Page 34 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

By the time I make it home, dawn is still hours away. My apartment is darker than usual, the lights all left off on purpose. I don’t need them. Every step is calculated, my muscle memory guiding me.

Instead of collapsing into bed like I should, I head to the far end of the living room. Pulling the false panel loose, I reveal the hidden wall cavity behind the bookshelves. The surveillance screens, fourteen of them, arranged in a grid, still lie disconnected. A protective measure.

But that measure ends tonight.

I spend the next hour rewiring and transferring the power nodes and rerouting the data lines to a more secure channel tucked away in the deepest part of my home, accessible only through a retinal trigger hidden in a mirror frame. No one will stumble onto it, not even if they come searching.

Once the screens hum back to life, I scroll through the feeds.

Camera angles blink open. The primary apartment Celeste abandoned still looks untouched, her bedroom intact.

The camera the intruder planted still sits unnoticed, perched in the far corner above her closet.

I note the timestamp. There’s been no recent activity.

Switching to the secondary feed, I find her.

She’s asleep in her backup apartment, curled into herself with one arm pressed beneath the pillow. I wonder if she feels safer there or just more isolated.

I watch her for a moment longer than I should. Her chest rises and falls in a slow rhythm. She looks peaceful, and it’s almost cruel how easily she slips into something like rest, while my thoughts stay knotted in wire.

I kill the feed and go lie down. My own bed feels foreign. Cold.

What the hell am I doing?

My hands ache from restraint. I haven’t talked to her in days, not since that look she gave me in the corridor, like I was something she’d finally realized couldn’t be fixed. Alec was there. Always there.

Still, I’m not out. I won’t be. I just need the right moment.

Sleep comes for me eventually, but it’s not rest. It’s something murkier, like drowning in a familiar tank.

Morning sneaks in a little faster than I would like.

I follow a routine by taking a cold shower, wearing a pressed shirt, and taking silent footsteps into the belly of the clinic. I don’t make myself obvious. I let Alec think I’m slipping and let Reyes waste his hours monitoring data that only tells half the story.

Then I see her.

Celeste stands by the atrium stairwell, speaking softly to Mara and two interns I don’t recognize. Her posture is stiff and formal. But she’s listening, at least. Mara hands her a clipboard. It’s likely something technical. Her gaze flicks upward and meets mine.

One second passes. Then two.

That’s all it takes.

Her eyes hold mine with no warmth, but they’re not cold either. It’s like she doesn’t know what I am today.

I nod once, but she doesn’t return it.

Late into the night, when the clinic is nearly empty and the halls echo with the hum of emergency lighting, I’m back in my hidden terminal space, reviewing logs in silence. That’s when it hits—an alert flashing in the lower corner of my screen. An unauthorized access to the rooftop stairwell.

Feed 8C goes live.

It’s Harper.

Her body language reads like guilt that’s soaked in panic, her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

I smile.

Time to end this.

I don’t hesitate. I cut through the dim service corridor, bypassing the main stairwell where I know cameras are trained like hawks.

Instead, I slip behind maintenance storage, tracing the shadowed path I mapped out weeks ago for moments exactly like this.

The back stair access is old and barely used, blind to the clinic’s usual surveillance sweep.

Perfect. Within minutes, I’m at the final door, and I don’t stop to think. I push through.

Harper’s silhouette is already there, a black smear against the fractured skyline, her arms clenched over her chest like she’s holding herself together by sheer will.

She doesn’t turn when the access door clicks shut behind me.

She doesn’t need to. Her voice cuts through the tension like wire through skin. “I know what you did.”

I move slowly, not to unnerve her, as that part’s involuntary by now, but because I want to savor every beat between her suspicion and her fear.

The air up here smells like metal and the dusty scent of the vents, and I watch as she exhales like she’s about to confess something that will cost her everything.

“You framed me. Sent her that message,” she mutters.

I shrug off my jacket and toss it onto the concrete ledge. The wind cuts through my shirt, but I barely feel it. “You’ll need to be more specific, Harper. I do a lot of questionable things.”

She turns now, her eyes wide and glassy. Her lip trembles, not in fear—not yet—but in the kind of rage born from knowing you’re cornered and still fighting like hell to pretend you aren’t.

“You think you’re smart? Hiding behind Echo systems like you own them? I was just trying to help her. I didn’t want it to go this far.”

“So you admit you were involved,” I say.

She falters for one heartbeat. Two. Then, she says, “I was told to monitor emotional baselines. That’s all. I didn’t know it was part of something… bigger.”

I take a step closer, not in a threatening way. And not overt. Just enough to make her rethink the distance between us.

“Who told you?” I ask.

Her jaw tightens. Her hands clench. And for a moment, she looks like she might run.

But there’s nowhere to go but down.

Her voice shudders. “I don’t know who he is. He never gave a name. Just scrambled feeds, always-masked audios, and sometimes distorted text-only comms. I thought it was coming from the research board, someone up top.”

“You believed that?” I step in fully now, closer than she can handle. “You thought this was sanctioned?”

She flinches. “I didn’t have a choice.”

I circle her, each step steeped with intent, watching her shoulders hunch tighter, her breathing spike. “You always have a choice. You chose to spy on her, to lie, and to manipulate what little peace she had.”

Harper turns suddenly, her eyes wild. “You don’t get to lecture me. You’ve been playing puppet master since day one. She doesn’t even see you clearly. You think you’re protecting her, but you’re just—”

I grab her arm before she finishes that sentence, but I don’t grab it hard enough to bruise. Not yet. “Don’t finish that thought. You’re not in control of this.”

“I was scared!” she hisses, yanking her arm back. “They threatened to take my license, to expose my records—”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, I swear. I never saw a face. It was just code, coordinates, and instructions. I didn’t think she’d get hurt.”

“But she did get hurt. She’s still hurting,” I say.

The words grind into me like glass beneath my skin.

My jaw tightens, something primal clawing through the smooth facade I’ve spent years perfecting.

I see Celeste, not the woman from the monitors, but the one who wakes with haunted eyes, who flinches when thunder rolls too close to her ear, and who once looked at me like I was her sanctuary and sin in a single, tangled instant.

And Harper? She’s the rot. The crack in the foundation. She’s the reason Celeste pulled away, the reason she second-guesses every shadow and every sound. Harper’s compliance and her cowardice cost Celeste her sense of safety, her sleep, and her trust in herself.

That trust… I worked for it. Bled for it in silence. I loved her in ways I wasn’t supposed to. And now it’s smeared with Harper’s fingerprints.

I look at her, really look at her, and see everything I’ve been trying to bury beneath protocol and patience. Harper isn’t just a liability.

She’s a threat.

And if I leave her standing, she’ll shatter it all beyond control.

So I step forward, not with rage, but with stillness.

She doesn’t retreat.

And I push.

She falls faster than I expect.

A sickening silence drags on before the thud.

There’s no scream and not a cry. Just a body reduced to consequence.

I stay at the edge for a beat too long, watching the dark patch spread like ink around her twisted frame.

My pulse is steady, unmoved. There is no regret. Only the itch of exposure. And the crackle of risk.

I step back, breathing evenly and dragging my thoughts into order. I’ve done this before. I’ve cleansed problems and removed rot. But never this close to the center. Never where it could ripple back.

Which makes this messier.

And I fucking hate messy.

By the time I re-enter the stairwell, I’m already cataloging what needs erasure.

Stairwell sensor logs, timestamp triggers, and anything that might show my path leading to the rooftop.

I confirm there are no cameras covering the side where it happened.

Still, I scrub every access point that could raise questions.

In my terminal, I stitch a soft ghost sequence—motion blurs and low-light distortions. I render her alone, isolated, and melancholic, her body language altered slightly in post-frame. Enough to suggest sadness and enough to make suicide plausible.

It’s delicate work, but not perfect.

But perfect isn’t the point.

Believable is enough.

The digital trace fades by 2:33 a.m. I wipe the last terminal echo and reset the elevator log to show a normal, unremarkable night.

Then I head home, back to the screens. All of them.

Celeste is still asleep, but her body’s turned. Her face is half buried in the pillow, her brows pinched. Something is chasing her in her sleep.

I brush two fingers across the monitor as though I could smooth the dream lines from here.

“You’re safe now,” I whisper. “I took care of it.”

She stirs but doesn’t wake.

Tomorrow, someone will find Harper, and there will be gasps and protocols. But no questions that matter.

And if Alec tries to dig?

Let him.

I’ve always been good at staying just out of reach.