Page 50 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

The light in Reyes’ lab always hums wrong.

Like it’s pretending to be fluorescent, but there’s something else underneath—a faint buzz that doesn’t match any known current.

I rub the back of my neck as I lean over the terminal, the screen’s glow turning every new discovery into something clinical and cold.

But today, the discoveries aren’t theoretical. They’re personal.

“Pull it up again,” I say.

Reyes taps a few keys, and the sequence unfolds. It’s not a video this time, but metadata. Line after line of file references, signatures, and upload origins. A trail.

“That one,” I point, narrowing my eyes. The origin code has been obfuscated and then buried under dummy data.

“That’s from the Echo prime server. Level 4 permissions only,” Reyes mutters. “This isn’t Celeste’s work. Someone upstream did this. Years ago.”

“Rourke?”

Reyes shrugs. “If it were just him, the metadata would be clean. This looks… layered. Like a committee of shadows.”

I let that sit.

It’s not one monster. But many.

We dig deeper. A timestamp appears that predates even Celeste’s official file creation. Same file string, same neural encoding format.

“They didn’t start the program with her,” I say. “They built the program around her.”

Reyes clicks again, and we find it.

A funding signature, disguised as a shell grant, routing through three firms.

All of them were tied to one investment group: Meridian Kinetics .

I speak the name aloud, and something about it sticks to the back of my teeth. Reyes stiffens.

“You know them?”

He nods firmly. “They’re not just a venture firm. They bankroll strategic psychological operations, behavioral weapons, and artificial empathy models.”

My jaw clenches.

Celeste wasn’t an anomaly.

She was a prototype.

The more I peel back the history behind Celeste’s files, the more it feels like watching a person be erased in slow motion—scrubbed clean, overwritten, and rewritten again.

Reyes reads out another sequence. “This was pulled from the neonatal development records linked to Project Celestia. It includes a hospital signature—Saint Lyra’s, rural district.”

“That’s not even near here,” I murmur. “That’s across the province.”

“Exactly. And there’s no birth certificate in the standard database. Only a provisional tag listed under a temporary custodial number.”

A child without a name.

I feel my stomach turn.

Reyes pushes a file toward me. It’s a scanned case report. “Her biological father died in a car accident when she was barely a year old. A drunk driver. But her mother remarried within eighteen months. That’s where the trail starts to rot.”

My breath slows as I read.

Domestic disturbances, unexplained injuries, and denied therapy recommendations. Then, a psychiatric referral. It’s listed as a research internship for the stepfather, but his credentials are fake.

Celeste’s mother filed a report once. Just once. But it was withdrawn the next day. Three weeks later, she was found dead. Cause of death: overdose. Ruled as a suicide. But Reyes points out the discrepancy before I can.

“She’d never had a prescription history before that day,” he says. “Nothing. It’s planted.”

“And Celeste?”

“Transferred into state psychiatric care under the care of Dr. Marlen Varon, which, by the way, was a pseudonym. The real name? Dr. Felix Rourke.”

The words hit like acid.

“She wasn’t just a survivor of the clinic,” I whisper. “She was bred for it.”

And somehow, she clawed her way out.

But the scariest part isn’t that they buried her origins.

It’s that they kept her close afterward.

They trained her, promoted her, and put her in charge of the very system that dismantled her.

Like they were testing something even deeper—

Reyes says it aloud, softly, “A long-term adaptation model.”

A child who is designed to be broken and rebuilt.

And she rebuilt herself into a goddamn weapon.

I step out of the lab, my boots scuffing against the worn floor tiles like they’re trying to argue with gravity. The hall outside is unnervingly still. My head’s still echoing with every line of code and every fucked-up breadcrumb we just uncovered.

The moment I turn the corner near Diagnostics, I see her. Celeste. She’s standing by the vending machine with her arms crossed, her profile cut in the clinical lighting like some beautifully angry goddess. Kade is with her. They’re close. Too close.

He’s leaning in like they’re speaking lowly and in private. And the way his fingers graze her elbow? It’s not guiding. It’s possessing.

I freeze.

Whatever they’re saying, she’s not pushing him away. She’s not stepping back. And it guts me in a way I can’t name without it sounding like betrayal. I watch her expression. It’s not soft, but not hostile either. It’s sharp and focused.

Like she’s learning him.

And it makes me want to break something.

He says something, and she tilts her head. Then she turns and walks away, leaving him standing there, hands in his pockets and smirking like he just won something. I catch his eyes for a split second before I move. He sees me, but he doesn’t say a word.

He just walks off like the corridor was always his.

I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

Then I hear footsteps behind me—smaller and quicker. Mara.

“That looked… intense,” she says, eyeing me sideways.

“Yeah.”

She raises a brow. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I tell a lie.

“That didn’t look like you’re fine. That looked like a man watching a woman he maybe sort of—definitely—wishes wasn’t talking to someone else. Especially that someone.”

I arch an eyebrow at her. “You done?”

She grins. “Just saying what everyone else won’t.”

I shake my head. But I’m not mad. Not really. It helps to laugh, even if it’s bitter.

Back in my office, the walls feel closer than usual, like the room has been breathing without me. I set Reyes’ data stack on the table and sit in silence for a beat, letting the hum of the ceiling vent lull me into focus.

I start building a timeline. Every date, every document, and every name we’ve uncovered so far.

Celeste’s father: dead in 1990. Her mother: dead in 1996.

Celeste was admitted to state care under Rourke’s alias: 1996. Early neural mapping: 1997. Miramont test subject ID created: 1998.

And then there’s a decade of blank.

No school files, no photos, no public records.

Until she appears again at seventeen as a prodigy intern for a now-defunct branch of the Echo program.

Under what name? Celeste Varon.

Varon.

The same alias Rourke used.

It’s not subtle.

He wasn’t just training her. He was renaming her.

Reclaiming her.

Fuck.

I scan the physical notes Reyes printed. One file buried in the folder catches my eye. It’s an old report from a memory integrity analysis, and it’s signed by someone named Dr. Langridge.

The note reads: “Subject shows unusually high resilience to induced false memory layers. Subject appears to consolidate trauma as a motivator rather than an inhibitor. Recommendation: modify memory bindings, introduce maternal-loss anchors, and suppress paternity narrative to increase dependence on clinical authority figures.”

My stomach turns.

They saw the wreckage of her life and stepped in with open arms.

They offered her structure, answers, and education under the guise of care.

And in exchange, they rewrote everything.

This wasn’t a rescue.

It was an occupation.

They didn’t just absorb her. They shaped every damn belief she’s ever had about herself.

I grip the table’s edge until my knuckles pop.

This isn’t research.

This is cult-level psychological warfare.

And Rourke? He wasn’t the originator.

He was the handler.

But someone else funded it. Someone else gave the order.

And they’re still out there.

The overhead lights in my office flicker once as Reyes steps inside, then they stabilise.

Reyes stands beside my desk, setting down a portable case stuffed with printouts, loose notes, and a foldable grid of red string and pins. He opens it on the table, and I help him reassemble the makeshift map across my whiteboard. Photos, labels, Post-its.

It’s a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream, except it’s real. Every piece has a name. A consequence.

“So what now?” Reyes asks from behind me, his voice lower than before.

“Now,” I murmur, tapping a line that runs from Meridian Kinetics to a black-barred memo titled ‘Phase Sustainment,’ “we follow the money until we find the puppet masters.”

Reyes folds his arms. “They used Celeste to refine a control system. And now she runs the place they built it in. Either she breaks it, or it breaks her.”

The silence is heavy.

I feel the guilt in my bones. For every time I thought I understood her. Every time I judged her without knowing this.

She didn’t choose this path. She was funneled into it.

“We tell her now?” he asks.

“Not yet,” I say, staring at the diagram. “Not like this. We need to pull the last layer first. And we need to find out what they’re planning next.”

Because if they went this far to make her, they’re not done yet.

And I have a sick feeling they didn’t just train a subject.

They’re waiting for results.

Reyes sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “What are you thinking?”

“I think the final project was never Echo. It was Celeste. And the minute they see she’s deviating from protocol, they’ll come to reclaim her.”

He goes still. “And if they can’t?”

I turn to him.

“Then they’ll burn everything down and start over.”

We stare at the map.

And for the first time in weeks, I feel cold to my core.

Because we’re not just fighting a system anymore.

We’re fighting the designers.

The following hour is a blur of silent movement.

Reyes and I comb through the secondary files buried in the cluster directories Mara flagged earlier—string after string of dead names, backdated financial injections, and shell organizations.

There’s no smoke without fire, and this much smoke could bury a city.

I pause at one line item: ST. CORA INSTITUTE – DEFUNCT, 2002. It’s marked in red.

“Reyes. Look at this.”

He leans over. “Is that—”

“Celeste’s mother was admitted there,” I say. My pulse kicks up.

We drill down. Celeste’s mother had been registered under a pseudonym: Marian Vale. Institutionalized under suspicion of a dissociative breakdown after the death of her husband. The notes are fragmented and corrupted. But a cross-reference pops up. Project Celestia. My stomach turns.

“She wasn’t just a patient,” I murmur. “They used her too.”

Reyes swears under his breath. “They tested experimental therapy on her.”

A few clicks later, we find something worse. We find custody documents, signed over to the clinic’s education wing. They raised Celeste under institutional observation and labeled her a “conditioned sleeper subject.”

“Jesus,” Reyes whispers.

We sit in silence. The kind of silence that’s heavier than grief.

Everything she remembers, all the gaps, the inconsistencies…

They were planted and designed. Not just by Rourke. But by something older. A foundation.

“This is it,” I say. “This is how they got her. Not through violence but through permission. Paperwork, protocol, and guardianship laws no one cared enough to challenge.”

Reyes nods. “It was never about controlling the clinic. It was about engineering the perfect clinical subject.”

“And then watching her grow into the system that built her.”

“We have to tell her,” Reyes says again.

I nod.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I need to sit in this room and mourn a little, though not for her.

But for the little girl she never got to be.