Page 4 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

Morning has no grace here. Just a cold slap of sterile light through the louvered blinds and the dry rasp of my own breath echoing in the stillness.

I sit on the edge of my bed, half-dressed, staring at the wall where the paint has started to peel behind the thermostat. It’s been three days since the boardroom blackout. Three days since Alec walked back into my life. Three days after that man—Kade—looked at me like he already knew my pulse.

My fingers twitch toward my notebook, but I stop myself. No more writing. No more spirals. Not today. I don’t trust what would come out of me if I let the ink flow.

I push off the bed and move through the apartment on autopilot, brushing my teeth, pulling my hair back into a tight bun, and dressing in the regulation gray scrubs that cling a little too tightly around the collarbone. My reflection in the mirror doesn’t look back. It hasn’t for a long time.

The air in the hallway outside my apartment is crisp, still laced with the faint antiseptic trace of last night’s sanitization. I step out and begin the short walk to the clinic, a five-minute stretch past trimmed hedges and the whispering hush of pine trees that line the outer path.

The morning is quiet, the kind of stillness that feels borrowed and fragile, like it might shatter under too much thought.

The main entrance of Miramont rises ahead, a jagged silhouette of glass and steel set against the slowly brightening sky. I badge in without a word, my coat tugged tight against the lingering morning chill.

Inside, the warmth and sterility greet me like an old routine, the polished floors gleaming under strip lighting, the faint hum of machinery ticking beneath the surface.

I take a breath and square my shoulders.

Time to work.

I’ve locked the name “Celestia” back into the basement of my brain, where it belongs.

In the clinic, everything smells like ozone and expectation. I pass Mara near the east wing. Her voice is clipped and exhausted as she fields questions from a restless family. She catches my eye briefly, then looks away.

She’s changed her perfume again. I remember the way she used to wear citrus oils back when she first got here as a new staff. Now, it’s something heavier. Vetiver or cedar. The kind of scent you choose when you need to feel unbreakable.

Further down the hall, three interns huddle near the diagnostics station, visibly stiffening when they see me approach.

I recognize them from the onboarding memo Mara forwarded yesterday.

They’re new rotations from the university’s cognitive psych program.

Fresh faces, all of them. Eager, wide-eyed, and still smelling faintly of overcompensation.

One breaks away and trails behind me, pretending to study her tablet.

She has a blonde braid, trembling hands, and a lanyard that reads Harper DuVall.

“Doctor Varon,” she starts, half a step too quickly, then falters. “I… uh… I uploaded last night’s vitals for Subject 17, but I wanted to flag a misalignment in the EEG overlay. I corrected it in the logs. I hope that’s okay.”

I glance at her. She’s young, maybe too young, and she says everything like she’s afraid it might be the wrong answer. Still, the correction was valid. I nod once.

“Next time, highlight the update in red. Subtle changes get buried otherwise,” I say.

She nods, clearly relieved, her shoulders softening under the weight of acknowledgment. When I turn the corner, she lingers a few seconds longer before vanishing back into the cluster.

“Doctor Varon,” Mara calls after me this time. “Dr. Rennick left his file on your desk. Subject 43. He flagged the REM regression.”

I nod again, not breaking stride.

Back in my lab, I close the door, secure the blinds, and sit in the dark.

Subject 43. Adolescent female with severe neuroassociative trauma. Baseline rewiring was initiated six months ago. Three days ago, she screamed during REM cycle and crashed into delta waves.

It shouldn’t have happened. Not with the current calibration.

The security footage shows nothing unusual, but that means little. Half the clinic’s systems were rebooted during the blackout, so there could be dozens of blind spots.

Or sabotage.

I file that thought away for now.

At noon, I’m due for a briefing with Rourke. He’s ten minutes late and smells faintly of the greenhouse, with a hint of soil and humidity clinging to his cuffs.

“You’ve been watching the integration numbers,” he says, settling across from me like a crow landing on a bare branch.

“Forty-three isn’t stabilizing,” I reply. “She’s regressing.”

“Temporary instability,” he counters. “Alec thinks it’s hormonal interference.”

“Alec’s thinking with nostalgia, not data.”

His lips twist into something unreadable. “So you’ve spoken?”

“We exchanged syllables.”

“Keep it that way.”

Night presses in, heavy and still, as I step into my second apartment three floors above Miramont’s west wing.

I don’t use it often, but when the days run too long, and the thought of the walk back to my place feels like a mile too far, this space becomes a second skin. The moment the door clicks shut behind me, I exhale, slow and controlled, like a valve releasing pressure.

The day peels off my skin with every step I take toward the bathroom. I undress in silence, each article of clothing falling to the cool tile floor with the soft hiss of surrender. One layer at a time, I strip away the pretense, the composure, the clinical detachment.

The proximity has always been intentional. Being this close to the lab ensures I can vanish into work if sleep turns traitor. It also means every hum of the generators below and every fluctuation in temperature vibrates up through the floor like a reminder of the life I’ve chosen.

I sink into the tub. The water is hot enough to redden my skin, but I need it. The sting makes me feel located.

I close my eyes.

There’s a sensation behind my forehead. It’s not pain, not quite. More like a pressurized thrum. Like a thought that wants to be born but can’t quite stretch its limbs.

I hum the lullaby again—soft, fractured.

But it’s different tonight. It’s not comforting. Not grounding.

I somehow have the feeling of being watched.

Even here, inside my own skin, something feels… inhabited.

The light above the vanity flickers.

And I wonder, briefly, if I imagined it.

Or if something… someone… is learning how to blink.

The water turns tepid as I remain in the tub, watching steam curl like breath from a wounded throat. Eventually, I force myself out, wrap myself in a towel, and sit at the edge of the bed with damp hair clinging to my back.

I should sleep. But instead, I reach for the tablet on my nightstand and tap into the clinic’s closed system. Just a check. Just a quick review of Subject 17’s chart.

The logs are clean—too clean. Almost sterile.

Harper’s correction from earlier sits near the bottom.

I open the overlay and study the waveform distortion she flagged.

It’s minor, yes, but there’s a nuance in the drift.

It mimics a neuro-exhaustion tremor I’ve only seen in patients undergoing unauthorized stimulatory feedback.

That shouldn’t be possible, not unless someone tampered with the sedation protocol.

I cross-reference logs, and a timestamp pings red. 02:03 a.m. A system override? There’s no matching authorization trail. My breath catches in my throat. There’s no video footage and no room access registered. Just the edit.

No way to know who did it. At least not yet.

My fingers hover above the screen, itching to flag it, to report it.

But instead, I encrypt a private note and bury the anomaly deep within my personal files. It’s second nature by now—almost every staff at the clinic goes through compulsory coding and encryption training during induction.

They say it’s to streamline patient security protocols, but everyone knows the real reason. It keeps us self-reliant. No waiting around for IT when something urgent surfaces. And no loose ends outside the clinic.

I need more. One breach doesn’t make a pattern. But if it shows up again…

I close the tablet, slide beneath the sheets, and stare into the half-dark, wide awake.

Outside, the generators hum again. A familiar, surgical lullaby.

Something’s changing inside the clinic.

Inside me.

Sleep remains elusive. I lie still, staring up at the ceiling as shadows crawl across it in slow, patient strokes. There’s a little insistence in the air, as though the walls themselves have begun to hold their breath.

I think of Harper, of her nervous glance and how carefully she tried to please. Then, I think of Kade’s unsettling stillness in the boardroom, of Alec’s unreadable silence, and of Rourke, always the spider in the corner, waiting.

The clinic is pulsing with secrets.

And I am too tired to chase them.

For now.

So I close my eyes and let the lullaby in my mind stretch thinly across the dark as sleep takes me under one breath at a time.