Chapter 36 | Anna #2
He slowed as we passed a café that held an old-world charm. It was small. Two tables inside, three outside, mismatched chairs, a chalkboard menu written in looping script I couldn’t read. Someone had hung paper lanterns over the narrow sidewalk, and they swayed gently in the breeze off the sea.
He hesitated. Glanced at me with question in his eyes. Like asking if this was okay.
“We can sit,” I said. “If you want.”
So, we did.
When the server came over, he ordered my coffee in Turkish and angled his body to block the aisle. He spoke Turkish. For a second, it hit me how many places he’d lived. How many versions of the world he’d learned to survive.
He didn’t order anything for himself. Of course, he didn’t. He didn’t ask what I wanted, either. He already knew.
It shouldn’t have been endearing. It was.
He folded his arms over his chest, stretched out his long legs, crossed at the ankles, like this was something he did every day. Still watching everyone who came in and out of the café and the shops within his line of sight. His gaze moved in a slow loop. Door, window, reflections, back to me.
It amused me.
Even in a casual setting, he was still hyperaware of his surroundings.
I watched people pass. Couples leaning into each other. Friends laughing. A woman scolding her kid. An orange tabby lounged at my feet under the table like we were best buds.
Ordinary things. Intimate things. Things that felt unreachable.
And then it hit me. I’d never done this before. I’d never stopped to have a moment like this without demons breathing down my neck or the world moments away from burning. And I’d certainly never done this with him.
It was weird.
My chest constricted. I didn’t know why. And I’d lost the taste for the coffee. It had gone cold anyway, the surface gone flat and dark.
Because I realized something sitting at the rickety café table with this man who had decided he belonged next to me. If this was any other time, any other place this might be considered a date.
I’d had dates before. The normal version of it. Dinner and movie plans. Coffee and shopping excursions. A life that had felt possible. And then Azriel—a fallen angel with a talent for ruin—had murdered that man and taught me how fragile possible was. That relationship was safe, distant, and gone.
There was nothing safe about us. There never would be.
But it was also real in a way I never expected. In a way I couldn’t survive losing.
And that was terrifying.
It was a glimpse of a life we weren’t allowed to want and the quiet certainty that if I lost him, it would destroy me in ways I’d never survived before.
“You’re thinking too loud again.”
Oh, hell.
He was listening. Of course he was.
Sometimes my thoughts bled into him before I realized I was thinking them.
Heat crawled up my neck, but I pretended not to notice. He pretended not to notice.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Occupational hazard.”
A hint of a smile tugged at his mouth.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said.
“I wasn’t—” I started.
“I know,” he said, quiet. “You don’t have to explain.”
His eyes held mine for a second too long. Something unguarded flickered there—warm and steady—before his face went blank again.
And my throat tightened, which was annoying.
“We should go.” Though I said it, I didn’t move. I didn’t want to go. I knew this was only a brief respite, anyway.
He didn’t argue. Didn’t ask why. He stood, offered me his hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I took it. Together, we walked back.
Nighttime was strange. Sometimes he stayed awake all night.
I knew what he was doing. I never questioned it.
Sometimes, I’d shout myself awake, and he’d already be there.
Like he knew the nightmare was coming. And sometimes we’d lay there together staring at the ceiling, neither of us sleeping but pretending to sleep.
It was hard to shake that constant coil of dread deep in my gut but there were moments when I forgot.
I was still awake at dawn when I heard the buzz. He was on his feet a second later. The screen lit up his face in a sickly pale glow. And I knew it was coming. I didn’t move but his gaze flicked to me, anyway. He knew I was awake.
“He’ll call in a few hours.”
A few. An indefinite time period that gave me all the time in the world to spiral. I needed something to occupy my mind until peace was shattered.
I skipped my morning coffee ritual because my stomach was in knots. I couldn’t bear the thought of food, either.
There wasn’t a way for me to release this nervous energy. I forced myself to stand on the balcony. And wait.
He waited with me. Two people standing guard over the last vestiges of tranquility.
“What if we can’t go back?”
My voice sounded thin, fragile. Like everything might shatter at any moment. This was the fear that had been gnawing at me for hours. And thinking it settled a profound loss deep in my chest.
He moved closer to me. Not touching. A comforting presence.
“Then we build something else,” he said.
We.
Not you’ll find another place or I’ll help you rebuild. We. As if my home was his home. As if my losses were his to carry, too.
I took a deep breath, exhaled. He never tried to tell me everything would be okay because in our experience, everything was never okay.
The phone in his pocket rang. We looked at each other. My heart rose to my throat as he pulled it from his pocket.
“Put it on speaker.” I wanted to hear it for myself.
He punched the button. “What do you have?”
Silas’s tinny voice rose from the speaker. “You aren’t going to like it. I hope you’re sitting down.”
He gave me a questioning look. I shook my head.
“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.”
Kincade’s jaw tightened. “Good.”
I opened my eyes. Looked up at him.
“That place can’t stand,” I said.
His gaze dropped to mine—no hesitation. No doubt.
“It won’t,” he said.
Silas exhaled softly on the other end of the line. “Then we’re past containment,” he said. “This becomes war.”
Kincade didn’t argue. Neither did I.