Page 23 of Fractured Devotion
“Ah.” I drop it.
He shifts closer, his voice soft. “Whatever’s eating at you, you don’t have to name it. But you can bring it to me.”
“I’m not ready,” I say. It’s not a wall. Just the truth.
“I can wait.”
We sit in silence for a while. The artificial lighting buzzes faintly, and I let the rhythm of it settle into my bones.
“There was a drawer,” I finally say. “In my backup apartment. It wasn’t closed all the way.”
He doesn’t speak. He just waits.
“I don’t think it means anything. But I noticed.”
“That’s what matters,” Alec says. “Not that something happened, but that your instinct caught it.”
I look at him. I really look.
He’s the only one who hasn’t tried to dissect me yet.
“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” I admit.
“You’re surviving. And that’s more than enough for today.”
He reaches over, not to touch, but to offer proximity. A gesture. A bridge.
And for a moment, I allow myself to rest there, just long enough to breathe without second-guessing.
Chapter 10 – Alec - The Shape of Her Silence
The start of each day here feels like walking into a memory no one wants to recall they always have. The light is sharp, efficient—like everything else in this place. The walls don’t creak. They hum. And machines breathe for people when people forget to breathe for themselves.
It’s just past 9 a.m. when I see her.
Celeste walks past my door like a ghost in a well-pressed coat. Her steps are soundless but not cautious. More like someone walking through the edges of a dream they can’t fully wake from. She doesn’t see me.
And I don’t call out.
Instead, I watch her from the office window. Her hair is pulled back too tightly, her posture perfect in that brittle way. Every part of her screams composed, but I’ve seen her fracture in small, involuntary ways. The twitch of a finger, the slight hitch in her breath when someone says her name without permission.
Yesterday, we sat together in the alcove—bare walls, flickering console, brief confessions. It was the most honest moment we’ve shared in weeks. Maybe even in the longest time. She spoke about a drawer left open. A detail so small that it shouldn’t matter. But it did.
Because she noticed.
And more importantly, she told me.
I’ve spent most of this morning reading her old research logs. The ones I wasn’t supposed to have. Reyes slipped me a drive on my first day back, discreetly, almost casually. He said it was just old material, backups he thought were lost during the tribunal purge.
I know he used to mentor Celeste. I think maybe he wanted me to see something she wouldn’t show on her own. It’s nothing illegal, technically. But definitely not sanctioned.
What I’ve seen so far unnerves me more than the way Kade watches her. I don’t know what he’s hiding—if anything—but the way his eyes linger on Celeste makes my spine go tight.
Celeste was brilliant before the fracture. She was obsessively meticulous. But buried in her early drafts are blueprints for something more dangerous than neural conditioning. Something that dances too close to override.
There’s poetry in the way she maps cognition, as if she wants to rewrite suffering without erasing the self.
But math doesn’t care about ethics.
