Page 116 of Dark Night of the Soul

“I appreciate the message you left me. Though I didn’t appreciate the destruction of the equipment.”

I shrugged as if to say I didn’t care. Because I didn’t.

His gaze looked past me to the doorway, to the empty hall beyond.

A faint smile tugged at his mouth.

“I have to say I’m disappointed you didn’t come alone.”

I stepped farther into the room.

“I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I’m still not dangerous.” I smiled.

“He’s supposed to be dead,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Which means you didn’t complete the assignment.”

Heat flashed under my skin. “He taught me to control it. To aim.”

He snorted. “Impossible.”

“Is it?”

His wary eyes tracked me as I moved, calculating. Searching.

“I can recalibrate you,” he said calmly, as if my words didn’t matter. They didn’t. He didn’t believe me. “You’re unfinished work.”

Something in his voice—ownership, certainty—made my hands curl into fists.

“Oh, I think your work is finished.”

That was when Kincade moved. The door clicked shut behind him. He slipped past me and crossed the room in three long strides.

One moment Vormund was standing upright, smug and composed. The next, a hand fisted in the collar of his shirt, hauling him forward.

Kincade slammed his face into the desk.

Wood cracked. Papers scattered. Vormund cried out—a sharp, startled sound—before he drove him down again. Harder.

“You don’t get to speak to her,” Kincade said, voice low and lethal, “like you own her.”

Blood smeared across the desk’s surface as Vormund struggled, dazed, gasping.

Kincade leaned close, his grip unyielding.

“You touched what was never yours.”

I didn’t flinch. That was the moment I understood how far he’d go for me.

Then he released him.

Vormund collapsed to the floor in a heap, coughing, shaking, one hand pressed to his ruined face.

Kincade stepped back deliberately. Cleanly. Gave me the space.

I met Vormund’s gaze as he looked up at me, alarm breaking through the arrogance.

I palmed the knife and stepped toward him, then paused in front of him.

“Stand up.” I glared down at him.