Page 128 of Dark Night of the Soul

“Go,” he said.

“The good news is the manor has been swept, and it’s clean. All the devices have been removed,” he said. And then paused. Papers shuffled in the background like he was organizing his thoughts.

“And the bad news?” Kincade asked.

“It went deep,” Silas said. “Micro-cameras in the hallways, main staircase, kitchen, dining, parlor, workout room. All the common areas. Listening devices in all the bedrooms and library.”

The blood drained from my head so fast I had to grab the balcony railing to steady myself. My hands shook. Listening devices in all the bedrooms. All. Mine—ours.

“How long?” he asked.

“Eight to nine months.”

Months. They were watching—learning habits and patterns and routines—before they ever decided to move. Listening to unguarded moments.

I thought of the conversation we had with Silas in the parlor when he first arrived. I thought of the argument Kincade and I had in the bedroom when I was furious with him. I thought of the discussion I had with Ophelia in the workout room when I was trying to figure out what was going on.

I thought of the nights in the library. The two of us. Sharing whiskey. The quiet conversations about nothing important. Those moments when we were us.

Someone was listening. Cataloguing. Planning their moves.

“Two were still transmitting in the last forty-eight hours,” he continued.

My gut twisted into a knot. I needed to sit. He wrapped his hand around my elbow and guided me back inside to the table. I sat, but he remained standing next to me. Like a shield.

They’d been inside my home, watching me live my life, planning how to destroy it. How to destroy me. Us.

“And the feeds?” he asked.

“We traced them. They weren’t stored locally. Everything was routed out. We know where the data went. We know who built the system. What we don’t know,” Silas said, “is how many people were watching.”

“Where?”

“Munich. Encrypted uplink. Dedicated infrastructure.”

Munich.

The Knights’ new headquarters.

I closed my eyes. Eight to nine months of my life reduced to data packets and surveillance feeds. Every moment I’d believed myself safe—curated, reviewed, possibly replayed.

“So, it wasn’t just Vormund,” I said. My voice sounded far away to my own ears.

“No,” Silas said. “He was a node. Not the network.”

That settled something cold and heavy in my chest. Vormund hadn’t been the end of this.

The grief crystallized into something sharper.

Rage.

Kincade didn’t speak right away. His hand rested on the back of my chair, steady and unmoving. When he did speak, his voice was even.

“How fortified is it?”

A pause.

“Heavily,” Silas said. “And after Iskenderun and Tuzla, they’ll be expecting retaliation.”