Page 62 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

The door closes, and the sound stays in the room like a hand on my throat.

I don’t move at first. The towel is tight under my arms. My skin smells like soap and him.

The mirror above the dresser sits crooked from where he pushed me into it.

One of the drawers is still open, and a corner occupies a scrap of lace from my bra, torn like proof of what he just did to me.

I breathe through the ache between my ribs until the floor steadies. My legs feel unsure, a little rubbery in the knees, but I make myself stand straight. He said to stay put. Of course he did. Elias speaks like gravity and expects the world to fall in line.

The hallway outside the bedroom is white and spare, a spine of light down the center. The apartment hums with expensive systems that keep the outside where it belongs. Out. I follow the thin rug to the living room.

Lydia is there. She’s perched on the edge of the couch with one boot braced on the table leg.

Her jacket is folded beside her. A black bag sits at her feet with the zipper partway open, just enough to see coiled wires and a squat camera lens.

She looks up once, reads me in one pass, then returns to the tablet in her hands.

“How’s the water pressure?” she asks, like we share a kitchen and not a target.

“Fine.”

“You look like you could use sugar.” She nods at the counter. “I brought pastries from the place two streets over. The ones with the almond filling. Your clinic people buy them on Fridays.”

The casual detail lands oddly. “You’ve watched me that long?”

“I watch everything that might keep you breathing.” Her tone is dry, not apologetic, not proud. A fact. “Sit. Your legs are still shaking.”

I sit because she’s right. The towel tugs across my chest. My hair leaves damp marks on my shoulders. I’m very aware of how little I’m wearing. Lydia is not. She treats me like a client on a checklist: pulse, posture, threat vector.

Her thumbs move across the tablet. A square of street appears on the screen. Another angle loads beside it. Two more follow, stitched together in a neat grid. The clinic’s block. The alley behind my building. The intersection where the streetlight stutters and makes everything look haunted.

“Cameras?” I ask.

“City feeds. Private lots. A couple of storefronts that don’t know how to password a thing.” She flicks through time stamps. “I flagged your routes. Morning. Evening. Coffee runs. Your habit of pausing at the crosswalk even when you have green. You do that too often.”

“It’s safer.”

“It’s a tell.” She stops on a frame where a dark sedan idles one car length back from the curb. “There. That one.”

The image is grainy, but the shape is familiar. The roofline. The tint. The way it sits, like it has nowhere to be except here. My throat tightens.

“That was yesterday,” she says. “Same car shows up on three other cameras within eight blocks. Never close enough to touch you. Always close enough to keep you in frame.”

“So he’s still watching.” I want it to be Caleb. If it’s Caleb, the monster has a face I already hate, and I know how to fear him. If it’s not Caleb, the fear has new teeth.

Lydia’s mouth flattens. “He and others.”

I fix my eyes on the screen. “Others who?”

“Working it.” She pinches the display to zoom. “Look at the driver’s mirror.”

A glint of a cap brim. A smear where a face should be. Nothing that helps.

“Elias thinks I should stay here,” I say, mostly to test the shape of the words. “He says reality made the choice for me.”

Lydia snorts. “He would.”

“It feels like a cage.”

“It is a cage.” She doesn’t soften it. “The trick is making it your cage instead of someone else’s.”

“How do I do that?”

“You stop acting like a passenger.”

I let the sentence sit between us. The apartment’s huge windows mirror our shapes on the glass. Two women in a room that looks like a museum. Bare shelves. Expensive couches. A view of treetops and sky. A space with no past.

Lydia’s gaze flicks toward the hallway I came from. “He push you too hard?”

I feel heat move up my neck. “That’s none of your business.”

“Everything is my business if it changes how you think when a door opens.” She sets the tablet down. “Look at me.”

I do. Her eyes are a cool, assessing brown. Nothing soft in them. Nothing cruel either. Just a scale that weighs cost and outcome.

“That car outside the clinic wasn’t just about seeing you,” she says. “It was placement. They wanted to learn how fast he shows up when you flinch.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“He was near enough,” she replies. “And they expect him to be closer next time.”

The room goes cold. It takes a second to find my voice. “You’re saying they’re using me to pull him out.”

“Yes.”

My fingers curl into the towel until the fabric bites my palms. A small part of me knew it already. The bigger part didn’t want the words. “He wouldn’t allow himself to fall for their traps.”

She tilts her head. “You sure?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. It tastes like defeat. It tastes like finally looking at the shape of the room with the lights on. “But I don’t want to be a lure, especially not to get to him or hurt him.”

“Good,” Lydia says. “Because the men circling you don’t see a lure. They see leverage. Different animal. Harder to kill.”

She picks up the tablet again and swaps to a different cam angle. The clinic entrance comes into view, the upgraded glass gleaming, the lobby visible behind it. I see myself in yesterday’s clothing, head down, handing files to the receptionist. The time stamp ticks.

“Freeze,” I say, pointing. “Back two seconds.”

She scrubs back. There. A figure across the street with a phone held low at his hip. He isn’t filming the door. He’s filming the reflection in the glass.

“That’s smart,” Lydia murmurs. “Less likely to get called out. You spot that fast.”

“Elias trained me without saying he was training me,” I answer, surprised at the edge in my voice. “He notices everything and makes you notice it too.”

“You resent him for it?”

“Yes,” I say. “And no.”

“Good. Keep both.”

She sets the tablet aside and nudges the black bag open with two fingers. Inside are tools that make my stomach tip. She pulls out a narrow case and flips the lid. Foam cradles a folding knife, a tiny flashlight, a compact baton no longer than my forearm when collapsed. Nothing flashy. All useful.

“I have pepper spray,” I say.

“Pepper spray is for people who want help to be nearby.” Lydia picks up the baton, snaps her wrist, and it runs out to full length with a clean metallic punch. “You won’t always have it.”

She lets me feel the weight. It’s heavier than it looks. My hand adjusts. She watches how my fingers settle.

“You’re right-handed,” she says. “Grip is decent. You’ll choke up when you’re scared. Don’t. Keep your hand here. If you lose it, don’t fish for it. Move. Create space. Get to a door, a car, a corner with a camera. You’re not trying to win a war. You’re trying to survive the first thirty seconds.”

“Thirty seconds is a long time.”

“It is when your lungs stop listening.”

She gets up from her seat and gestures for me to get up too. I do, then she steps closer, sets my feet with a tap of her boot on my toes.

“Square up. Knees soft. Hips back half an inch. If someone grabs your wrist, you twist toward their thumb. If someone grabs your hair, you step in, not away. Elbows hurt. Eyes hurt more.”

Her voice stays even. Not cruel. Not kind. Instruction that assumes I can learn because I must.

“Why are you helping me?” I ask.

She considers that. “Because he can’t be everywhere. Because I don’t like losing people on my watch. And because men like the ones hunting you only respect two things: speed and pain.”

“Caleb,” I say. The name feels like a bruise. “Is he part of this net or just riding the current?”

“Riding it,” Lydia says at once. “But he’ll take a shortcut if someone hands it to him. He’s angry enough to get sloppy. Sloppy makes noise. Noise brings friends you don’t want.”

“So if I move wrong, I bring a crowd.”

“You don’t have to move wrong to bring a crowd,” she says. “You just have to be interesting.”

I stare at the baton in my hand. I picture the courtyard behind the clinic. The note under my apartment door. The Civic’s dark glass. The towel under my fingers feels like a lie. I need clothes. Shoes. Something that tells my body it can run if it has to.

Lydia seems to read that thought. “Go get dressed. Jeans. Shoes you can sprint in. Nothing that needs adjusting to stay up. Put your hair in something a hand can’t grab.”

“You’re not leaving?”

“I’m in until he gets back.” She taps the tablet awake again. “And if he’s smarter than usual, he’ll text in five minutes to say he isn’t dead yet.”

I stand. Take one step. Stop. “Lydia.”

“Mm?”

“If Elias is letting them use me as bait, tell me now.”

Her eyes cut to mine. No flinch. No turn away. “He’s not letting them. He’s pretending he didn’t notice they already are. That’s different and not different enough.”

The honesty lands hard and clean. It knocks something steady into place that fear can’t move.

“Then I won’t be easy to follow,” I say.

Her mouth lifts. Not a smile. An approval. “Good girl,” she says, and for once it doesn’t feel like a leash. It feels like a weapon I get to keep.

I turn toward the hallway and the bedroom that still smells like him. The towel loosens when I move. The mirror waits, skewed. I will fix it. I will dress. And if the net tightens again, I will cut it where it pulls.

The mirror on the dresser catches me again when I step into the bedroom. The glass still tilts from when Elias shoved me into it earlier. My reflection bends at the edges, my face fractured in ways that make me look like someone else entirely. A warning or a truth—I can’t tell which.