Page 33 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

She hasn’t looked at me in what seems like forever.

Not like before. And not like the night on the cliff, when the air between us burned so hot that it should’ve left a scar on the clouds.

Not since Alec crawled his way back into her psyche like a parasite with a white coat and moral spine.

I gave her space, though it was not out of mercy but calculation.

I’m not foolish enough to chase a woman mid-suspicion. Not when Alec has been whispering theories and planting ideas like rot in the foundation. He has Reyes in on it now too. They meet in corners and exchange glances when they think no one sees.

But I see everything.

Still, I wait. Because while they speculate and posture, I move.

Celeste has been pulling back. No more questions. Just silence. And that tells me more than any confrontation would.

So I distract them and feed them what they think they want.

Things like little inconsistencies, terminal anomalies, and enough breadcrumbs to draw them off my scent and onto something juicier.

Harper.

She’s the weak link, the perfect scapegoat. But I don’t think she’s alone. Nobody that nervous moves without a leash.

And I intend to follow the chain to the hand that holds it.

I begin with her access logs. The surface-level entries say nothing, just timestamps that make her look diligent, if erratic. But deeper in the server cache, I find the fingerprints of obfuscation, ghosted login tags rerouted through deprecated paths. Someone taught her how to hide her trail.

That’s the first red flag.

The second is the chat log.

It’s encrypted and scrambled, but not invincible.

I spend the next five hours running old decryption patches, the kind the board never approved because they were “ethically suspect.”

They work like a charm.

What I get is a transcript between Harper and someone using the handle “PHRNTK.”

It’s fragmented, like most black market relays. But the context is damning.

PHRNTK: Status on Subject-V? Harper: She’s fragmenting. The emotional triggers are working. PHRNTK: Good. Stay close. Don’t let her re-stabilize. Harper: She’s starting to doubt him. I think she’ll break soon.

There are no names, but it doesn’t take a genius to know who “him” is.

I isolate the middle exchange, clean it, encode it into a fresh packet, and then send it.

To Celeste.

With no signature and no commentary. Just the truth, delivered raw.

Let her draw her own lines.

Let her wonder why Harper talks like a handler.

Let her start to see who’s really been in control all along.

And let Alec keep watching me while the walls close in from someplace else entirely.

I track Harper’s movements in real time. But nothing invasive. Not yet. Just a passive thread through her Echo passkey, her coffee preferences logged by the vending AI, her schedule, and how often she changes routes between wings.

She’s panicking.

Her shoulders are tight, her steps are quick, and she avoids eye contact with everyone except Mara, whom she clings to like an emotional crutch. Even that’s slipping as Mara’s been more distant lately and skittish, like she’s caught in a current she doesn’t understand.

Harper’s avoiding the North lab now, which is strange, because that’s where she used to run her behavioral cross-checks. The moment I logged her absences from there, I knew something shifted.

She’s hiding something.

And Alec and Reyes are trying to hide me.

I see their network shadows dancing around my logs. I see the lightweight scans and fingerprint trace attempts. They’re sloppy. Reyes is better than that. I suspect he’s consciously botching it so Alec thinks he’s being covert.

They’re watching the wrong man.

Or the right one.

Depending on who wins first.

Back to Harper, I run a thermal pass over her quarters. There are no extra occupants and no hidden servers. But her tablet pulses irregularly, with activity spikes between 2 and 4 a.m., when no one’s supposed to be online. She’s talking to someone.

And whoever they are, they’re feeding her directives.

I reaccess the chat log and trace the relay path. It bounces through eight nodes before reaching her device, but the third hop? It’s internal, and not just clinic-level but admin-level.

Someone above her is in on it.

Someone with clearance.

Someone who might’ve given her everything she needed to watch Celeste. Or to unravel her.

So I start digging deeper.

It’s nearly midnight when I finally get the name.

On the third relay node, the registration tag has been wiped, which normally would’ve made tracing it impossible.

But the firmware signature wasn’t scrubbed.

Sloppy work. Or maybe just rushed. It takes hours and a few tricks I’m not proud of, but eventually, the ID pings back to an access node tied to Dr. Felix Rourke’s override desk.

I sit still for a long time.

Then I laugh.

Of course it’s him.

The man who signs off on every funding loophole, who turns a blind eye to discrepancies as long as the data keeps flowing, and the board stays impressed. Rourke didn’t just know Harper was feeding someone. He helped her.

I lean back, crack my knuckles, and let the weight of the revelation settle like gunpowder in my lungs.

Rourke is orchestrating this, which means Celeste isn’t just a subject to Harper.

She’s a target.

I rewire a few subroutines in my personal monitoring grid, set new motion alerts outside Rourke’s private office, and pull power logs from his network. They’ll tell me when he’s online, when he’s asleep, and more importantly, when he’s deleting something.

Because if he suspects I’m looking, he’ll cover his tracks.

But I’ll already be there.

My fingers hover over the keyboard.

For a moment, I debate telling Celeste just enough to tip her further from Alec’s carefully crafted trust.

But not yet.

This has to be timed.

For now, Harper will keep dancing at the edge of exposure.

And Rourke won’t see the fire creeping toward his doorstep until it’s too damn late.

By the time the hallway clock flicks to 2 a.m., I’m exactly where I need to be.

On the seventh floor in the northeast wing. Rourke’s private entrance.

Most people wouldn’t even know it exists. He had it carved into the design under special architectural clearance. It’s soundproof and off the clinic grid, its power rerouted through a decoy terminal. But I know the bones of this place. I’ve mapped it in my head a hundred times.

And now, I’m inside.

The air is stale. Only artificial pine lingers, a scent Rourke once said reminded him of controlled environments. Of order.

The monitors are still warm.

I plug in a passive sniffer and leave it running. The deeper records I want won’t be accessible now, not without triggering alerts. But logs from the past few hours can still be pulled silently. Session duration, input types, sleep mode time, and who came and went.

I watch the numbers load.

The last login occurred forty minutes ago.

Rourke was in this room, accessing archival surveillance logs tagged under Tier Red. That’s Celeste’s classification. No one outside of board-approved clearances should even know that tag exists.

So he’s digging too. Into her. Maybe into me.

Or maybe trying to erase something before anyone finds it.

I copy the timestamp, encrypt the file, and exfiltrate the logs through a dead channel just in time.

Footsteps echo from down the hall.

I freeze, kill the lights, and pull the door shut behind me.

Then, I vanish into the service duct before the night shift even realizes a ghost walked past.

Rourke has made his move.

Now it’s mine.

To further confirm what I already know, I don’t go home. And I don’t sleep.

Instead, I loop through the server footage on a dummy terminal set up behind an unregistered janitor’s panel. No one knows it exists except me, and that’s exactly how I like it.

I run the footage from the lobby, the elevator, and the hallways that connect Rourke’s office to the rest of the clinic.

There’s a window between 1:48 a.m. and 2:06 a.m. where all power to the hallway cameras is cut for exactly eighteen seconds.

It’s intentional.

I flag it and mark the frames before and after. Whoever spliced the footage knew what they were doing.

Then I see it. Right before the cut. Harper. She’s standing near the terminal outside Rourke’s door.

And after the cut? Gone.

My jaw clenches, and the skin behind my ears tightens like someone strung a cord there.

She was there.

And she’s part of it.

But still, she’s not the one pulling strings. She’s the one dancing on a leash.

I make a decision I know I’ll regret.

I start to build a new archive. One that Celeste can’t ignore.

All the logs, the footage, and the metadata. Encrypted and clean, with no commentary and no manipulation. Just enough to let her walk to the edge of the truth herself.

And then I’ll be there when the floor crumbles.

She’ll either lean into me.

Or she’ll run screaming.

And God help me, I’m not sure which I want more.

I seal the new archive inside a hidden node only Celeste can access. One tied to her retinal scan and buried beneath a mundane research folder labeled as “Autoimmune echo resonance.”

She won’t find it right away.

But she’s not stupid. And curiosity is a far more potent drug than trust.

She’ll look eventually.

I close the console and take the back corridors toward the east wing exit, careful not to trip any motion alerts or get caught on late-night admin patrols.

The hall outside the observation chamber still smells faintly like antiseptic and ozone, the synthetic signature of trauma cleaned too fast. My boots make no sound against the tile.

I pause by the door to her old lab, the one we’ve both been pretending doesn’t exist for a week now.

Just for a second.

Because even now, even after all I’ve done and all I still plan to do, I still want to be close to her.

But not to touch yet. And not to speak to either.

Just to see and be around her.

But I turn away.

Because it’s not time.

Not yet.

I know she’s in her upstairs apartment. She hasn’t drawn the blinds in two nights.

She sits at the edge of her bed like she’s waiting for something, or deciding who to stop trusting next.

And I watch from a grainy corner of the feed, not because I enjoy it, but because silence is more revealing than speech.

But I don’t go to her. Not yet.

I step into the night instead, the cold swallowing me whole. The air smells like sterilizer and distant electricity. I could stay and push and gamble it all with a knock at her door. But if I force it, I lose everything.

She’ll come to me when she starts to doubt Harper more than me, and when the walls I’ve built around her questions feel safer than Alec’s polished truths.

I just need to make sure she sees what’s real. Or at least, what’s real enough.

Soon.