Page 113 of Dark Night of the Soul

Twenty minutes away. Close enough to strike. Far enough to plan.

Silas’s style. Functional, forgettable, and perfectly positioned.

I stood on the balcony, letting the breeze off the Marmara Sea wash over me. Salt and sea air mixed with the city smells rising from a vendor’s cart below, coffee brewing somewhere nearby, the sharp bite of spices drifting from an open window. And underneath it all, something warm and woody.

Sandalwood.

My chest tightened. That scent would always be his. Two thousand years walking this earth, and the city itself smelled like him. Like he’d left traces of himself in the air.

I closed my eyes and breathed it in. Let it calm me.

Tonight, I’d need that.

In moments like these, when my life was one terrible disaster after another, it was a reminder that there was still something good in the world. And it was also in moments like these when I wished we were merely travelers on a long holiday doing tourist things and… being normal.

Nothing about my life had ever seemed normal.

I tried to picture what that looked like—if we were those people. It was laughable. Kincade was far from the tourist type. He’d lived history. He didn’t need to visit it.

“Are you going to stand there all night,” he said, “or are we going to get to work?”

Oh, he was so charming.

I turned from the balcony and joined him at the dining table wedged against the wall. He had the floor plan of the Tuzla facility in front of him.

“Vormund expects you to come for him. Which means he’s already decided where he wants you,” he said.

“And so… are you saying I’m not supposed to go?” I folded my arms, defensive.

“I’m saying we don’t give him that moment he’s already planned,” he said. “We watch first.”

I wanted to argue. Wanted to go now. But he was right.

“He has two routines,” he said. “Office and residence. We don’t want him at his residence. We want him at his office. We learn when he rotates his guards, which ones are weakest.”

“And then?”

“Then you end him.”

“And the servers?” I asked. Still thinking about all that data. All that research that could be resurrected at any moment.

He pointed to the server room on the first floor near the center of the building. “Here. That’s where we erase what he’s built.”

“So, we erase what he’s built,” I said. “But Munich still stands. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take out the headquarters instead?”

“Vormund is here now,” he said. “Munich will be fortified. We save that for later.”

He had a point. I peered down at the small box of a room that likely held racks and switches like the research lab in Iskenderun. Imagining destroying it all.

“How do we do it?” I asked.

“Two options.” He sat back in the chair. “First, fire suppression.”

I frowned.

“Gas-based,” he added. “Designed to choke flames and protect the hardware. It keeps the data intact.”

I looked back at the floor plan. “So, it saves his work.”