Page 5 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

It’s still dark when I rise. It’s the kind of darkness that folds over you, thick and soundless, like a cloth pulled tight around the neck. I haven’t slept, not in the way people mean when they talk about rest. I’ve been watching, always watching.

Three days have passed since the blackout, one that the clinic blamed on a system-wide calibration surge.

But I know better. It wasn’t planned by me, though I wish it had been.

That flicker, that moment of chaos, was a crack in their perfect wall, and it revealed more than just technical vulnerability. It exposed timing. Fear. Silence.

Rourke called it an opportunity. “Not ours, but worth borrowing,” he’d said.

An opportunity to trigger a systems audit, reroute attention, and slip into dark corners while everyone else was rebooting protocols.

It gave me the access window I needed to lace my software deeper into the clinic’s infrastructure—an unplanned gift that pushed our timeline forward.

It's been three days since that moment in the boardroom—the cold glass walls, the hum of breaths held too long. And then her. In real time. Not a still frame, not a recording. Celeste, in the flesh, where no filter or data artifact could distort her edges. I knew she’d be there, of course.

It was orchestrated that way. But knowing didn’t prepare me for the gravity of proximity.

She’s magnetic, even when motionless. Something about the tension in her jaw, the precision in her silences. And beneath it all, the fracture I’ve spent months trying to understand—a wound too complex to suture, too deep to ignore.

I’ve been watching her from a distance through surveillance from the clinic. Dr. Felix Rourke’s orders. I needed to study my assignment well enough. She is not just another regular project.

I’ve mapped her silences, studied the edges of her pain, and built hypotheses from her deflections and the way her eyes fixate when she thinks no one sees. That fracture is the key to everything.

Dr. Felix Rourke arranged my cover. On paper, I’m just a temporary Surveillance and Security Operations Liaison. Harmless and forgettable. But the real reason I’m here runs deeper, hidden beneath the surface of the clinic and buried in the fractured layers of Celeste’s past.

There’s a prototype—a neurological code she designed years ago, hidden beneath ethical frameworks and masked in trauma intervention trials.

After her tribunal, they tried to erase all traces of it.

They locked it behind firewalls and protocol red tape.

But it still exists, somewhere deep in the clinic’s oldest systems.

Rourke wants it, and I’m the only one who can extract it. But to find it, I need to understand the one who created it. And that means getting as close to Celeste as she’ll allow… and closer still when she won’t.

The sky begins its slow surrender from charcoal gray to hints of diluted gold as I step across the inner courtyard that stretches between the archive wing and the main research center of the clinic, nestled securely within Miramont’s walled premises, with frost clinging stubbornly to the glass awnings.

Morning stretches its fingers above the rooflines, banishing the last traces of night, though the cold still bites like a warning not yet lifted.

Rourke meets me in the greenhouse behind the archives, of all places. The air inside is humid and laced with the bitter tang of chlorophyll. He’s pruning something with thorns, and his gloves are slick with sap.

“You’re late again,” he says without looking.

“I was installing upgrades.”

He nods like he knows that’s only partly true. “Does Celeste suspect anything yet?”

“No. But she’s… aware. She doesn’t let things slide.”

“She shouldn’t. She’s the only reason this place runs.” He clips a stem and holds it between us like a scalpel. “But she’s also the only one who knows how to dismantle it. So be careful.”

“I don’t need to hurt her.”

Rourke looks up for the first time, his eyes catching the light. “You sure? You’re already secretly watching her every move. That’s a kind of violence.”

I don’t flinch. “I need to understand her. That’s not the same.”

He drops the flower into a silver bin and wipes his gloves. “You’ll get your access to Sublevel B tomorrow. Find what we lost. But remember, Kade. You break her, you lose everything.”

He turns, brushing past a hanging fern, his back already to me.

I nod once, then step backward through the greenhouse’s exit.

The humid air gives way to a chill as I shut the door behind me, the sharp scent of sap still clinging to my jacket.

The greenhouse, nestled near the edge of the archive wing, is separated from the clinic’s main research corridors by a narrow passage flanked with frost-kissed glass.

My boots tap along the cobblestones of the outer courtyard as I move briskly, the cold wrapping tighter around my neck the closer I get to the central building. I replay every word Rourke said, each one sharp with purpose, echoing in my mind like the snap of dead twigs beneath my feet.

I don’t look back.

By the time I reach the main threshold, the sky has paled to a muted silver-blue, with hints of gold brushing the upper clouds.

I scan in through the east gate and step into the central lobby.

The warmth inside is stark, a sudden shift that feels like crossing thresholds in more ways than one. It cleanses. It isolates.

The elevator ride is brief. As the doors slide open onto the main floor, I glance down the corridor that leads to Celeste’s office. Midway through my walk, I spot her standing near her office door with her head tilted slightly as she reads a chart.

The hallway lighting pools around her like a spotlight, catching in the strands of her dark hair. I slow my pace, careful with every footfall, needing to see her up close—her eyes, her mouth, the way she holds herself.

She looks up from the chart and meets my eyes. Her body remains still—no retreat, no step forward. Just a suspended moment. A pause. Is it calculated? Reflexive?

“Good morning,” I say, my voice measured.

She returns the greeting with a nod. “Morning. Kade, right?”

“That’s right.” I let a beat pass. “Settling in. Slowly.”

Her eyes narrow just slightly, but not in suspicion. More like in assessment.

“You’ll find this place adapts faster than it welcomes,” she says.

A brief silence stretches between us as she shifts a folder from one arm to the other. I watch the way her fingers press into the cover—tight, possessive.

“See you at the briefing later,” I say.

She offers a faint smile. “Of course.”

I nod once more and keep walking, but not before I catalog everything—the cadence of her voice, the way her breath quickens before she speaks, and the glint in her eyes when she thinks she has the upper hand.

She’s every bit the enigma I expected.

And she’s only just begun to unfold.

It’s past noon now, and the post-lunch hush is settling over the clinic halls. I’m returning from a brief walk under the guise of a break, though I haven’t eaten a thing. It was all just steps and thoughts.

On my way back to the control hub, I spot her again—Celeste. She’s not alone.

There’s a man with her this time, a broad-shouldered man with a demeanor too comfortable around her to be casual.

They stand close, not touching, but the air between them feels charged.

He says something that makes her smile—not the tight-lipped one she gives to colleagues, but something closer to softness. Familiarity.

I slow my steps, watching from a reflection in the polished wall. He touches her arm lightly, and she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she looks at him, something complicated flickering in her eyes.

Who the hell is he?

Later, I see him again near the stairwell. This time, he’s alone. We pass each other.

“You must be the new security guy,” he says, pausing.

“Kade,” I offer.

“Alec. I used to work here, alongside Celeste… years ago. Glad to see the place is tightening its defenses.”

I nod, filing away every detail. His voice, his watch, and the way he glances back over his shoulder.

Used to. Right.

Everyone leaves marks. I just have to figure out which ones she still bleeds from.

The rest of the day blurs. My updates to the network system are ahead of schedule, which means I’m left with too much time and not enough restraint. I rewatch one of the boardroom feeds again.

I watch the way Celeste’s fingers flex when someone uses the term “neural resonance,” and the way she doesn’t blink when Alec looks at her like she’s a war wound he can’t stop tending.

I track her movements across the clinic. She’s intentional, mechanical almost, except in the moments when she thinks no one’s watching. Like when she reads a line of notes and bites her lower lip. Or when she pauses outside the break room door as if bracing against the noise inside.

But she doesn’t let anyone in. Not fully. Not even herself.

I don’t have access to her apartment feeds yet. The firewall is older than the clinic’s newest architecture. Probably her doing. I’ve placed soft access nodes in the ceiling vents near her quarters, but they need proximity syncing.

So I wait.

And while I wait, I study. Every motion, every change in gait, every coded nuance in her voice recordings. Her logs, her errata, and the journal entries I pull from system redundancies that she doesn’t realize still exist.

She once wrote about a lullaby and said it was the last song she remembered before the fracture. She said it echoed in her chest when she couldn’t breathe.

I find the audio file. It’s old and warped. I loop it. And I listen.

And then I write: “Subject-0: Fractured Devotion. Analysis ongoing.”

By nightfall, the hallways thin out as people leave.

I slip through the underbelly of Miramont, past dormant offices and humming server bays.

The air smells like cold copper and recycled air.

I pass Harper DuVall, one of the new interns, if Mara’s onboarding list is accurate, in the west stairwell.

She doesn’t see me. She’s biting her thumbnail and pacing like she’s afraid to be still. Noted.

When I reach the access panel beneath the trauma diagnostics wing, I test a pulse scanner. It fails.

Plan B.

I slot in an override key and input Rourke’s root cipher. The panel hisses open. Inside, I find untouched storage, files, backup drives, and an old terminal locked behind encryption older than the clinic’s foundation itself.

I drag a stool closer, connect my tablet, and begin extraction.

My hands don’t tremble. Not even a little.

Because I’m finally beneath the skin of this place.

And I’m not leaving until I find what lives under hers.