Page 182 of Dark Night of the Soul

“You didn’t kill him.” I didn’t have to say the name for him to understand who I meant.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He stared at the wall past my shoulder like the answer lived there. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” I said.

His gaze moved up to my face, question in his eyes.

“Because, despite everything, despite whatever he’s become, you still believe in second chances,” I said. “He doesn’t deserve one.”

I knew this because of the men who got us here and the ones I’d yet to meet.

He said nothing.

“You can’t save everyone. He’s made sure of that,” I said.

He didn’t say anything to that, either. He was deciding whether to accept it—or defy it.

“He was waiting for you,” he said.

My stomach turned. The memory of his hand on my throat. The metal rack against my skull. The black spots at the edge of my vision.

“He was. It wasn’t a coincidence,” I said with a nod. “He intended to take me back. Why else would he be there?”

I wasn’t certain. And it was something I tried not to think about. Because it would drive me mad to know I’d come that close again. And Kincade would be dead.

“They knew,” he said. “Or suspected. The cameras being down, the guards late… it wasn’t sloppy. It was bait.”

“And we walked right into it.”

Not only that, but they still had pieces of my life stored on hard drives and cloud servers.

He didn’t deny it. His thumb brushed over my knuckles. I could tell he was thinking it through, trying to come up with another plan, another way to get back there and finish it.

I had to derail that.

“I think…” My voice was slow. Careful. “I think I’m going to have to be okay with knowing what they have.”

“No, fuck that.”

The hostility in it made me flinch.

“But—”

“I’ll find another way,” he said. “We will.”

I blinked. And then I understood. That’s what was bothering him. Not that he’d come within inches of death and they’d come within inches of taking me.

It was the fact they still had pieces of me. And then something occurred to me. There were other ways to destroy data—from the inside. We didn’t have to destroy servers. We had to destroy the data. I filed that away for future deep thinking.

And for now, that didn’t bother me as much anymore. Something else did.

“I thought you were going to die.”

My breath hitched and for a second, I thought I might crack—all the way—this time. But I forced those emotions back down.