Page 100 of Fractured Devotion
Time to end this.
I don’t hesitate. I cut through the dim service corridor, bypassing the main stairwell where I know cameras are trained like hawks. Instead, I slip behind maintenance storage, tracing the shadowed path I mapped out weeks ago for moments exactly like this. The back stair access is old and barely used, blind to the clinic’s usual surveillance sweep. Perfect. Within minutes, I’m at the final door, and I don’t stop to think. I push through.
Harper’s silhouette is already there, a black smear against the fractured skyline, her arms clenched over her chest like she’s holding herself together by sheer will. She doesn’t turn when the access door clicks shut behind me. She doesn’t need to. Her voice cuts through the tension like wire through skin. “I know what you did.”
I move slowly, not to unnerve her, as that part’s involuntary by now, but because I want to savor every beat between her suspicion and her fear. The air up here smells like metal and the dusty scent of the vents, and I watch as she exhales like she’s about to confess something that will cost her everything.
“You framed me. Sent her that message,” she mutters.
I shrug off my jacket and toss it onto the concrete ledge. The wind cuts through my shirt, but I barely feel it. “You’ll need to be more specific, Harper. I do a lot of questionable things.”
She turns now, her eyes wide and glassy. Her lip trembles, not in fear—not yet—but in the kind of rage born from knowing you’re cornered and still fighting like hell to pretend you aren’t.
“You think you’re smart? Hiding behind Echo systems like you own them? I was just trying to help her. I didn’t want it to go this far.”
“So you admit you were involved,” I say.
She falters for one heartbeat. Two. Then, she says, “I was told to monitor emotional baselines. That’s all. I didn’t know it was part of something… bigger.”
I take a step closer, not in a threatening way. And not overt. Just enough to make her rethink the distance between us.
“Who told you?” I ask.
Her jaw tightens. Her hands clench. And for a moment, she looks like she might run.
But there’s nowhere to go but down.
Her voice shudders. “I don’t know who he is. He never gave a name. Just scrambled feeds, always-masked audios, and sometimes distorted text-only comms. I thought it was coming from the research board, someone up top.”
“You believed that?” I step in fully now, closer than she can handle. “You thought this was sanctioned?”
She flinches. “I didn’t have a choice.”
I circle her, each step steeped with intent, watching her shoulders hunch tighter, her breathing spike. “You always have a choice. You chose to spy on her, to lie, and to manipulate what little peace she had.”
Harper turns suddenly, her eyes wild. “You don’t get to lecture me. You’ve been playing puppet master since day one. She doesn’t even see you clearly. You think you’re protecting her, but you’re just—”
I grab her arm before she finishes that sentence, but I don’t grab it hard enough to bruise. Not yet. “Don’t finish that thought. You’re not in control of this.”
“I was scared!” she hisses, yanking her arm back. “They threatened to take my license, to expose my records—”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, I swear. I never saw a face. It was just code, coordinates, and instructions. I didn’t think she’d get hurt.”
“But she did get hurt. She’s still hurting,” I say.
The words grind into me like glass beneath my skin. My jaw tightens, something primal clawing through the smooth façade I’ve spent years perfecting. I see Celeste, not the woman from the monitors, but the one who wakes with haunted eyes, who flinches when thunder rolls too close to her ear, and who once looked at me like I was her sanctuary and sin in a single, tangled instant.
And Harper? She’s the rot. The crack in the foundation. She’s the reason Celeste pulled away, the reason she second-guesses every shadow and every sound. Harper’s compliance and her cowardice cost Celeste her sense of safety, her sleep, and her trust in herself.
That trust… I worked for it. Bled for it in silence. I loved her in ways I wasn’t supposed to. And now it’s smeared with Harper’s fingerprints.
I look at her, really look at her, and see everything I’ve been trying to bury beneath protocol and patience. Harper isn’t just a liability.
She’s a threat.
And if I leave her standing, she’ll shatter it all beyond control.
