Page 16 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

From the surveillance wing on the east corner, I watch the corridors come to life. Lights hum into awareness, and movement stirs on the third floor. An intern arrives too early. Harper. Predictable. Always trying to prove she’s more than what she is.

Celeste arrives twenty minutes later.

There’s no hesitation in her stride, but it’s the kind of control one wears like a shield, not in ease. Her coat doesn’t swing, her hands stay deep in her pockets, and her shadow cuts clean along the tiled wall like she’s carved out her place here. Like it belongs to her.

But it doesn’t.

Not yet.

I don’t follow her immediately. There’s no need. I’ve already done what I came to do during the dead hours. I copied network logs, mapped access pings, and mirrored last week’s system purges onto a hidden loop.

No one’s noticed.

No one but her, probably.

I slip out of the wing and onto the main floor through the side hall, all casual confidence, like I haven’t just crawled through Miramont’s digital bloodstream. Alec walks past me in the corridor without noticing.

He’s distracted.

Good.

When I approach the diagnostics wing, Mara’s voice carries softly from inside. The door isn’t shut all the way, so I listen without guilt.

Celeste’s voice comes softer than usual, fatigued, but still steady. I don’t make out words, just the weight of them. When Mara leaves, she passes me without making eye contact.

I start moving, but I don’t enter Celeste’s lab. Not yet. Instead, I cross to the archive bay two rooms down, unlock the console, and begin scrubbing traces of a second access point Mara almost spotted alongside the 4:27 a.m. ghost log.

She’s sharper than she lets on.

Celeste hasn’t flagged it officially, which tells me more than any surveillance footage ever could.

I linger for seventeen minutes.

Then I make my way upstairs. The lounge on the sixth floor is empty at this hour. Forgotten and half-used. From here, I can watch the courtyard without being seen. Celeste’s window glints faintly under the morning gray.

She’s behind it. She always is by now.

When I close my eyes, I can see the way she stands with her arms crossed, the tension like a wire across her collarbone. I’ve always noticed that edge of control, evident in the stills and transcripts Rourke showed me, even before I ever stepped foot inside Miramont.

She thinks no one remembers and that no one is watching.

But I was. From a distance. Back then, it was just a file. Just a theory.

The girl in those videos wasn’t broken. She was unfinished. All edges, no center. A threat no one understood yet.

Now she’s something else. Something more dangerous.

The logs in Reyes’ office say she’s accessed restricted trials and resurrected simulations no one else dares touch.

Not even me.

Yet.

I lean forward, elbows on my knees, my fingers steepled beneath my chin.

She’s pushing back now. Planning something. Alec’s presence is a tell. His concern is too visible, and he forgets that she doesn’t respond to comfort. She responds to friction. Challenge. Heat.

I should be the one to offer it, but not yet. Not until I know what’s on that flash drive.

Not until I see how far she’s willing to go alone.

Because when she finally steps into the dark, truly steps, I need to be the only one waiting there.

And she needs to believe it was always her idea.

I descend to the fourth floor when I hear the lab doors hiss open. It’s Harper, again, alone this time. She walks fast, but not confidently. It’s like she’s carrying something too sensitive and doesn’t want anyone to notice it slipping through her hands.

I fall in step behind her, two corridors back. I don’t need to hear what she’s saying to the console or what she’s entering into the terminal in Room 4B. I already traced her key signatures three nights ago. She doesn’t encrypt her side logs. Rookie mistake.

She leaves ten minutes later, and I slip in after. The smell of printer ink and metal still hangs in the air. She left the system running.

The log details a sleep-response spike in Subject 3-19. It’s connected to one of Celeste’s private simulation streams. It’s not logged in the main trial registry and not reported. It’s buried behind dummy test names and sample redirect codes.

But it’s her work, precise and razor clean. It has her design all over it.

She’s running something unsanctioned.

And more than that, purposeful. Like she’s building something. Or reviving it.

I want to touch the terminal. I want to sit in her data and break it apart. But I don’t. I’m not ready to be seen in it yet. If she’s guarding this, it means she’s not ready to let anyone get too close.

Which means she’s still deciding who to trust.

I lock the room behind me and head back toward the central elevators.

In the hallway, I pass Reyes.

He gives me a tight nod. It’s measured. Not quite suspicion, not quite welcome.

He knows something too.

But the thing about this place is that no one talks directly. We all just dig, pull threads, and wait to see who unravels first.

I return to my temporary office and close the blinds.

Then I pull out the personal rig I smuggled in through maintenance weeks ago. It’s small and obscure. Off the grid.

I run the predictive sim model again, this time aligning Celeste’s recent access patterns with three known trial variants from the sealed list Rourke buried under committee clearance.

The model spits out a match ratio of 87%.

She’s reconstructing Trial 14.

I sit back and smile.

She’s not just remembering who she used to be.

She’s becoming it again.

And when she does, I’ll be ready.

Not to stop her.

But to meet her there.

Exactly where the fracture begins.

Later that night, I take the long way back to my rental because I don’t like patterns. Routine makes you visible, predictable.

I pass the bakery near Celeste’s building, the one with the flickering neon sign and terrible tea. I stop just outside, under the guise of tying my shoe, but my eyes are elsewhere.

The surveillance van is parked exactly where it was three days ago. It has the same dented panel and the same tinted windshield. It’s unmarked but not unfamiliar.

Someone’s watching her.

But it’s not a clinic-grade observation. This is external. Government, maybe. Or private. But not internal protocol.

I watch it for a while and wait for movement, but none comes.

I should walk away.

Instead, I take note of the license plate, same as before. I should run the number to see if I can find any information that’ll be useful.

She thinks Miramont is the only warzone she’s navigating.

Well, she’s wrong.

Someone’s waiting to catch her mid-transition, right between fractured and whole. And if they get to her before I do…

They won’t understand what they’re awakening.

But I do.

I keep walking.

And the van doesn’t move.

I slide into the bakery, the one she visits when she’s not drowning in protocol. I pick a corner booth near the window, but tucked enough to vanish from notice. The lighting is dim, barely more than a sigh, but it’s enough.

From my coat, I pull the backup tablet, the one with a low-frequency signal and hard-scramble encryption. It pings once, then unlocks. I tap the icon marked “CROW” and wait for the visuals to load.

A soft, grainy view from her apartment’s living room camera floods the screen. The angle’s clean, and she’s in frame.

Celeste is barefoot with her coat off and sweater loose. Her hair’s still damp from the shower, curled at the ends. She moves like she’s unspooling from something tight, rolling her shoulders as she crosses the room, unbothered and unknowing.

I lower the brightness.

She grabs a book, settles on the couch, and pulls her legs beneath her. There’s a bruise that I hadn’t seen before on her ankle. It’s faint.

I shouldn’t look.

But I always look.

Because there’s a moment, just after she exhales, where she lets go. Her mask thins, and her guard drops.

And it feels like something real is bleeding through the silence.

My chest aches with something sharp and ugly.

I could watch her forever.

“Excuse me?”

I jolt. Not visibly, but it’s close. The waitress, maybe nineteen, stares at me with a polite smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Would you like anything?”

I clear my throat. “Coffee. Black.”

She nods and walks away. I catch the smell of steeped tea from the next table and nearly grimace.

The tea here tastes like floral regret. But the coffee… well, at least it’s not lying about what it is.

I glance back at the screen.

Celeste is asleep now, with one hand curled near her cheek.

The book she’d pulled from the shelf earlier has slipped from her fingers and is now resting against her thigh, the pages fanned open like it’s still trying to be read.

The flash drive she always keeps close rests on the end table, untouched.

I stare at it, at her.

She doesn’t know how exposed she is.

And I don’t know how much longer I can keep watching without touching the edges that she doesn’t show anyone.

Eventually, I kill the feed.

Outside, the van is still parked at the same spot. But there’s movement inside now, just a flicker behind the glass.

I step out of the bakery with my coffee and cross to the alley beside the van. There are no alarms, no second ping.

But there’s a camera rig wired into the headrest, and it’s civilian-grade, not clinic-issued.

Interesting.

I walk away like I never stopped, my steps even, my pulse steady.

Tomorrow, I’ll have that plate number traced. Whoever’s watching her has no idea what she’s capable of.

But I do.

And if they miscalculate…

They’ll break themselves on her long before they break her.