Page 9 of Fractured Devotion (Tainted Souls #1)

Morning sneaks in with no fanfare. Just gray light through grid windows and the mechanical hum of unseen machines. I’m back at my console before six, already wired with black coffee and obsession.

Celeste didn’t return to the clinic last night.

I tracked her path to the edge of the woods, waited until her apartment lights glowed faint behind curtained glass, then returned here to finish what I started.

The nodes are in place in her office, lab, and backup apartment. Her world is mapped now, mostly.

But mostly still isn’t enough.

She still eludes full capture. Even with every angle monitored, she leaves me guessing. It’s intentional… that calculated calmness. That mournful, unfocused stare she wears when she thinks she’s alone. The girl’s not just haunted. She’s hexed. And I’ve never been more drawn to anything in my life.

I don’t have direct access to her main apartment. Not yet. But what I do have is grainy exterior surveillance from nearby traffic cams and a secondary hallway feed that catches shadows through her curtain gap. It’s just enough to make out shapes, enough to guess.

Behind the soft curtain glow, her silhouette moves in restless loops—pacing and pausing.

At times, her shadow bends forward as if seated, possibly journaling again, but it’s impossible to tell from this distance.

Around three a.m., the lights dim, and her form sinks out of view, suggesting she’s collapsed on the couch.

The window holds nothing but shadows now, vague and distant. But I watch all the same.

I record every frame. And then I watch again.

By 7.30 a.m., the clinic comes alive. Hallways bloom with orderly chaos—nurses shuffling carts, interns spilling caffeine, researchers clutching encrypted tablets like lifelines. I slip into the rhythm seamlessly. I’m not seen. I’m scanned and forgotten.

I make my rounds, checking sensors that don’t need checking. When I pass Alec Rennick in the north stairwell, he barely glances at me. Good. I prefer the edges. But I log his presence, just the same.

Then I see her.

Celeste enters from the west wing side, her hair swept into a knot, her tailored coat drawn tight.

Her mouth is set, unreadable. She stops to exchange words with a nurse outside the cognitive lab—Juliet, I think—but her eyes flick toward the upper floors.

The backup apartment. A thread of tension coils under my skin.

She knows something.

Or maybe she feels it.

Either way, it puts me on alert.

I duck into a side corridor and trigger the hallway feed from her apartment upstairs, just to make sure everything I planted stays intact and hidden, skimming footage from the night again.

Nothing. There are no alerts. No signs of disturbance.

But she’s not easily fooled. That’s what makes this interesting.

I return to the control hub, the soft whirr of cooling fans and muted screens wrapping around me like a second skin. It’s still early. The scent of stale coffee lingers, and the first stirrings of the morning shift echo faintly down the corridor.

I check the feeds out of habit, but there’s only one I care about.

Celeste. The image flickers once before it sharpens.

She’s at her desk now, a soft halo of light spilling over her shoulders.

She’s not working. She’s sitting still, one hand resting lightly over a closed file, her eyes on nothing.

Not the screen. Not the data. Just… silence.

She moves slowly. Elegantly. Her fingers trail over her temple, brushing a stray strand of hair back into place. It’s not the action that gets me. It’s the tenderness of it. The kind of absent gesture one makes when they think they’re unobserved. That intimacy of solitude.

She reaches for her mug, lifts it, and pauses halfway. She stares into it like it might whisper a secret back. Her mouth doesn’t move, but her expression shifts subtly. A flicker of sorrow, maybe. Or memory.

I zoom the feed tighter, my breath shallow.

I notice the way her lips part ever so slightly, the tilt of her neck, the faint dark circles beneath her eyes.

I shouldn’t notice these things. But I do.

I’m not cataloguing behavior now. I’m watching the woman, not the subject. And it’s dangerous.

I shut the feed off abruptly, my breath sharp in my chest.

Obsession creeps in with small permissions. I won’t give it more, at least not until after lunch.

I lean back, my eyes burning, and glance at the time. It’s mid-morning. The rest of the clinic is finally stirring and getting to full speed. And I’ve seen enough.

For now.

Before lunch, I meet with Rourke. He’s planted in his glass-walled office like a spider in a web, his eyes sharp over folded fingers.

“You’re ahead of schedule,” he says, his tone unreadable.

“Progress takes shape when you leave people alone long enough to show their fractures,” I reply.

He chuckles once. “And?”

“She’s unraveling. Slowly. But definitely.”

Rourke exhales through his nose, then leans back slightly, his fingers steepled. “I wasn’t honest with you when we first started this.”

I don’t speak. I just wait.

“There’s something buried in her early research… before the tribunal, before the revisions. Notes that never made it to the public archive. Concepts beyond redirection and into neural overwrite. If she kept copies, they’d be encrypted and hidden. But if she’s building anything off them now…”

His voice trails, heavy with implication.

I nod once. “You think she’s picking up where she left off.”

“I know she is,” he says. “And I want everything. Methods, motives. Especially if she’s creating something that could compromise the clinic’s structure.”

I take that in. Then, his mask slips, and for a moment, I see not a man protecting institutional legacy but someone chasing power he lost years ago.

“Keep tightening the frame,” he says again. “I want to see what spills when she breaks.”

I step out of Rourke’s office with a pulse of unease tightening in my chest. His candor unsettles me more than any silence ever could.

There’s a deeper layer he’s only now choosing to reveal—one that paints this entire operation in a much darker shade.

He’s not just curious about her breakdown.

He’s hunting legacy and secrets buried too deep for the tribunal to uncover.

And I suspect those secrets are the key to everything she’s building now.

And I need to know too.

By dusk, I return to my suite and cue up a side protocol—a layered program designed to intercept journal entries from any digitized files she transfers. It’s risky, but necessary. Her written voice might give me the clearest map yet.

Later, I scan the feeds. Celeste sits alone in her office. She’s working late, the corners of her mouth twitching as she reads something on her screen. Then she turns and looks directly at the camera.

She can’t see it.

But she feels it.

The hunter in me stills.

I press two fingers to the screen.

“Good girl. Stay curious. That’s how you come closer.”

And I wait.

I don’t move from the monitors.

The sky deepens into a heavy dusk. I wait and watch, hoping she’ll retreat to the upper floors, to her backup apartment. The one I can see. But sometime after nine, she exits through the main doors instead. A clean, clinical disappearance. No lingering.

I remain at the controls well past midnight, traffic cams pulled up on a secondary feed. Her apartment is quiet, the curtains drawn. There’s no view inside, only silhouettes gliding behind glass and curtains.

Still, I wait. And watch. And imagine what lies just out of reach.