s a whisper of something behind everything, a tension I can’t quite place. It isn’t about work. It’s something else. And it clings to my shoulders even as I try to shake it off.

I press my hands to my face and drag them down slowly, then lean back into the chair, exhaling. A knock sounds at the door, sharp and intentional.

“Come in,” I say.

Mara enters, her silhouette crisp, her hair pinned in its usual no-nonsense twist. She doesn’t hesitate.

“You asked for the log updates on Simulation 14, Dr. Varon,” she says, stepping forward with a black folder pressed precisely to her side. “I also flagged inconsistencies in the bioreactivity thread. I ran the comparisons three times to be sure.”

I sit up straighter. “Show me.”

Mara opens the folder with the kind of mechanical grace I’ve come to recognize —not coldness, but habit. Her precision is her protection. Every page she lays out is annotated in her handwriting, sharp and angled. It reminds me of mine when I’m running on barely any sleep and too much caffeine.

She hovers just behind me as I scan the data. She’s not intruding, but close enough that I feel the steady hum of her focus.

“You caught this on your own?” I ask.

She nods. “The pattern wasn’t obvious at first. But the fluctuations weren’t following baseline degradation curves. I thought it might matter.”

It does.

I glance up at her, noting the way her fingers flex around the edge of the folder.

“You did well,” I tell her.

A flicker, just a breath of something unguarded, crosses her face. Gratitude? Uncertainty? It vanishes before I can decide.

“Thank you, Dr. Varon.”

She moves to turn away, then pauses. “I reran the calibration script on the secondary channel. That’s why the readings appear cleaner this morning. If there’s still noise, I can reprogram the threshold filters manually.”

I study her for a moment longer.

“Have you been sleeping, Mara?” I ask.

She stills. “I’m fine.”

Her reply is too fast. Too firm.

“We need clarity,” I say. “Not endurance.”

Her jaw flexes, and for a moment, I think she might argue. But then she nods and says, “Understood.”

When she leaves, the office feels emptier. It feels like the absence of something I hadn’t realized grounded it.

Alec steps inside moments later.

He looks good today. More composed than usual. Or maybe just harder to read. He wears black slacks and a charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his expression is unreadable. There’s a strain around his mouth, like he hasn’t slept either.

“You got to the clinic early,” he says.

“So did you.”

He walks over and leans against the edge of the desk. “You always come in before the lights are on?”

I shrug. “Couldn’t sleep.”

He nods, like that explains everything. And maybe it does. Maybe neither of us needs to ask what it is we’re trying to outrun. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a flash drive, turning it between his fingers.

“Reyes gave this to me,” he says.

I tilt my head. “Why?”

“He didn’t say. He just slipped it into my palm and walked away.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

I hold out my hand, and Alec passes the drive over without a word. I insert it into the secure port, bypassing my usual encryption. A folder opens.

I find archived trial logs and my early notes. Things I never thought I’d see again.

My throat tightens as I scroll.

“These were sealed. Some of this was destroyed before the tribunal. How does he have it?”

Alec doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The silence between us is heavy, tangled with memory.

I close the folder. “Why now?” I ask. “Why would he give it to you?”

“Maybe he thinks you need to remember who you were.”

“And who was I, Alec?”

He pauses, then says, “Brilliant. Dangerous. And completely alone.”

I flinch.

He leans in slightly. “You don’t have to be alone this time.”

I look away. Outside the window, the wind lifts a tree branch, pressing it briefly against the glass. The moment passes.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

He doesn’t respond. He just stands and walks to the door.

“Be careful, Celeste. Not just with the research, but with the people watching it.”

And then he’s gone.

I don’t move for a long time.

Later, I leave the office, the flash drive still warm in my pocket.

The clinic halls feel sharper than usual, and every glance feels like a blade. The nurses talk in hushed tones near the intake station, and I catch my name once. Maybe twice. But I keep walking.

Kade passes me near the stairwell. Our eyes meet briefly, and this time, he doesn’t just nod. “Morning,” he says, barely above a whisper, but sharp with an unnamed emotion.

“Morning,” I reply, keeping my tone neutral. Too neutral.

He looks like he might say more, but instead, he just holds my gaze for a beat longer, then continues on his way.

I feel the weight of it even after he turns the corner.

In my lab, I stare at the monitor again. This time, I open a new file. A new protocol.

Something darker.

Something unfinished.

Trial 14.

It’s not just the remnants of a discarded experiment but a restructuring of neural reactivity mapping pulled directly from the flash drive Alec handed me.

The first variant had shown erratic behavior, but what it revealed in its unpredictability had stuck with me. If pain could rewrite memory, then with the right feedback loop, fear might overwrite desire. Or amplify it beyond restraint.

My fingers hover over the keys, then they move.

I begin layering the parameters, adjusting thresholds, and refining stimulus intervals. No subjects yet. Just theory and hypotheticals. But this isn’t routine work. This is old, dangerous ground. A secret buried deep enough that I had convinced myself it was gone.

But the shape is there.

The shape of something dangerous enough to work.

The room darkens as clouds slip over the sun, and the shadows on the floor elongate. In the dim, the noise in my head thins into focus.

I glance down at the interface, tempted to reopen the rest of the flash drive contents and dissect them until something screams meaning. But there’s danger in that. I know myself well enough to recognize when obsession is dressing itself as curiosity.

Still, I remain on Trial 14. The failed variant. Or rather, the one everyone thinks failed.

My hands move without thinking, launching sequences and mapping data clusters, my eyes scanning for anomalies no one else would even know to look for. This work, t his stillness, is the only space where my lungs remember how to fully work.

A message blips onto my screen: Rourke wants a progress update before noon.

Of course he does.

I ignore it for now. I need five more minutes. Maybe ten. Just a little more time in this silence before I have to face the noise again.

Alec’s words echo. Brilliant. Dangerous. And completely alone.

Maybe that’s still true.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

A knock at the lab door breaks the stillness. I freeze, my fingers stilling on the keyboard.

“Dr. Varon?”

It’s Harper. Of course it is. Her voice always lands with just a hint too much eagerness, like she’s waiting to be noticed more than heard.

“Come in.”

She steps inside, clutching her tablet, her eyes flicking nervously toward the dark interface behind me.

“I just… I wanted to drop off the latest logs from the patient simulations. We had a spike in response rates during the recent sleep sequence. Thought you’d want to see it.”

I nod without turning. “Leave it on the table. I’ll review them later.”

A pause. Then, she asks, “You okay? You look… tired.”

“I am. But I’m working.”

She lingers a beat too long before setting the tablet down and stepping back. I hear the hesitation in her breath, like she wants to say something else but doesn’t.

When the door clicks shut behind her, I finally turn.

The screen blinks back at me. Trial 14’s data pulses in slow waves, waiting.

And I feel it again, that strange burn under my skin.

It’s not fear. Not excitement. But something in between.

I push back from the desk and cross to the window. Below, the courtyard is already alive with the thrum of midday routine—interns moving with determined steps, carts squeaking down tiled paths, and staff murmuring as they pass clipped notes and glances between them.

Amidst it all, I see Kade gliding through like he was made of shadow.

I watch him without knowing why. His pace is measured, his hands in his pockets, his face angled slightly downward as if he’s cataloguing everything and nothing. He moves with intent that feels too calm and too deliberate for this place.

I wonder briefly and irrationally if he senses me watching. If he knows I’m standing here, hidden behind thick glass and reflection, observing the careful calculation in every step he takes.

There’s a sharp elegance in the way he moves, a grace too refined to be purely professional. It unsettles something in me. It’s like he’s always hunting something unseen. Or waiting to be hunted himself.

A chill slips across my skin, though the room hasn’t changed.

I return to my seat.

There’s still more to do.

Much more.

My eyes flick to the corner of the monitor. It reads 11:47 a.m.

Shit.

The message from earlier flashes back into memory. Rourke wants a progress update before noon. I’d let it slide and buried it beneath the weight of Trial 14, but time has a cruel way of catching up.

I stand abruptly and smooth down my blouse, slipping the flash drive into my inner coat pocket. No one can see that. Not yet.

I gather a few sanitized printouts—surface-level metrics, neural progression charts, simulation indexes. Nothing that exposes the depth of what I’ve just started. Nothing that reveals how close I am to a threshold I swore I’d never cross again.

With practiced precision, I slide the data into a black folder and head down the hall toward Rourke’s wing, my heels soft against the vinyl. The air sharpens near his corridor, cooler and more clinical somehow.

Just as I reach the door, I stop.

I take a breath.

Then I knock.

The door swings open almost immediately, and I blink in surprise. Kade is inside, already on his way out. His eyes meet mine, steady and unreadable. We’re so close that our bodies nearly brush.

“Dr. Varon,” he says, his voice calm and almost too smooth.

“Mr. Lorran,” I reply, my voice equally neutral.

He steps aside with a faint nod, and I step past him, our arms just shy of touching. His scent, cedar and something sharper, lingers even after he’s gone.

Rourke stands at his desk, motioning for me to sit. “Right on time.”

I hand over the folder. “Progress metrics from the last two cycles. Simulations are stabilizing.”

He flips through the pages as if weighing the worth of every page, his lips pursed. “And the secondary trial?”

I keep my tone measured. “Still in review. Early data looks promising, but I won’t move forward without full ethical clearance.”

Rourke hums in that way that means he doesn’t quite believe me. “Good. Keep refining. We’ll want a presentation ready by the end of the quarter.”

“Understood.”

The meeting is brief and clinical. He doesn’t mention Kade, and I don’t ask.

As I leave, I remember Kade’s presence like a fingerprint on my skin. A question unspoken. A warning unissued.

I don’t turn back.

But my mind does.