Page 120 of Dark Night of the Soul

As the sun set, we drove back to the safe house in silence.

She sat in the passenger seat, her hands fisted in her lap, staring straight ahead. Her face was pale. Her body rigid and coiled tight like any moment she could snap.

Traffic folded around us. Istanbul moved on, indifferent. I kept my focus on the road while my mind catalogued the desk, the laptop, the images.

He’d kept the necklace like a trophy. My grip tightened on the wheel. He expected her to come to him for it. So he could “return” it like a favor. His obsession with her was proof of ownership. Even to his last breath, he thought she belonged to him.

The manor bothered me more. Not the surveillance—that was expected. If someone wanted to map her, they’d start there. With the people she loved. With routines and patterns. Like we’d done when we were hunting him.

But the interiors.

Bedrooms. The kitchen. The rooms she hadn’t entered in decades.

That meant access. That meant time.

Vormund wouldn’t have done the surveillance himself. He’d have sent someone. Someone who was still out there.

We parked, exited the car, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. She went in first, dumped her pack on the floor. Moved into the deepening shadows of the small apartment to the balcony doors and flung them open. Salty sea air swept inside as she stepped out, her hands gripping the railing as she peered out at the distant Marmara Sea glistening in the final rays of the day.

I waited for her to say something. But she didn’t. She stood there with her back straight and the wind fluttering through her hair.

She was processing. I didn’t interrupt.

The lights remained off. The room settled around us.

I gave her space for a long moment, then stepped out behind her. Waited.

“The programming didn’t kick in,” she said at last. Her voice was strained. She knew I was there. She didn’t turn.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you controlled it.”

“No,” she countered. “Because I wanted it. Me. Not the programming.”

She drew in a breath that trembled despite her effort to steady it.

“I wanted him dead,” she said. “I wanted to watch it end.”

She turned. The fading light washed over her face, stripped bare of armor. Fear surfaced there. Something I hadn’t seen since we left the facility.

“But it didn’t end, did it?” she said. “It’s not over.”

“No,” I said.

She sucked in a breath, turned away. I moved to stand next to her. She was still rigid, full of tension.

“But now we know what we’re dealing with,” I said.

“The monster is bigger than we thought.” Her gaze drifted from the distance to me. “Those pictures—”

Her face paled. “That’s how they did it.”

My blood went cold.

“They weren’t just watching,” she said, voice tight. “They were mapping me. Tuning me to you.”