Echo: Vendetta (Men of Echo Ridge #6)

Chapter 1

VICTORIA

London, England

A knock sounds at my door.

Nobody knows about this safe house. Nobody should be able to find me here. My hand closes around the weapon lying on the desk beside me while the encrypted phone still burns in my other palm, the last warning I sent to Echo Ridge glowing on the screen like an accusation.

The knock comes again. Three sharp raps, followed by two, followed by one.

It's a pattern I haven't heard in ten years.

I cross to the door and check the security feed.

The man standing in my hallway is older than I remember, gray threading through dark hair, new lines carved around his eyes.

But the bone structure is the same, and so is the scar above his left eyebrow.

His stance speaks to years of tactical training far more recent than anything MI6 gave him.

Roman Frost, my former MI6 partner, the man who died in Budapest.

I open the door.

He looks at me with those ice-blue eyes I thought I'd never see again, and the decade collapses in a single breath.

I take in the width of his shoulders filling the doorway, the way he holds space like he owns whatever room he walks into.

He always did that: took up more air than he was entitled to.

"Hello, Vix."

Nobody's called me that in years. The name lands like a blade between my ribs, precise and devastating, and for a fraction of a second the floor tilts beneath me because the last time I heard that voice, it was coming through a comm link while Committee soldiers put a gun to his head.

That low, unhurried baritone is rougher now, worn by years I know nothing about, and the not-knowing makes heat twist low in my gut that I immediately classify as rage.

"You're dead," I say.

"So are you, according to multiple intelligence agencies.

" He glances past me into the flat, scanning sight lines and exits with the kind of tactical awareness that doesn't come from memory alone.

Whoever Roman has been since Budapest, he hasn't been idle.

"Can I come in? We have a lot to discuss, and Webb's people are closer than you think. "

It's not a request. It never was, with Roman. He phrased things as questions the way a commanding officer phrases them, the answer already decided, the courtesy a formality.

I step back and let him in, close and lock the door. My weapon stays in my hand, barrel toward the floor, because I haven't decided whether to raise it.

He passes close enough that I catch the scent of rain on wool and underneath that, cedar, maybe, or sandalwood.

It's not the same cologne. Everything else about him hits me like muscle memory I thought I'd trained out of myself, but the scent is different, and that difference is somehow worse than the familiarity, all those years of someone else's life written in the details I don't recognize.

Roman moves through the flat the way he was trained to, checking the windows and entry points, assessing the reinforced door he just walked through.

His body carries the lean economy of active fieldwork, not a desk or a gym.

He moves the way he always did: deliberate, controlled, each step placed with an economy that suggests violence is a resting state rather than an escalation.

He looks like a man who has spent every one of those years surviving, which is remarkable, given that I spent them certain he hadn't.

"How long do we have?" My voice comes out level, and I'm grateful for it.

"Based on how fast they burned through your Berlin relay, an hour.

Maybe less." Roman pulls the curtain back a fraction and studies the street below.

"Echo Base intercepted Committee traffic hours ago.

Webb's people traced your transmissions to a relay node in Hackney.

They don't have this address yet, but they're working backwards through your network architecture.

Once they identify the node's output routing, they'll find this location. "

He lets the curtain fall.

"Hours ago." The words come out sharp. "Echo Base had intelligence about a threat to my network, and nobody thought to send an alert through the channels I've maintained for years?"

"Kane sent me the moment we confirmed you were the target. I was already in London." His tone doesn't waver. "Getting to you was the priority. Not a message through channels that might already be compromised."

The logic is sound, and I hate that it is. If Webb's people were already inside my relay architecture, any warning could have confirmed my location before Roman reached it.

Roman might as well be delivering a mission brief to a colleague rather than standing in the flat of a woman who scattered flowers at his memorial in Surrey.

"You work for Kane." The words taste like copper.

"Echo Ridge. Three years now. European intelligence specialist."

Roman has been operating in my theatre the entire time, working for the very organization I've been selling intelligence to, coordinating operations with, building a professional relationship through secure channels and anonymous dead drops.

Kane never mentioned him. In hundreds of exchanges, there was never a word, never a hint, never a single careless pronoun.

Kane made the right call on the warning.

The rest of it, the years of secrecy, is a conversation I intend to have with him directly.

"Running intelligence on the Committee's continental network, feeding it back to Echo Base." Roman faces me directly, and there it is, the way he holds eye contact a beat too long, turning a look into a challenge, into a claim. "Vix, I know this is—"

"Don't."

The word comes out sharp enough to cut glass, and I mean it to.

Whatever Roman is about to say about how complicated this is, about Budapest, about the silence while I built my entire career on the wreckage of his death, he can file it under things I cannot afford to process while Webb's kill teams are converging on my location.

His jaw sets. He's not chastened; he's recalibrating. Roman never did back down when told to. He'd go quiet, let the silence gather weight, and then come at the same objective from a different angle. He had the patience of a man who understood that control isn't about force. It's about timing.

I watched them execute him. It was surveillance footage I'd pulled from a Hungarian intelligence contact weeks after Budapest, and I watched it over and over because my mind refused to accept what my eyes were showing me.

Then I watched once more, because grief is a kind of compulsion.

Then I buried Roman Frost in a ceremony with no body and no closure, and I rebuilt myself on the foundation of what the Committee took from me.

He's alive. The foundation cracks. I feel the structure shudder, a decade of carefully constructed purpose threatening to collapse, and then I slam a mental bulkhead across the breach because I am Victoria Cross and I do not fall apart during a crisis.

"You want to explain Budapest, save it." I cross to my primary workstation: multiple monitors, a pair of encrypted laptops, and a communications array that would make most intelligence agencies envious.

"Right now I need to sanitize every piece of hardware in this flat, wipe the drives, burn the dead drops, and get out of London before Webb's people arrive with considerably less courtesy than you showed.

After that, once I am somewhere safe and not actively being hunted, I'll decide whether to kill you myself. "

"You won't." His voice is quiet and certain, amusement ghosting across his mouth, and I hate that I noticed his mouth at all.

"Don't test that theory."

"Wouldn't dream of it." But he doesn't look away. His gaze tracks me as I move to the workstation with a focus that has nothing to do with professional distance and everything to do with the way Roman has always watched me, like I'm a puzzle he hasn't finished solving.

My fingers move through the shutdown protocols with mechanical precision, born from rehearsing this exact scenario dozens of times.

Each channel receives a kill command. Each relay node gets a termination signal.

Data cascades through the wipe sequences in orderly waves, years of intelligence infrastructure dissolving as the progress bars fill.

While the drives erase themselves, I pull open the phone and scan the damage reports.

The situation has worsened since Roman knocked.

Baumann in Berlin is forty minutes overdue for his last routine check-in.

Sato in Vienna has missed his window entirely.

Ines in Marseille hasn't responded to the emergency ping I sent before a dead man walked through my door.

Webb isn't retaliating. He's conducting an extermination.

"He deployed a dedicated team," Roman says from his position by the window where he’s watching the street, but his voice has shifted, lower and harder, the professionalism gone.

This is the man who spent years doing things I'll probably never know about.

"Committee resources, not contractors. That came from Echo Base's intercepts.

Priority operation. He's targeting everyone connected to your infrastructure, working from the periphery inward.

" He pauses. "You're the center, Vix. If the pattern holds, he's working his way to you. "

"How generous of him."

"Vix." The nickname lands differently this time, not a greeting but a claim. He says it like he's been saying it to himself for years in rooms I've never seen. "I'm serious. This isn't—"

"I know what it is." The wipe cycles finish, leaving the primary drives dead and clean. "I've been reading Webb's strategic communication for longer than you've been resurrected. He dismantles threats connection by connection. Morrison was a blunt instrument. Webb is a scalpel."