Page 130 of Dark Night of the Soul

Her jaw tightened. Her hands curled into fists in her lap. I watched her carefully, as she took a deep breath in and out. She was controlling it. Her rage. Her fury. Because I could feel that spike—that warning tremor in the bond where the programming lived. She knew it, too. Knew if she let go completely, the wires would react. So, she held on. Not because she was weak. Because she refused to let them control her twice.

What I couldn’t say yet was that Vormund wasn’t acting alone—the scale was too big. No system like that existed without layers. Without redundancies. Without sanction. Without men who believed they were untouchable.

I crossed the room without another word to the kitchen. I’d planned for this. Prepared for it. I pulled the bottle from the brown paper bag, grabbed two glasses, and walked to the table. She looked at it, the glasses, then her gaze flickered up to mine.

For the briefest of moments, I thought she’d refuse. She said nothing as I poured, placing it in front of her. She eyed the glass.

“Isn’t it too early in the day for that?” she asked.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

She snatched it up, drank, then held it out for a refill. I poured.

Her hand was steady now. The shaking had stopped.

That should have relieved me. It didn’t.

I’d done this before.

Different room. Different blood on the floor. Different type of death.

Back then, the grief had been raw and uncontained. She’d been shattered, and I’d given her the whiskey because it was something solid. Something she could hold when everything else had come apart.

This was different.

This was quieter. Colder.

She wasn’t breaking—she was changing.

And this time, the ritual wasn’t about stopping the fall. It was about standing beside her and letting her know she wasn’t alone on the other side of it.

I watched her drink. Not to judge. Not to intervene.

To witness.

“Vormund had the pictures,” she said, “but who has the footage?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I think Sebastian does,” she said, sounding bitter.

I didn’t answer right away.

Because she wasn’t guessing. And neither was I.

If the Knights were funded by the Brotherhood, it made sense. They never dirtied their own hands if they didn’t have to. It explained the reach. The funding. The silence.

“He said something to me,” she continued. “I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted me.” Her gaze flicked up to me and in those violet depths—fury.

“He can want whatever he likes,” I said. “It doesn’t make it his. And anyone who forgets that learns why I exist.”

Fury burned low and steady in my chest.

He could want her.

The thought registered as anger but it was something colder than that.

Sebastian didn’t want her the way men wanted women. He wanted her the way empires wanted territory. As proof. As leverage. As a living artifact that justified everything they’d built in the dark.