Page 38 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

I’m earlier than usual today because I haven’t slept. It’s not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t want to.

The air outside the clinic smells like old cement and bitter coffee.

Celeste stands near the north entrance, talking to Mara.

Her posture is steel-straight, her gray suit buttoned with precision, all edges and intent.

Mara fidgets, glancing over Celeste’s shoulder every few seconds.

She looks like someone carrying too many secrets in too small a body.

Celeste murmurs something, then nods and walks off without looking back.

It’s subtle, but I see it—the way her jaw tenses just a little too tight. It’s like she’s holding something in.

The mood in the clinic has shifted. Everyone says Harper jumped. That she was unraveling, and no one could have seen it coming.

Bullshit.

I’ve seen enough dead bodies to know when one doesn’t add up. Harper didn’t just jump. And someone made sure no one could ask the right questions.

Reyes is waiting for me in my office. He’s already seated in my guest chair, a thermos in one hand, a tablet glowing in the other.

“You look like hell,” I say, dropping into my seat.

“You look worse,” he replies flatly. “And you’re not going to like what I’ve found.”

He turns the screen toward me. I squint at the data, the timestamped stress indicators, the elevated cortisol spikes, and the micro-patterns of fear that seem to align with a repeating external presence.

“These are Harper’s?”

Reyes nods.

I let out a deep breath. “Jesus, she was scared.”

“More than scared. Monitored.”

I scroll through the logs. Everything points to consistent external pressure. Reyes flips to the next slide. It shows access history from secure nodes and time-logged entries that don’t match Harper’s usual routines.

“Looks like someone was dragging her into something deep,” he says. “But whoever it was knew how to stay under the radar.”

“You’re saying this wasn’t suicide.”

He hesitates before saying, “I’m saying she didn’t fall alone.”

I sit back. My chest feels tight, like I’m trying to breathe through a wire mesh.

“She left no notes, and her messages are clean. There are no data leaks. Just these anomalies.”

“What about the footage?”

Reyes shakes his head. “The rooftop camera doesn’t cover the north ledge. So there’s no footage. Nothing conclusive.”

Which means someone planned it.

“Then we go analog,” I say, pulling out Harper’s desk key from my drawer. “Let’s see what she was hiding while alive.”

Reyes watches me with the same weary empathy he always wears when we’re about to dig up something foul. The kind that doesn’t just stink, it stains.

And I already know.

This won’t end cleanly.

Harper’s workspace smells faintly of perfume and scorched plastic, like she left something burning, and no one bothered to put it out.

Her desk is still sealed with the flimsy corporate tape the security team puts on after an internal incident—thin red stripes with MIRAMONT SECURITY printed in white.

I slice through it with my scalpel. Petty rebellion, maybe. But I’m not in the mood for protocol.

Reyes closes the door behind us and sets up a portable scanner. “I’ll go digital. You go messy.”

“Fair.”

Inside the desk drawers are colored gel pens, a stash of granola bars, a mini recorder, and notebooks filled with obsessive scrawl and half-legible notes. Harper’s handwriting is all loops and slants, like someone always rushing, always halfway through a thought.

“Check this out,” Reyes mutters. He turns a tablet to me.

It’s a folder buried three directories deep and misnamed as a scheduling archive. Inside is a series of logs tagged “Veritas,” each with a timestamp and a brief entry.

“She was recording meetings,” he says. “One-on-one consults and off-book encounters. Some of them with staff I don’t even recognize.”

“Any mention of Celeste?”

“Not directly. But she was tracing someone who had access to the security feed and analytics platform, someone rerouting live data into ghost nodes.”

I glance up. “Kade?”

Reyes shakes his head. “Too soon to say. But if he was in her notes, he’s not in them now. It’s like someone erased the trail, sloppily. There are data fragments, just enough to make us suspicious. But not enough to point fingers.”

I pull out one of the notebooks and flip through. A Post-it note falls free. It’s a crude drawing of two eyes drawn in red ink, the pupils inked in like camera lenses. Below them is a single word: WATCHED.

Reyes looks over my shoulder. “She knew.”

“And no one listened.”

There’s a long silence before I speak again. “Let’s cross-reference the Veritas logs with admin access records. If someone scrubbed Harper’s notes, they had to log in somewhere. Find the anomaly.”

Reyes nods. “On it.”

I leave the office with the notebook still in my hand, Harper’s final notes burned into my brain. Whatever she was on to, it got her killed.

And whoever did it is still inside these walls.

I step into the archive bay down the hall, pressing my ID badge against the reader until it clicks open. It’s cold inside, metallic. It’s the kind of place that smells like old wires and decisions no one wants to admit to.

The logs Reyes found were only partial. If Harper used her clinic credentials, they’d be time-stamped here too. I sift through rows of access panels and pull up the raw admin reports.

As I scan the list, something jumps out—an access ping from Harper’s ID at 3:42 a.m., just two days before her death. The node accessed? A restricted analytics port tied to system behavior modifiers.

That’s not standard. That’s not even supposed to be visible to interns.

I tag the entry and send it to Reyes.

His reply comes fast, and it says, “That terminal’s in the executive diagnostics suite.”

Which means she was either escorted in, or someone gave her access.

My pulse tightens. I scroll backward. Someone else used that terminal less than five minutes after her. The entry is masked, the ID scrubbed. But the timing’s too tight to be a coincidence. Harper found something, and someone followed.

I pull up the audit log for the suite’s camera. It cuts out the moment Harper enters. There’s just static.

And then nothing.

The file is labeled CORRUPTED.

I exit the archives with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Whoever killed Harper didn’t just silence her. They erased her.

But they missed a breadcrumb.

And I’m going to follow it to hell if I have to.

I find Celeste outside her office, speaking to one of the interns with that clipped tone she uses when she’s running low on patience but pretending not to be. Her face is composed, unreadable, but her eyes flick toward the hallway where Kade stands too close, too casual.

He leans in to say something, and she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t smile either, but the lack of recoil is enough to make my stomach churn.

She notices me and excuses herself quickly, murmuring something I can’t hear before approaching me with that straight-backed stride that always reminds me of a battlefield surgeon—efficient, practiced, and worn.

“Alec,” she says. Her voice is neutral. Guarded.

“I was coming to check on you,” I say. “See how you’re holding up.”

“I’m fine.” Her mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “As fine as one can be after knowing a colleague fell off the roof.”

She tries to pass me, but I step aside just enough to hold her there. “I’m serious, Celeste.”

“I know,” she says. Her voice is a bit tender now. “But I’m not ready to be dissected today.”

I nod slowly. “You saw the footage?”

“There was no footage,” she says, her tone clipped. “Convenient, isn’t it?”

I glance past her toward Kade, who’s already disappeared around the corner.

“Celeste…” I begin.

She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

I don’t press. Not here.

But the way her eyes linger on the space he left behind is all the answer I need.

She’s pulling away from me.

And she doesn’t even realize it’s breaking something in me.

She walks off before I can say anything else, her heels sharp against the polished floor. I stay where I am with my jaw locked, watching her disappear into the lab wing.

For a moment, I don’t follow. I just stand there, my pulse humming with something ugly. Jealousy? Anger? I can’t name it. But I know it’s got Kade’s name on it.

I head back to Reyes.

“We’re going to need more than logs and fragments,” I tell him. “We need a trail they can’t erase.”

He leans back, rubbing at his temples. “Agreed. But if Harper was documenting something off-book, there might be physical backups. Something she stashed somewhere else.”

“Then we start digging. And we don’t stop until we find out who she was trying to expose.”

Reyes nods. “If we want to catch the spider, we need to stop chasing the web and look for the nest.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking.

Which is that the spider might already be in Celeste’s bed.

And she might not even realize she’s being bitten.

I sit alone in my office long after Reyes leaves, staring at Harper’s crude red drawing—those two inked-in eyes and the word below them. WATCHED. I flip the Post-it over and back again. What the hell were you trying to tell us, Harper?

The light in the hallway dims with the end of the workday, and I catch sight of Celeste passing by. She doesn’t look in. Her arms are folded tightly across her chest, and her pace is too fast for casual.

She’s unraveling, but not visibly. Not enough that the others will see it.

Just me.

And maybe him.

I grab my coat, the edge of my nerves scraping raw as I follow the hallway out. I tell myself I’m just heading home. That I’m not trailing her shadow like some guilt-wrapped ghost.

But my pace matches hers, and my eyes track her every motion. She exits out the east side, into the small courtyard lined with dusk-burnt hedges and benches no one sits on unless they’re trying to hide a cigarette.

She stands there for a moment, her arms still tight, her gaze low. I watch from the entry alcove, half in shadow. I don’t speak. Don’t step closer.

Eventually, she moves.

And I follow a few steps behind, like some predator of memory.

Because I can’t let her fall again.

Not like Harper.

Not like the others.

Even if it breaks me first.