Page 47 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

The hatch slams shut behind us. I hear it seal with a dull, pneumatic hiss, the sound of something old locking itself away beneath the surface and shutting out the world above.

I carry the drive inside my coat, pressed flat against my ribs, as though if I let it go too far from me, it’ll vanish, just like the rest of this place should’ve. Reyes doesn’t say much.

“I’ll parse what I can after my last session,” he mutters.

He nods once, then peels off toward his wing. I watch him go before turning the opposite direction and slipping back into the hum of clinic life.

It’s sometime after eleven when I spot them—Celeste and Kade, walking side by side near the west stairwell. He says something I can’t hear. She doesn’t laugh, but her mouth twitches like it wants to. Her arm brushes his. It’s not accidental.

A heat flickers deep in my gut. It’s irrational and fast.

I turn before they spot me. I take the long path through Recovery to loop around toward the commons. I need air. Or a distraction. Or both.

But instead, I get Mara.

She’s at the espresso machine, punching buttons like they owe her money. She looks up, startled, when I approach.

“Dr. Rennick,” she says a little too formally. Then, more calmly, she asks, “You okay?”

“Fine. Just caffeine-starved.” I gesture at the second machine. “Mind if I steal a slot?”

She smiles faintly and steps aside. “Be my guest.”

I load a capsule and try not to let the silence grow too awkward. But Mara, for once, fills it herself.

“You’ve seen them too, right?” she asks, her voice soft. “Dr. Varon and Mr. Lorran?”

I glance at her sideways. “What about them?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. They’ve been… closer lately. People notice. I notice. And you… well, you don’t look thrilled.”

“I’m not paid to be thrilled,” I mutter.

Mara snorts. “You’re jealous.”

“I’m concerned,” I correct too fast. She lifts a brow, unconvinced.

“Look, I’ve worked with Dr. Varon longer than most. I’ve seen her cold, and I’ve seen her pissed, but never… tangled.”

That word lands. Tangled.

“I think he’s dangerous,” I say.

Mara nods. “So does half the clinic. But she doesn’t.”

I say nothing, because there’s nothing useful to say.

When my drink is ready, I take it and step away with a nod. Mara watches me go like she knows more than she’s letting on.

I hope she’s wrong, but the ache in my chest says otherwise.

Rounds keep me distracted for a while. Post-op assessments in Recovery, and a scheduled consult with Reyes over a trauma regression patient who keeps relapsing mid-loop. I throw myself into it—measurements, neural response calibrations, and too many notes. Anything to keep from thinking about her.

But the stillness always returns, between steps and charts. Her face comes back. So do the line of her spine and the way she looks at Kade like he’s a puzzle only she can solve.

By 3:15 p.m., I’m reviewing MRI spike data alone in the diagnostics wing. The hum of the equipment is oddly soothing. It sounds like something alive, something that breathes in rhythms too subtle for regular ears.

Then Mara passes by again with a clipboard in hand, moving fast. She catches my eye through the glass and raises an eyebrow. I give her a nod, professional and reserved.

But even then, her smirk lingers.

Everyone sees it. Whatever’s happening between Celeste and Kade, it’s not subtle. And it’s not over.

Not yet.

After my last consult, I head back toward Records to drop off intake revisions, but I double back halfway through the hall. Something feels off. The admin terminal outside central monitoring is left on, the screen dimmed and unattended.

I glance around. It’s empty, and there’s no tech in sight.

Curious, I step closer and tap the touchpad. The display flares to life, showing diagnostics logs and timestamped access queries.

And one incomplete transfer.

Drive activity.

I lean in. The source reads as an internal diagnostic backup. Non-networked and unmarked. The transfer log ends suddenly.

I try reopening the log.

Access denied.

Typical.

I kill the screen and turn away, irritation prickling at the back of my neck. It’s probably nothing.

But everything lately starts as nothing, then mutates.

I need to keep my head straight. My next step is Reyes. We need to cross-check what we saw in the Black Box Room against the main archival schema.

That, and I’m not letting this Kade-Celeste connection keep unfolding without someone watching from the other end.

Not anymore.

I finally get a chance to breathe after hours of back-to-back noise. My office is dark when I enter. The overhead lights are on sensor delay, but I don’t bother triggering them. I just sit.

The moment I let my head fall back, the weight returns. Not just the jealousy, but the guilt, and the helpless orbit around someone I swore I wouldn’t chase again.

The drive from earlier still sits in my coat pocket. I dig it out and plug it into my private terminal.

For a second, the screen glitches. Then it stabilizes, and file directories bloom like roots.

There’s one folder marked RECOVERED_LOGS. And another marked CLIENT_GESTALT_TEMPLATES. But it’s the third one that catches my eye: AUX_CAPTURE_DAEMON.

I open it.

There’s one video file with no title. Just a string of numbers.

I hit play.

The image is grainy, and it’s timestamped nine years ago.

A girl no older than ten sits in a room I don’t recognize. She’s hunched forward, breathing hard, and there’s a lullaby playing in the background. It’s familiar.

A door creaks, and a masked figure enters. The girl flinches so hard that she falls off the chair.

My throat goes dry.

She’s screaming. And then the feed cuts out.

I close the window fast. My pulse won’t stop thudding as I stare at the frozen black screen.

Whatever this is, it wasn’t just stored.

It was buried.

And if we’ve dug it up, then someone’s going to want it buried again.

I move out and lock the door behind me.

It’s time to meet Reyes.

It’s time to pull this all the way into daylight.

The hallway outside my office is quiet. Most of the admin staff have either gone home or buried themselves in closed-door diagnostics. I move quickly, keeping the drive tucked inside my coat again.

I take the east stairwell down two flights to Sublevel 1, where Reyes’ secondary lab is nested behind a double-security corridor. I pass two orderlies and nod at a nurse who doesn’t make eye contact.

When I reach the lab door, I knock once, and Reyes opens immediately. His face is pale, his eyes shadowed.

“You saw it,” he says. It’s not a question.

I step inside and shut the door. “Yeah, I saw it.”

He locks the door behind me and gestures toward his terminal. “There’s more.”

I cross the room and glance at the screen. It’s all still frames—paused video segments, raw neural capture files, and metadata overlays. Reyes has already mapped out what we found.

He taps one image. It’s the girl. Celeste. She’s younger. “This wasn’t just therapy, Alec. It was prototyping, iteration testing, memory disruption, and emotional priming. That’s not child counseling. It’s manufacturing.”

I feel sick.

Reyes scrolls through the logs. “There are dozens of these files. Some are incomplete, others looped. They weren’t training her. They were trying to fracture her. To rebuild from the break.”

I steady myself against the desk. “Who did this?”

Reyes doesn’t answer. He just clicks another tab.

A signature tag blinks in the lower corner. C0-ZERO.

The same identifier from the earlier architecture.

And suddenly, I’m not sure if Rourke is the end of the ladder.

Maybe he’s just the rung she’s meant to break next.

And maybe Kade wasn’t her first captor.

Maybe he’s just the one who made her remember.