Page 39 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

The moment the clinic doors slide shut behind me, the tension drains from my shoulders.

Maybe it’s been there all day.

The buzz of low conversation, the soft clatter of shoes against polished floors, the subtle, judgmental glances… they follow me until I cross the threshold into open air. Then, it’s just silence. A deeper kind. The kind that presses into your ribs.

The sidewalk feels too wide, too exposed. I walk fast, purposely. Not because I’m in a hurry, but because I don’t like the sensation crawling up my spine—the feeling of being followed. It’s irrational. Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t turn around.

The weight of the day stretches across my back. Harper’s name still floats in the spaces people won’t touch, but I’m too tired to care how it looks. Grief has a way of gnawing through protocol. Still, I don’t cry. I just walk.

The streets between the clinic and my apartment are mostly empty by this hour. A flickering street lamp casts shadows where none should be, and I pass it without looking up.

My apartment greets me in stillness. There are no signs of intrusion and no clicks of hidden cameras. Just the smell of old books and the faint trace of bergamot from the candle I left half-burned two nights ago. I lock the door behind me. Twice.

I sit on the couch and stare at nothing for a while. Then, my phone buzzes.

Kade: Are you alright?

My fingers hesitate over the keys. I don’t answer right away. I just hold the phone, letting his question sit between us like a pulse. Finally, I type: Still living.

He doesn’t reply. But he doesn’t need to. That single message, the thread of it, pulls the memory out of me like velvet drawn across a blade.

The scent of him, the pressure of his hands, and the fire we built between us without meaning to. My body still remembers. I close my eyes and lean my head back.

His mouth against my neck, the softest growl before he pushed me harder and deeper, and the sound I made when I stopped resisting. When I wanted it.

I shift in my seat, heat pooling deep in my stomach. My fingers curl against the armrest, and I let the memory come. I let it wrap around me, thick and raw and real.

For a moment, I’m there again, under him and around him. Lost in the dark and loving it.

The ache that follows is sharp, but not painful.

It’s longing.

I exhale slowly as my heartbeat slows.

I don’t text him again. I just hold the phone to my chest until sleep finds me.

Morning light presses through the blinds like it doesn’t care how little rest I got. I blink awake slowly, as if my dreams were full of gravel. My body aches, not from pain, but from too many hours curled around a need I still haven’t named out loud.

Coffee comes first. The smell anchors me.

I sit at the kitchen table, mug in hand, ignoring the news feed playing mutedly on my phone. I scan the clinic schedule, make notes on my tablet, and run over the postmortem details from Harper’s report again and again like something might change if I just look at it hard enough.

But nothing changes. And nothing makes more sense.

By midmorning, I’m dressed and heading back to the clinic. I walk slower this time, still alert, and still hyper-aware, but steadier. Kade hasn’t messaged again, and neither has Alec.

The courtyard is nearly empty when I cross through. Two interns laugh at something behind the hedge, their sound too sharp. It cuts through the stillness like broken glass.

Inside, everything is familiar. Everything is sterile.

Except for the tension that coils when I step through the corridor near Diagnostics. Alec’s standing at the end of it, talking to Reyes. I pause. He sees me but doesn’t wave.

Our eyes meet briefly, and there’s something in his face that I can’t quite read. Anger maybe. Or disappointment. But I don’t slow down. I just keep walking.

Because I’m tired of being the one people look at like I’m glass.

I’m not going to shatter. Not yet.

Not today.

The hours drag.

I bury myself in work, scrubbing through behavioral data, adjusting Echo’s filtration parameters, and checking thermal monitors—anything to keep my hands moving and my mind too distracted to think.

But every so often, I catch myself drifting. My eyes go to the hallway where Harper used to appear, bright-eyed and eager, and my fingers hover too long over her access permissions. I should revoke them, but I don’t. Not yet.

I know what grief looks like on other people. I’ve catalogued it, analyzed it, and fed it into algorithms. But on me? It doesn’t compute. It just festers.

“Dr. Varon?” Mara’s voice is too soft, like she’s trying not to startle me.

I glance up. Her hands are clasped at her front, her knuckles white.

“I, um… I took care of the interview summaries. I just left them on your desk.”

“Thank you,” I say.

She hesitates. “Are you… okay?”

I nod once, too sharply.

She nods back, then leaves quickly, her footsteps hushed.

I stare at the closed door for a long time.

The silence in the room feels heavier now, layered. I need to do something, anything, to pull myself back from the edge I keep hovering near.

So I move to the terminal. I open Echo’s archive folder, the one with legacy files we never use. There’s a corrupted entry, one that shouldn’t even be there.

TEST_0704_REDLINE.

There’s no timestamp and no operator ID. Just an audio file with seven minutes of recorded noise.

I click play.

At first, it sounds generic, an old recording, maybe someone else’s patient session mistakenly buried in the archive. A child sobs. Not the tantrum kind but the broken, muffled kind. A soft lullaby plays under it, like something from a warped music box. Then comes the scream.

It comes from a man ripped open by grief. It’s guttural. The pain is too precise, too intimate.

And then, something inside me ruptures.

I know this sound.

But not from someone else. From me.

The blood, red against white tile. My mother’s perfume, cloying gardenia. And the closet door. My tiny knees against splintered wood. A memory I didn’t consent to remember.

This isn’t someone else’s trauma.

It’s mine, coming from my memory like it’s a fresh one.

My hands start shaking.

I don’t remember getting up. I don’t remember leaving the diagnostics room.

But I find myself back in my office. Later, I think. Maybe minutes? Hours?

I move to the restroom, and the mirror above the sink holds a single word, smeared across the glass in what looks like red marker but smells like iron.

Celestia.

I don’t remember writing it.

I stare at it until my legs buckle. Then I slide down the wall and pull my knees to my chest.

The room buzzes in and out of focus.

And then he’s there.

Kade.

He doesn’t speak.

He just closes the door behind him gently, his eyes scanning the wreckage of my posture, crumpled on the floor, shaking and broken. For a breath, I think he’ll say something and try to fill the silence with words that don’t help. But he doesn’t.

He crosses the room slowly, kneels beside me without hesitation, and wraps his arms around me like it’s the only way he remembers how to stay alive. His hands slide around my back with a steadiness that shouldn’t be possible, his breath slow and even, like he’s trying to sync mine to his.

He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t try to fix me.

He just holds me.

And for now, that’s enough.

We sit like that for a while. I don’t know how long. But long enough for the lights overhead to dim with the automatic night cycle and long enough for my breathing to steady against the calming rhythm of his.

My head rests against his chest, and for a few strange, suspended minutes, I don’t feel like a broken equation or a failed hypothesis. I feel… held. Like I matter to someone in a way that isn’t about my work or my past.

When I finally speak, it’s into the fabric of his shirt. “How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t,” he says, his voice low. “I just had a feeling.”

I should question that. I should find it suspicious or invasive. But I’m too tired. Too hollowed out by memory and grief.

His hand moves slowly up and down my back, grounding me. “Do you want me to stay?”

The rational part of me says no. That I need to process it alone. That his presence will muddy my thinking.

But the part of me still curled in the closet, breathing perfume and blood, wants something else.

“Yes,” I mumble.

He nods, as if he expected that. He helps me to my feet, and I move like I’ve aged years.

I don’t say thank you. I don’t need to.

We don’t speak again as we move to his office, since he says something about needing to pick up his things.

He picks up his laptop, and we leave the office. The hallway is empty, the lights dimmed. My legs carry me almost on instinct up the stairs to my backup apartment three floors above. He follows, his steps soundless behind me.

Inside, I flick on a lamp. The silence feels thicker here, but somehow safer. I gesture vaguely toward the couch.

“You can crash there,” I murmur.

He doesn’t argue. He just shrugs off his jacket and settles in like he’s done this before. I disappear into the bathroom, splash cold water on my face, and stare at myself in the mirror for a beat too long.

When I step into the bedroom, I leave the door cracked.

I fall asleep with the soft hum of the city pressing in through the windows.

And when I wake in the middle of the night, I catch the faint sound of his breathing from the other room, slow and even, like a metronome grounding me to something solid.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel afraid.