Page 30 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

The garage door slides closed behind me with a hydraulic sigh.

Darkness folds in slow, layer by layer, until the last sliver of daylight is smothered by concrete and steel.

I leave the engine running for a moment longer than necessary, just to hear something alive in the room.

Then I kill it. The silence that follows is dense and low, like fog in the chest.

I don’t go upstairs.

Instead, I move through the inner access door, bypassing the motion-activated lights with a flick of my wrist. Manual mode only. No announcements. No welcome-home chirps. I don’t want the house to know I’m here before I do.

The control panel near the back stairwell glows low amber—standby mode. I override it. Password, biometric scan, heatprint sequence. It takes less than ten seconds to bypass the layers, but the act makes my pulse rise anyway.

No cameras inside. Not by rule. Not by accident. But there are still traces—digital fingerprints in the house systems. And Mara left plenty.

I pull up the internal sensor logs. Motion sweeps. Surface contacts. Panel requests. Pressure trails on the floor mesh. All timestamped. All painting a portrait of someone who wasn’t panicked, but was bracing for something.

She left the house.

The logs tell me exactly when: 11:51. The door opened from the front, authorization accepted, and no alert triggered. She had her badge. She must have taken one of the older field bags. The weight differential in the wall rack is enough to confirm that.

There’s a twelve-minute void in the outbound mesh. No signal pings until Lydia’s ID syncs with the house again at 13:07. The logs confirm Mara came back with her. Alone. No tail. But the metadata around her burner activity before that—something’s wrong.

Two encrypted messages were received on the burner line between 11:00 and 12:30.

One of them disappeared before backup sync.

That’s not Mara.

That’s someone else.

I cross-reference outbound traffic. Her path was consistent with the beach route. But the traffic cam near her old apartment caught a shadow—a man stepping back from the edge of the frame as she passed.

Not mine.

I scan further. On reentry, Mara went quiet. No system calls. No audio memos. She moved from the kitchen to the basement to her assigned quarters. No pacing. No loops. But she didn’t stay too long in her bedroom.

She went to mine.

And she stayed there.

I breathe in slowly.

Then run a sweep on the house perimeter.

There it is. Northwest outer mesh pinged just after Lydia left. Subtle. Featherweight. Deliberate. Whoever it was knew what not to trigger. They brushed the warning net without stepping into it.

That takes skill.

Or familiarity.

Inbound telemetry reads a secondary ghost ping a few minutes later. Bounced through Budapest, chained through Lyon, then off an outdated biomedical relay. Whoever it was, they didn’t just want to be seen. They wanted to be read.

Like a signature scrawled on the edge of a mirror.

I tap into the signal archive. The compression is dirty. Stuttered. Hand-built.

ALTA tech.

Old ghosts.

I walk to the sub-level cabinet and key in a manual lock sequence. It hisses open.

Inside is a long black box. Dustless. Marked with four letters I told myself I wouldn’t say out loud again.

ALTA.

I lift it free and set it on the workbench. The latch resists at first. Then it gives.

Inside: a modified signal decoder, built from pre-war telecom scrap and illegal firmware injections. I built it when I was still a syndicate. When I thought ghosts could be tracked by noise alone.

I lift it free, run a wire to the house mainframe, and sync the first sweep.

Nothing.

Second sweep: a low-pulse static echo matching the burner bounce. Signature partially scrubbed, but not completely. This wasn’t military. It was personal.

They didn’t want access.

They wanted a reaction.

I check the clock.

It’s been six hours since Mara returned.

She hasn’t called.

Not directly. There was only a message—one I didn’t see until recently. Buried behind signal noise, logged through the secondary device. I missed it in the field, filtered out by the firewall.

I’m back. Safe.

Then another: We need to talk when you return.

It was there. Small. Honest. A breadcrumb instead of a flare.

Which makes this worse.

Which means she knows I’ll see this first.

She’s not hiding.

She’s warning me.

I reach for my earpiece, slot it in, and trigger a direct line.

“Lydia.”

Her voice is there instantly. “I know.”

“How much?”

“Enough to tell you we’re not the only ones watching her burner.”

I close my eyes. “Did you trace it?”

“No. Whoever it was used shell code built on repurposed ALTA hardware. Like someone knew what tools you’d used before and mirrored them.”

That makes my blood go cold.

“Someone’s trying to speak in my language.”

“Or they’re mocking it.”

She’s right. And I hate that she is.

I press my palm to the edge of the bench. The house is too still.

Mara’s signal tag is stationary.

She’s not in her quarters.

She’s in mine.

Not sleeping.

Waiting.

Like she knew I’d feel all of this before I ever stepped into the room.

And now I do.

I shut down the decoder.

Because if they wanted a response?

They’ve got one coming.

The stairwell hums beneath my boots, each step a soft thud in the quiet. I don’t rush it. The house doesn’t feel like mine right now—not fully. It’s holding its breath, like the walls are listening to me move. Like they’ve been listening to her.

When I reach the second level, the lights remain off, the hallway dim. Pale slices of dusky light slip through the slatted shades. Everything smells sharper than it should. Steel. Soap. And something faint and unmistakable: her hair. Her skin. Her fear, folded inward like origami.

I pass her room without pausing. Nothing inside it calls to me.

My hand curls around the knob of my door.

It’s already open.

Only a little.

Enough to mean something.

The air in the room is warmer than the rest of the house. I step in slowly, boots silent against the dark wood floor. She didn’t light anything, but the curtains are cracked just enough to spill that dusky gold across the edge of the bed.

She’s there.

Asleep.

Not sprawled. Not curled. Stretched long, one arm draped across where I usually sleep, like she knew I’d be standing here eventually, looking at that exact spot. Her other hand is tucked beneath her head, fingers slightly curled like she didn’t fully exhale before giving in.

And beside her, on the nightstand—

The knife.

Unwrapped. Laid flat. Gleaming.

A message.

I walk to the foot of the bed. Not to wake her.

To look.

She’s wearing one of my shirts. The hem has slipped up her hip. Her thigh is bare. There’s a mark at the edge of it—something old. A scrape or scar she never talks about. But now I can’t stop seeing it.

The room smells like her.

And there is a feel of something else in the air.

Not the warmth of rest. Not the scent of sleep.

Preparedness.

Like the air had been shaped by intent, not comfort. Like someone had measured each breath against a clock ticking just beneath the bedframe.

The drawer at the side table is slightly ajar. I don’t need to look. I know what’s in it.

The burner.

She’s not hiding it.

She wants me to see that it’s been used. That someone reached for her—and she didn’t reach back.

My fingers itch. Not with the need to touch her. With the knowledge of what I’ll do to whoever made her place a blade beside her own head before sleeping.

I sit at the edge of the bed.

She doesn’t stir.

But her breath shifts.

So I wait.

Not because I have to.

Because she chose this bed. Not hers. Mine.

And that means something is already bleeding between us.

She moves.

Just a little.

And then her fingers find my thigh.

And curl.

She doesn’t open her eyes.

She doesn’t need to.

“Your scent,” she murmurs. “It always gives you away.”

My hand closes lightly over hers. Not possessive. Not tender. Just certain.

“You’re in my bed,” I say.

She hums. “Didn’t feel like the guest room would listen.”

That hits harder than it should. I stare at the place where her fingers rest against my thigh. “You left the house without telling me.”

“I left because the silence got too loud.”

That stops me.

“I waited,” she says, softer now. “But it felt like you were already somewhere I couldn’t reach.”

“I had to clean up a name I buried.”

Her eyes flick open, sharp against the low light. “And did it stay buried?”

“No.”

We stay there like that, quiet, neither one moving. The knife still gleams where she left it. My breathing is too shallow. Hers isn’t.

“I wasn’t followed,” she says finally.

“I know.”

“But you still checked to make sure, I'm sure.”

“I always will.”

Her expression doesn’t change. But something in the air does. Like the tension isn’t between us anymore—but around us.

“I saw Caleb,” she says.

My hand tightens slightly.

“Lydia showed up. She handled it.”

“She shouldn’t have needed to.”

“She didn’t. But she did anyway. Which means you told her to watch me.”

I don’t answer that. Because there’s no version where I didn’t.

Mara exhales slowly. “I didn’t step out with the intention to run.”

“But you packed like you might.”

“I packed because I didn’t trust the quiet to last.”

That undoes something in me. I don’t say it. But I shift closer, not touching, not yet. Just there.

“I killed Toma,” I say quietly. “He was working with Vale. And he knew about you.”

She nods once, unsurprised. “Then he deserved it.”

“He said something I can’t unhear.”

Mara waits.

“That you’re not leverage. You’re evidence.”

Her fingers flinch. But just for a second.

Then: “I know.”

And she does.

Because she’s not just my weakness.

She’s the seam someone’s trying to rip open.

And I’ll tear the world to fucking shreds before I let that happen.

We sit in the quiet with those words between us, their weight thickening the air. She doesn’t fill the silence. Neither do I. But something shifts in it—smooth and heavy.