Page 21 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

Her mouth is still on mine when it hits me—everything I’ve done, every scar I’ve earned, none of it ever mattered until this exact moment. Until her.

The kitchen is barely lit, just enough glow bleeding from the hall to catch her eyes when they flutter shut. Her fingers knot into my shirt like she needs something to anchor her, and I let her. Let her press into me like she’s trying to memorize the shape of my restraint.

I don’t push.

But I don’t pull back either.

My hands are at her waist, tight enough to remind her I’m not just standing here. I’m choosing to stay.

The kiss isn’t soft. It’s not clean. It tastes like the end of a long lie and the beginning of something we might not know how to survive.

She breaks away first.

Breathless. Glassy-eyed. Her lips parted, swollen. She looks at me like she’s trying to find the version of me that makes this safe.

She won’t.

I’m not safe.

But I’m hers.

“Mara,” I murmur, pulling back just enough to see her face. My voice is low, uncertain. I’m not sure if I’m asking her if she wants more—if she’s ready—or if I’m just trying to slow down what’s happening between us before it pulls us under.

She doesn’t answer with words. Instead, she shakes her head once, gently, not in rejection but in pause. Then she presses her forehead to mine, and it quiets something restless in me.

Her breath brushes my lips when she says, “Not yet.”

That’s all. No fear. No shame. Just honesty.

And I nod. Because that’s more real than any yes could be.

She’s not running. She’s not surrendering. She’s just asking for space to breathe.

And I’ll give it to her. Every inch she needs.

Because what we’re building here—it isn’t about taking.

It’s about earning.

I walk her back to the room without touching her again. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask me to stay.

She doesn’t have to.

I don’t sleep. Not yet. Not with everything moving the way it is.

Once I hear her breathing change—deep, slow, curled into the quiet like she’s trying to make herself small—I slip out.

The house hums with her scent. Soft cotton, tea leaves, something warm I haven’t named yet. It follows me down the hall, into the part of the house that almost no one ever sees—off-limits unless I decide otherwise.

The private office.

Everything in here is wired for function, not comfort. Dark concrete walls, steel desks, multiple screens blinking in intervals. It's the only place I can still pretend I have control.

The second I boot the terminal, Lydia’s voice buzzes through.

“You’re late.”

“I had a situation.”

“Five foot seven? Big eyes? Haunting silence?”

“You already knew.”

“I know everything you don’t say.”

I pull up the flagged entries she left for me. No name jumps out. No violent spike. Just movement.

She speaks again through the line, her voice steadier now. "Something else came in while you were offline. New job request. The client wants an answer on whether we’re taking it. Thought you’d want to glance it over first."

I pause. My fingers hover over the keyboard, then click once to bring up the file.

There’s no immediate red flag. No personal crossfire. Just another tightly wrapped contract passed through Lydia’s private channels.

The brief outlines a scan job. One target. Unlisted offshore accounts. Background monitoring. No mess. High payout.

"No flags on our end so far," Lydia says after a beat. "But I didn’t greenlight it. Didn’t feel right making that call alone."

She’s smart. That’s why she’s still on the line.

I skim the fine print again. Whatever this is, it’s a moneyed request. Clean language. No obvious strings. Still, something about the timing makes me slow.

"Put it on hold," I say. "I’ll let you know within the hour."

There’s a soft chuckle on her end. "Copy that. Try not to overthink it."

"Impossible."

I exhale and lean back in my chair. The walls around me are thick with silence, screens humming, waiting.

No Caleb for now. No ghosts.

Just a clean line of work.

Almost.

I close the feed and lean back, the dark hum of the office settling around me like armor.

The job stays up on the second monitor, a slow scroll of credentials and ghost-data, but I’m not really looking at it anymore.

I’m still in that kiss.

Still in the soft scrape of Mara’s breath against mine. The way she didn’t pull away like I thought she would. The way she pressed in like she knew what I was holding back.

She said not yet, and I believed her. Respected it.

But there’s a line in my chest now, burning low and steady, and I can’t quite breathe around it.

I force myself to look away from the screen and re-engage the comm panel. One more ping to Lydia—“Check last night’s traffic around the clinic. Anyone tag the north-facing cam between 8 p.m. and midnight?”

I don’t expect a fast response. She’s thorough. Won’t send me anything unless she’s certain.

While I wait, I scroll to the cross-feed of exterior sensors. My home is a fortress. Trip-layered security, passive sensors, retinal entries. I designed it that way for me. But now I have her here, and I’m already calculating holes I never worried about until she became one of them.

I flip to thermal. Then to motion.

Still clean.

I tap into the private channel and scrub through the night’s logs again. Nothing unusual. No anomalies. Just the subtle shift in ambient temperature after I stepped out of her room. My motion in the hallway. Nothing from inside. Still, I log it.

I sit back. My neck aches.

This isn’t the part they warn you about.

Not the blood. Not the contracts. Not even the obsession.

It’s the stillness. The knowing someone could touch what you’ve protected by accident, just by breathing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I reach under the desk and flip the hidden panel. Inside, an old ceramic teacup sits nested among encrypted drives and magnetic safes. I pull it out carefully and set it beside the monitor.

Mara’s mug.

She left it on the counter. Didn’t even realize it.

That’s the kind of detail that roots itself in a man like me.

I hear the soft ping of an incoming transmission.

Lydia.

Her voice crackles through. “North camera picked up a shadow. 22:46. No clear face, but the posture’s off. Didn’t linger. Just enough to clock the exit routes.”

“Send the frame.”

“Already in your queue.”

I open it.

A still shot. Mid-stride. Hooded. Gloved. Not facing the camera, but the tilt of the head is calculating. Watching.

Wrong gait for a delivery runner. Too smooth for a drunk. Definitely not a civilian.

“Same guy from the flower box?” I ask.

“Too tall. Different stride. But the same posture. And the same choice of window.”

Mara’s.

Always Mara’s.

I drag the still onto the main screen and enhance it. Nothing new. But the timing—less than two hours after she left the clinic. Right before we drove out here.

I grind my teeth and close the image.

“Put a proximity alert on her office,” I say. “Anyone comes within six feet after dark, I want it logged and flagged.”

Lydia doesn’t argue. “Already done.”

She’s quiet for a beat, then adds, “You know what this means, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not about following anymore.”

“No. It’s an audition.”

Someone’s testing boundaries.

Trying to see how close they can get without touching.

Trying to see what I’ll let them take before I react.

“Should I escalate?” she asks.

“Not yet. But prep the file.”

“Which file?”

“The contingency. In case the line between watching and acting breaks.”

The silence on the other end deepens. Then: “Copy.”

The line goes dead.

I sit there for a long time, Mara’s mug still warm in my hand.

They’re not just watching her.

They’re baiting me.

And sooner or later, someone’s going to find out what happens when you do that.

I lean forward and open the client portal again, dragging Mara’s mug close, thumb tracing the chipped rim while the terminal finishes syncing updates. The job Lydia flagged is still queued. But I skip past it and instead run a deeper sweep across the network for low-frequency chatter.

A few lines hit.

Encrypted names. Partial match.

My jaw tightens when I see it. Same user that pinged our Belgium shell company two months ago. Not the target from the job Lydia just mentioned—this is something else. Older. I’d marked it for deletion.

But now it's crawling again.

I flag it and initiate a trace.

The map populates slowly. Brussels. Then Lyon. Now? Stateside. Just outside Detroit.

And the most recent packet they opened—one of my burner identity strings. Alias I retired three years ago.

Someone’s digging.

I bring up the nested feed of user cross-interactions.

Three names.

Two scrubbed clean.

One I recognize.

Not from a case.

From a room with steel walls and no clocks.

I sit back.

There’s something moving under all of this. And it’s not Caleb.

This isn’t about Mara at all.

Not yet.

But it could be.

If I don’t get ahead of it.

I pull up a second window and start typing instructions. Layered proxies. Clean buffer nodes. If someone’s probing my old ghosts, they’re not going to find a house of cards.

They’re going to hit a wall made of teeth.

And I’ll be on the other side, smiling.

Let them try.

Because unlike before, I have something to lose now.

And if they think that makes me softer—they’ve read the wrong file.

I lock the query in a sandboxed thread and minimize the window. Whatever that trace is—whoever stirred it up—it can wait until morning. But it won’t.

Not the way these things work.

Not when old blood starts surfacing like oil in cold water.

I reach for my comms panel again and tap a silent ping to Lydia. Not urgent. Just a breadcrumb. My way of saying: Keep a weather eye. Something’s shifting. It’s not pressing yet. But it’s circling.

I pause and glance back at the live hallway feed outside Mara’s door. Still dark. No motion.

Still safe.

For now.

My phone vibrates once, silently. A secure line message from the Discentra ledger team—an automated update.

The message is benign, but the time stamp on the back-end script running it isn’t.

It’s eight hours old. Which means someone inside their vault has been flagging dormant projects. That shouldn’t happen without notice.

I flag the ledger packet and trace it to the last internal terminal to access it.

My spine straightens.

It’s a name I haven’t heard in over a year.

Cassian Drake.

Not a threat. Not then.

But he had reach.

Longer than mine. And colder. He knew how to disappear into legal shadow. Preferred it. The only reason I remember him is because he once looked at me and said, “I don’t hunt. I wait.”

The fact that he’s stirring now?

Means someone whispered my name again.

And this time, I’m not the only thing they’ll find.

This time, Mara exists.

I close the panel. Stand slowly. The air in the room feels heavier. Not wrong. Just thick. Like the oxygen has been filtered through memory and returned to me soaked in static.

I step into the hall.

The house is silent, but I check every lock. Every sensor. Every weak point.

Not because I think they’ll come tonight.

But because I know how they think.

I’ve been them.

And I’ll be damned if they think I’ve gone soft just because I’m building a world she can live in.

They want to see if I’ll flinch.

Let them look.

I only flinch when I’m aiming.

And I never miss.

I check the comm log for fresh pings. Nothing. No updates from Lydia. No flagged movements. Just stillness again, pretending to be peace.

I lower the brightness on the terminal and set Mara’s mug down gently on the tray. My eyes drag back to the secondary screen. That contract Lydia flagged—the one I paused. It’s still sitting there. Waiting for a verdict.

I hover over the accept key. Don’t press it.

Instead, I open the client message logs. I scroll.

There’s one note. Not a directive. Just a tag: "High discretion. Minimal footprint. Target must not know."

I hate those lines. Not because they mean anything real. But because the people who write them think they sound precise.

They don’t. They’re a permission slip to crawl under someone’s skin without leaving a mark.

My cursor drifts back to the main request.

There’s a pattern in the payment routing. Subtle. But I’ve seen it before.

I copy the chain and run a silent trace. It redirects three times, then lands on a node I’ve used myself—in Berlin. A ghost wallet I thought I’d wiped clean.

That makes my pulse tighten.

No one should know that string still exists.

Unless they were watching me even before Mara.

Unless this request isn’t about the job at all.

It’s about access.

I type one line into the system’s internal chat:

"Where did this job really come from?"

I don’t expect an answer. Not right away. Not from Lydia. She’s asleep by now, or pretending to be.

I leave the message blinking.

The clock on the wall ticks softly, each second folding into the next like a breath I forgot I was holding.

Mara’s still asleep.

But I’m not.

I won’t be. Not until I know what I’ve invited in.

Because there’s more than one way to break a system.

And the quietest ones always start with a name you didn’t say out loud.

I shut the panel and kill the lights.

The house settles.

And I wait.