Page 7 of Fractured Devotion
I pull up the live feed through a handheld console. She’s inside, arguing with a nurse over patient records. Her tone is sharp, unyielding. I watch her hands as much as her face. She touches her temple when she lies and crosses her arms when she doubts. Even her fury is elegant.
I install two more units before noon: one under the ceiling trim of the neural archive hallway, another discreetly embedded into the corner of a nameplate outside her office. Close, but still not close enough.
Her apartment remains a fortress.
I need more than schematics. I need timing, patterns, maintenance logs, and anything that tells me when her space is vulnerable. No one watches her like I do. No one should. Not even Felix.
Later, in the server monitoring hub, I sift through fragments of the past two weeks. Celeste’s patterns are careful, but not flawless. Three days ago, she paused too long at a junction near the restricted elevator, like she sensed something out of sync.
She’s testing the walls.
I smile.
It’s only fair. So am I.
A flicker on one of the feeds from earlier in the day catches my eye. She’s exiting the boardroom. But something is off. Her hand lingers on the biometric panel longer than necessary. Almost with calculated care.
I rewind, play it again, and zoom in.
Her fingers tap twice after the system clears. It’s not part of the access code. Not necessary.
Was it muscle memory… or a signal?
I lean back, considering.
She’s laying down her own threads.
Good.
Let her spin. I’ll follow every strand until I’m inside the web with her.
And once I am?
There’s only one way it ends.
Chapter 3 – Celeste - The Space Between Needles
Morning has no grace here. Just a cold slap of sterile light through the louvered blinds and the dry rasp of my own breath echoing in the stillness.
I sit on the edge of my bed, half-dressed, staring at the wall where the paint has started to peel behind the thermostat. It’s been three days since the boardroom blackout. Three days since Alec walked back into my life. Three days after that man—Kade—looked at me like he already knew my pulse.
My fingers twitch toward my notebook, but I stop myself. No more writing. No more spirals. Not today. I don’t trust what would come out of me if I let the ink flow.
I push off the bed and move through the apartment on autopilot, brushing my teeth, pulling my hair back into a tight bun, and dressing in the regulation gray scrubs that cling a little too tightly around the collarbone. My reflection in the mirror doesn’t look back. It hasn’t for a long time.
The air in the hallway outside my apartment is crisp, still laced with the faint antiseptic trace of last night’s sanitization. I step out and begin the short walk to the clinic, a five-minute stretch past trimmed hedges and the whispering hush of pine trees that line the outer path.
The morning is quiet, the kind of stillness that feels borrowed and fragile, like it might shatter under too much thought.
The main entrance of Miramont rises ahead, a jagged silhouette of glass and steel set against the slowly brightening sky. I badge in without a word, my coat tugged tight against the lingering morning chill.
Inside, the warmth and sterility greet me like an old routine, the polished floors gleaming under strip lighting, the faint hum of machinery ticking beneath the surface.
I take a breath and square my shoulders.
Time to work.
I’ve locked the name “Celestia” back into the basement of my brain, where it belongs.
