Chapter 34 | Anna #2
“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.
When his eyes met mine, fear glittered there. Then he saw the blade in my hand. He tried to smile. Blood was on his teeth and dripping from his nose. He puffed out a breath of defiance.
“You can’t hurt me. That’s not in your programming.”
“I told you. I altered the programming,” I said. “Stand. Up.”
He still didn’t move. He stared up at me with wide eyes.
I looked up at Kincade with silent communication. He didn’t hesitate. He reached down and hauled him up by the scruff of his neck. The man started to shake.
He was terrified.
“You’re still mine,” he said. “My greatest success.”
“I may be your great success, but I don’t belong to you.” My voice was ice. “You taught me to be efficient. Precise. Deadly. You never asked who I’d choose to aim at.”
He held up his hands in surrender. Like realizing this was all too real. Like he understood I meant business. Like he knew he was leaving this building in a body bag.
The blade moved. Fast. Clean. Across his chest. He yelped. From surprise and pain.
“That was for what you did to my mother,” I said.
Then I leaned forward and dropped my voice.
“This is for what you did to me.”
Across his throat.
Kincade released him. He dropped.
I watched him bleed out. Blood pooling underneath him.
Felt nothing but cold satisfaction.
And knew with sick certainty I’d crossed a line I could never uncross.
I stood there, not moving. Not thinking about anything but that it was done. It was over. Kincade didn’t move. He waited.
Then I said, “Let’s take care of that server room.”
I started to turn when something shiny on his desk caught my eye. I halted, trying to focus on it. I crossed behind the desk as my heart lurched into my throat.
My necklace. On his desk. He’d kept it. I snatched it up, clutched it in my fist.
But then the laptop screen grabbed my attention. Several windows were open. All pictures—of me.
A coldness settled in my chest. I moved the mouse.
Clicking through image after image of me on the estate.
Walking with my mother. With Ophelia. With Grace.
With Kincade. Images of me when my hair was still black, before Megiddo.
Months and months of surveillance. In my own home.
In the place that was supposed to be safe.
I hadn’t realized how close danger was to me. Neither of us did. And that was the real horror.
My hands shook. My stomach cramped, threatening to heave.
“Fuck,” he said. “He was obsessed with you.”
I hadn’t realized he’d moved to stand behind me. When he spoke, there was shock in his voice and that frightened me more than the images.
If Kincade hadn’t known, then none of us had been safe.
And then I came to more that turned my stomach.
Pictures of the inside of the manor. All the bedrooms. The kitchen. The parlor. The dining room. Rooms I hadn’t explored in decades. Like someone was mapping it.
“Someone was in the manor.” My voice shook.
My home.
The word twisted in my chest. Whatever safety I’d believed in fractured all at once, every memory suspect.
He’d studied me. He’d invaded the places I let my guard down. It wasn’t surveillance. It was possession.
Was this how they learned to do it—map my alteration onto him, tune my response until it matched him? Vormund said I would be calibrated for one specific target.
Now I knew how they’d tuned me.
Kincade reached past me and slammed the lid with such force, it cracked. I glanced up at him. Fury creased his features. His eyes were muted green.
“Destroy the hard drive,” I said.
But he was already picking it up from the desk. He smashed it against the edge. It crackled. Then he snapped it half between his hands like it was nothing more than a twig.
I stared at him. Sometimes I forgot what he was capable of.
“It’s a good thing he’s dead,” he said.
He sounded so calm it was unnerving.
“Let’s get rid of that fucking server room.”
Then he was moving. Striding past the dead man toward the door. He flung it open. It banged against the wall hard enough that the knob punched into the drywall and stuck.
I paused only long enough to slip on the necklace. The chain was cool against my skin, the weight familiar as I tucked it under my shirt and it settled against my chest. Then I followed him.
I’d never seen him like this before. I never wanted to see it again.
Whatever Vormund had taken from me, this was what he’d awakened in Kincade.
And I was profoundly grateful it wasn’t aimed at me.
He moved with purpose, long strides eating up the corridor, every line of him tight with restraint. Focused. Lethal.
I kept pace, fingers already unzipping the pack at my side.
The stairwell was empty. The hum of the building pressed in around us. Ventilation, distant machinery, the faint echo of footsteps that weren’t ours. Somewhere above, Vormund’s body was cooling. Somewhere below, his legacy waited.
The server room door sat where the floor plan said it would. No markings. A reinforced steel panel with a biometric lock.
Kincade didn’t slow.
He planted the access card in his palm against the reader. The system chirped once—recognition granted by a dead man’s authority—and the door unlocked with a quiet hiss.
The door swung open.
Cold air blasted my face. The room was tight and windowless, racks of servers lining both walls, cables bundled and color-coded, status lights blinking in quiet, relentless rhythm. Vormund’s real work. Not the scalpel. Not the knife.
This.
Rows of machines that thought they’d outlive him.
He scanned the space in one sharp sweep. “No cameras inside,” he said. “But the corridor’s covered. We have three minutes. Four if we’re lucky.”
“That’s generous,” I said, already dropping to one knee.
I pulled the charge from my pack. Compact. Directional. Ugly in the way only purpose-built things were. Kincade had explained it how the blast would fold inward, how the shockwave would turn hardware into molten scrap without leveling the building.
Enough to erase. Not enough to die.
I fixed it to the center rack, hands steady despite the adrenaline humming in my veins. Magnetic clamps bit into metal. Solid. Secure.
“Angle it down,” he said, stepping in close. His voice was tight now, clipped. “Toward the core.”
I adjusted it.
The servers hummed on, blissfully unaware.
I armed the detonator. The device pulsed once—green, then red—waiting.
A strange calm settled over me.
This wasn’t rage. It was finality.
“Thirty seconds,” I said.
His jaw flexed. He took one last look at the room, like he was memorizing the death of something that deserved it.
“Let it burn,” he said.
We moved.
The door sealed behind us as we hit the corridor at a controlled jog—fast enough to matter, slow enough not to draw attention. My heart pounded, but my head was clear.
Five.
Four.
Three—
The explosion wasn’t loud.
It was deep.
A concussive thud rolled through the floor, a pressure wave that rattled the walls and knocked the breath from my lungs. Alarms screamed to life behind us, lights flickering as the building shuddered in protest.
He grabbed my arm to keep me steady as the hallway filled with smoke.
“That’s it,” he said. “Go.”
We didn’t look back.
By the time we hit the exit, the fire suppression had kicked in. Gas flooding the server room, useless now, choking empty space while molten metal cooled into slag.
Vormund’s work was gone.
Outside, the late afternoon sun hit my face like a benediction as we jogged across the parking lot, slipped into the car and vanished into traffic, another pair absorbed by the city.
Only this time—
The monster didn’t get the last word.