Anna and Kincade: Building Love After Survival
One of the most important choices I made in Dark Night of the Soul was this:
I did not want to reset Anna and Kincade emotionally.
By the time we reach this story, these two have already been through so much together. They have fought side by side. Bled for each other. Chosen each other at terrible cost.
So I didn’t want to pretend they were still circling each other from opposite sides of the room.
I didn’t want to create distance just for the sake of drama.
I wanted readers to feel that Anna and Kincade have history now.
Ritual. Familiarity. Private language. A life already in motion.
I wanted their relationship to feel lived in.
What Comes After “I Love You”?
There is something very powerful about romance that has already crossed the threshold of declaration.
Once the “will they, won’t they” question is gone, a different question takes its place: How do they love each other now?
What does devotion look like in practice? What does trust feel like on an ordinary morning? What happens when desire and tenderness and fear all live in the same house?
That was the emotional territory I wanted to explore.
Anna and Kincade are not a casual love story. They are not light, easy people. They are both marked by violence, sacrifice, grief, duty, and impossible choices.
So when they reach for each other, it means something.
When they allow themselves softness, it means even more.
Sacred Domesticity
That’s part of why I wanted domesticity in this book. Not boring domesticity. Not “nothing happens” domesticity.
I mean the precious sense of normalcy that becomes sacred when your life has never been normal.
A shared room. A shared bed. A small touch. A look across a table. The comfort of knowing who the other person is in silence.
Those details matter because they humanize epic love. They tell us what is actually at stake.
If all a couple ever shares is battle and passion and high drama, then the relationship can start to feel untethered from life.
But when you give them quiet? When you give them routine? When you let them exist together in the in-between moments? Suddenly the reader understands what they are fighting for. Not just each other in the abstract.
A future. A home. A thousand ordinary days they haven’t had yet.
That’s what I wanted for Anna and Kincade.
Love Built on Truth
I also wanted their love to feel mature in the truest sense.
Not perfect. Earned.
This is not a relationship built on fantasy. It is built on repeated choice. It is built on seeing the worst parts of each other and not turning away.
And it is built on truth.
If you know me, you know that matters deeply to me.
Because one of the core dynamics between Anna and Kincade is this:
Anna needs honesty.
She needs partnership, not protection-through-deception.
And Kincade, as much as he is a protector to his bones, has to keep learning that loving her does not mean managing her.
It means standing beside her.
It means trusting her with the truth, even when the truth is ugly.
That tension is incredibly important to them.
Where the Romance Lives
In Dark Night of the Soul, I wanted to show both the beauty and the strain of that kind of love.
The fierce desire to shield each other. The temptation to carry pain alone. The need to let the other person in anyway.
That’s where the romance lives for me.
Not only in the grand speech. Not only in the kiss. Not only in the heat. It lives in the staying. It lives in the truth.
It lives in the choice to keep reaching for each other when fear would be easier.
Anna and Kincade are both people who know exactly what it is to lose. So loving again—loving fully—is an act of courage for both of them.
And in Dark Night of the Soul, I wanted that courage on the page.
I wanted the tenderness to feel hard won.
I wanted the intimacy to feel like something sacred they carved out of chaos with their own hands.
Because that’s what it is.
Their love is not soft because the world is soft.
Their love is soft because they have chosen to be with each other in a world that is not.
And that, to me, is one of the most romantic things I can write.
Dark Night of the Soul begins the War of the Brotherhood trilogy, continuing Anna and Kincade’s story in the Dream Walker universe. If you’re new to the series, start with Before the Dark or Call of the Dark. If you’re already caught up, grab Dark Night of the Soul today.
