Page 32 of Dark Night of the Soul

He never saw me. His attention was fixed on whatever he heard—or felt—or already knew.

Then another thud. Final this time.

And I understood the last piece of it.

He wasn’t doing this for me.

He was doing it to stop them.

I remained rooted in place, my hands shaking. Terror slicing through me.

I heard a muffled thump. A faint groan.

Oh, God. Someone was in the manor. Someone who didn’t belong. And he’d dealt with whoever it was.

And here I was a sitting duck.

The air around me shifted. The temperature plummeted. And I thought of what Decker told me so long ago—every elite Watcher had different abilities. He and Kincade were among the elite.

I jerked open the middle drawer. A letter opener gleamed in the faint light. I snatched it as the man suddenly appeared in the library feet from me.

He lunged for me. I stumbled back, the make-shift weapon in my hand. Holding it like I’d hold my dagger. But this wasn’t sharp enough to kill. It was sharp enough to hurt.

When he reached for me again, his hand landed on my wrist. His fingers clamped down hard, digging into my skin. I lunged toward him, jammed the letter opener into his shoulder. He jerked back and cried out—the exact desired effect I wanted.

Kincade would hear that. He’d come.

But the man still had his hand on my wrist, dragging me to him.

Footsteps pounded on the stairs. And then Kincade ran through the door as the man wrapped his arm around my shoulders, gripping me to his chest.

“Too late,” he said.

The last thing I saw was Kincade’s face twisted in recognition.

The world compressed—sound imploding, light folding in on itself. Then—boom—we were gone in a flash of light.

I was standing outside the estate grounds held captive by a man I assumed worked for Sebastian Crane.

“Let’s go!” someone shouted.

I was shoved into a black SUV with blacked-out windows, the man who captured me following.

Then we sped away into the night, leaving the manor behind. And the most chilling thing of all… Kincade was right.

Chapter 12 | Kincade

Anna was gone, and the world did not end, which told me how wrong everything had become.

The library still smelled faintly of whiskey and ozone. The wards hadn’t shattered. The desk hadn’t been overturned. No signs of a struggle beyond the residue in the air. A distortion I recognized instantly. Watchers were not uniform. The Brotherhood never wasted resources that way. Some were soldiers, built for force and spectacle. Others were observers, content to watch worlds burn from the margins. And then there was the elite—the ones who slipped between spaces, who treated distance like a suggestion rather than a barrier.

They hadn’t sent a soldier.

They’d sent one of the elite.

Which meant this had never been about testing defenses. It had been about timing. About distraction. About taking her while my attention was elsewhere.

I took in the room. A glass of whiskey, untouched on the cart. Like she’d poured it, then got distracted.