Page 15 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I don’t remember the last time the air in my office felt this thick.

Maybe it’s the light that’s softer now, pooling near the window like it doesn’t want to disturb the rest of the room. Maybe it’s the folder in my hand—the one Kade just brought in. My name is on the label. And it’s in my handwriting. But I don’t remember leaving it anywhere near Rourke’s desk.

I set it on my desk cautiously, as if it might bite.

Then I sit back, but not fully. My spine stays stiff and angled, my every joint tense.

The overhead lights buzz faintly. Everything feels louder lately.

The sound of paper shifting, the hushed whir of the tablet on standby, my own measured inhale and exhale.

Kade’s presence still lingers. He was here for only a few minutes, but it stretches longer in my mind. The way he looked at me. Calm, attentive, too controlled, and underneath it all, something else. Something hungrier than he lets show.

I open the folder. It’s just standard documentation. Audit entries from last week, cross-checked with interface logs. It’s all familiar. All mine. Which makes it worse. I don’t remember misplacing it.

I rub a hand down my face. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe the fragmented sleep from last night is catching up.

But I don’t like gaps in my memory. Not when they concern people like him.

My gaze shifts to the small digital clock on my desk. It’s nearly 2 p.m. The afternoon is unraveling quickly, and I haven’t reviewed the second half of the patient simulation module.

I reach for the tablet.

Alec’s folder sits beside it. The one with the flash drive. I still haven’t opened it. It sits like a stone, heavier than its size should allow. I press the screen and bring up the internal diagnostics to keep my mind from veering off.

There’s no corruption. No forced rewrites. The data’s clean.

But the feeling in my chest isn’t.

I look back at the file Kade brought in.

And I try to shake the unease.

But I fail.

I keep trying anyway.

However, the air never clears.

It clings to the edges of the room, my thoughts, and the back of my throat like smoke that doesn’t burn but smothers.

I scroll through the patient simulation logs, my eyes tracking the data with mechanical precision.

My fingers know what to do even when my mind drifts.

Even when the phantom heat of Kade’s nearness resurfaces like a bruise I can’t explain.

Since he left the folder, since he left me standing with that look, I haven’t been able to exhale fully. He didn’t say anything threatening, and he didn’t touch me. But he didn’t need to. He exists like a scalpel: sharp, sterile, and meant to pierce.

The logs blur.

Somewhere between lines of code and archived entries, a sound interrupts me. A tap. It’s delicate, not a knock. Not quite. I glance up.

Mara.

She slips into the room like she always does, moving like a metronome—measured, exact, and with no wasted motion. She holds a sealed container and a slim black notepad, her fingers wrapped too tightly around both. Without a word, I motion for her to enter.

“Dr. Varon,” she says softly, placing the items on the side table. Her eyes don’t rise immediately. “You asked for the additional samples from the interface deterioration set. I ran the variant overlays again.”

I nod, gesturing to the desk. “Show me.”

Mara approaches, a little slower than usual, like she’s walking underwater.

Her notes are exact, her margins neat, her annotations cut with mathematical clarity.

Her voice remains composed, threading through the data as she explains, pointing to a subtle rise in deviation from last week’s trial batch.

“That shouldn’t happen,” I murmur.

“No,” she agrees. “Unless someone altered the behavioral tags between runs. Which I didn’t.”

Her voice drops even further. “I checked the logs against my admin timestamp. There was another user access early this morning. About 4:27 a.m. Level Two credentials. Not me.”

My head lifts slowly. “Who?”

She hesitates before saying, “It was scrubbed. I tried tracing it, but whoever did it rerouted the access trail through three internal servers. Intentionally.”

A muscle in my jaw tightens. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

Mara looks like she wants to say more. But instead, she hands over the folder, closes the container, and takes a single step back. I catch her watching me. It’s not out of curiosity but something softer. Guarded, but watchful.

“You’re the only one who caught this?” I ask.

“As far as I know. I didn’t want to log it into the official system until I showed you. I wasn’t sure if it was… internal.”

I nod my head. “You did right. Thank you.”

She turns, nods once, and disappears out the door.

The moment she’s gone, the silence deepens. But it’s not emptiness. It’s anticipation.

I glance toward the flash drive.

Some files from it still stay a mystery, unopened.

I should open them now, not because I’m ready, but because I need to be.

The screen flares softly as I connect the flash drive, then populates with lines of text, data grids, and embedded video files. Some are labeled by date, others by number, and some by names I haven’t spoken in years.

I open one.

It’s a short clip. There’s static, and then the audio kicks in. A voice—mine—from over six years ago. The tone is brittle and clinical, detached in the way only someone who is deeply attached can sound.

“Subject displayed favorable compliance in response to auditory recalibration. Threshold sensitivity dropped below the resistance curve by hour four. Emotional indexing remains in flux. Recommend delayed conditioning.”

My breath catches in my chest.

I remember this trial, and I remember how it ended. I remember the subject’s sobs during hour five and how the data clipped them down into neat bars and unfeeling spikes.

A knock comes again, and this time, it’s soft and hesitant. It pulls me from the data, and it’s not jarring, but deliberate. “Come in,” I call out.

Alec enters.

His coat is unbuttoned, a subtle departure from his usual neatness. He looks tired, more than usual, and when our eyes meet, something unreadable flickers there. He closes the door behind him, but he doesn’t speak right away. Instead, he walks to the chair across from me and lowers himself into it.

“You look like you need a reason to stop staring at that screen,” he says.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. “Was it that obvious?”

He smiles faintly. “Only to someone who’s done the same thing.”

The silence between us isn’t uncomfortable. It’s weighted, yes, but not suffocating. He leans forward, his arms on his knees, watching me without pressing.

“I saw Kade come in earlier,” he says suddenly, too casual to be nothing. “Didn’t realize he made office visits now.”

I tilt my head, a small smirk forming. “He dropped off a folder. That’s all.”

“Right,” Alec murmurs, his gaze flicking away before returning. “Just a folder.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” I say, my voice cool but edged with something sharper. “You know I prefer substance over spectacle.”

He breathes a short laugh, the tension around his eyes easing slightly. “I’m not jealous,” he says. “Just observant.”

“Then keep observing,” I say, my voice softer now. “But don’t make assumptions you’re not ready to prove.”

“You looked at the files in the drive yet?” he asks all of a sudden, changing the topic.

I nod. “Some of them. I couldn’t go further yet.”

“I looked through some of it before I passed it to you. Not all, but enough to know it wasn’t nothing. Reyes didn’t tell me anything, though. He just said you’d understand what mattered.”

I glance back at the screen. “There’s too much. And none of it feels like the past. It feels like something is still moving beneath the floor.”

Alec leans back again, his expression hardening. “That’s because it is.”

I study him now, more closely. There’s a flicker of unrest beneath the still water of his gaze.

“You’re worried,” I say.

“I’m angry,” he corrects. “But there’s no one to aim it at. Yet.”

I nod slowly, the weight of the flash drive somehow heavier now that he’s sitting here.

He eyes me carefully. “You can’t do this alone, Celeste. Not this part.”

“I’ve always done it alone.”

“And look where it’s gotten you—tired, cornered, and watching your own past unravel on a loop.”

The words aren’t cruel. They’re honest, which makes them worse.

I sit back in my chair, my fingers curling around the edge of the desk. I feel the tremor in my bones before it registers in my thoughts.

“You think I’ve already gone too far.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then, he says, “No. But I think if you keep walking forward without looking back, you won’t see the cliff until you’re falling.”

My throat tightens.

He stands slowly, moves around the desk, and stops beside me. He doesn’t touch me, but the space between us narrows, and the air shifts.

His voice lowers when he murmurs, “Wherever this leads, I’ll make sure to stand with you all the way.”

I look up. And for a second, I let myself believe him.

“You’re a fool,” I whisper.

“Maybe. But I’d rather be a fool beside you than safe behind a door you keep locked.”

The tension in the room shifts again, something gentler trying to surface beneath the weight. But neither of us moves to close the distance further.

Alec doesn’t linger. When he finally turns for the door, he does so with the same subtle finality with which he entered. There’s no dramatic pause and no backward glance. Just the soft sound of the door pulling shut behind him.

And then I’m alone again.

The silence isn’t gentle this time. It presses into the corners of the room and the center of my chest.

I turn in my chair, my eyes scanning the data still open on the side screen. But it’s not the files that hold my attention. It’s the thought Mara planted earlier. The Level Two access at 4:27 a.m., the rerouted servers, the scrubbed trail.

Someone inside this place thinks they’re smarter than the system. Than me.

It’s not just that it happened. It’s how clean it was. Too clean. Which means it was intentional and rehearsed.

I scroll back to the diagnostic report Mara left and then expand the overlay. Her annotations were crisp and exact, but there’s something buried deeper. Something she didn’t say outright, either because she didn’t catch it or because she thought I would.

There.

One cluster of altered tags repeats at irregular intervals, just shy of traceable patterns. Someone was testing access, probing the limits. Like they weren’t just interfering. They were watching for when someone would notice.

My stomach coils.

Mara didn’t log the breach. She brought it straight to me, which means she doesn’t trust the system either. It also means she’s paying closer attention than I realized.

I reach for my tablet and begin encrypting a private clone of the logs. If this thing spreads, I want proof that hasn’t passed through anyone else’s hands. Especially not the official chain.

My fingers move steadily over the keys, but inside, I’m unraveling. I’m not panicking. Not yet. But I’m alert in a way that makes everything else fade. The sound of my breath, the cool hum of the room, and even the soft tick of the wall clock.

Whoever accessed those files wasn’t looking for patient data. They were looking for me.

I pause, then save the file to an offline partition, locking it under a triple-tier authentication protocol I haven’t used in years.

The flash drive still sits in the center of my desk.

I stare at it.

Then I speak into the silence, “Not this time.”

And I begin to plan what comes next.