Page 118 of Dark Night of the Soul

Pictures of the inside of the manor. All the bedrooms. The kitchen. The parlor. The dining room. Rooms I hadn’t explored in decades. Like someone was mapping it.

“Someone was in the manor.” My voice shook.

My home.

The word twisted in my chest. Whatever safety I’d believed in fractured all at once, every memory suspect.

He’d studied me. He’d invaded the places I let my guard down. It wasn’t surveillance. It was possession.

Was this how they learned to do it—map my alteration onto him, tune my response until it matched him? Vormund said I would be calibrated for one specific target.

Now I knew how they’d tuned me.

Kincade reached past me and slammed the lid with such force, it cracked. I glanced up at him. Fury creased his features. His eyes were muted green.

“Destroy the hard drive,” I said.

But he was already picking it up from the desk. He smashed it against the edge. It crackled. Then he snapped it half between his hands like it was nothing more than a twig.

I stared at him. Sometimes I forgot what he was capable of.

“It’s a good thing he’s dead,” he said.

He sounded so calm it was unnerving.

“Let’s get rid of that fucking server room.”

Then he was moving. Striding past the dead man toward the door. He flung it open. It banged against the wall hard enough that the knob punched into the drywall and stuck.

I paused only long enough to slip on the necklace. The chain was cool against my skin, the weight familiar as I tucked it under my shirt and it settled against my chest. Then I followed him.

I’d never seen him like this before. I never wanted to see it again.

Whatever Vormund had taken from me, this was what he’d awakened in Kincade.

And I was profoundly grateful it wasn’t aimed at me.

He moved with purpose, long strides eating up the corridor, every line of him tight with restraint. Focused. Lethal.

I kept pace, fingers already unzipping the pack at my side.

The stairwell was empty. The hum of the building pressed in around us. Ventilation, distant machinery, the faint echo of footsteps that weren’t ours. Somewhere above, Vormund’s body was cooling. Somewhere below, his legacy waited.

The server room door sat where the floor plan said it would. No markings. A reinforced steel panel with a biometric lock.

Kincade didn’t slow.

He planted the access card in his palm against the reader. The system chirped once—recognition granted by a dead man’s authority—and the door unlocked with a quiet hiss.

The door swung open.

Cold air blasted my face. The room was tight and windowless, racks of servers lining both walls, cables bundled and color-coded, status lights blinking in quiet, relentless rhythm. Vormund’s real work. Not the scalpel. Not the knife.

This.

Rows of machines that thought they’d outlive him.

He scanned the space in one sharp sweep. “No cameras inside,” he said. “But the corridor’s covered. We have three minutes. Four if we’re lucky.”