Chapter 13
VICTORIA
The sheets beside me are cold.
My hand finds the empty space before my eyes open, fingers pressing into cotton that has already lost his warmth, and the temperature tells me what I need to know.
Roman left before dawn. He extracted himself from the bed and the flat and presumably the city, silent and precise, gone before anyone could register the loss.
He has been disappearing from places for the better part of his adult life, and the skill set is flawless.
It was a professional withdrawal. A considerate one.
The kind of careful departure designed to spare me the awkwardness of a morning after I didn't ask for.
I wanted him gone, and I hate that he knew it before I did.
I hate that he left precisely the way I would have wanted and that the precision feels like being read, like having the contents of my internal filing system accessed by someone who still remembers the password.
I sit up in the rented flat's bed and catalog the damage.
My body aches in places that have nothing to do with the mission, a low pull across my inner thighs, a tenderness in my hips where his hands gripped hard enough to bruise, the raw spot on my neck where his teeth found purchase.
My lips feel swollen. There is a bite mark on my shoulder that I can see when I pull the sheet down, red and deliberate, a territorial marker left by a man who has no territory to claim.
The flat is empty. Roman's jacket is gone, along with the med kit and the comms unit. A fresh bandage sits on the kitchen table beside a cup of coffee, and the fact that he made me coffee before he left makes me want to throw the cup against the wall.
I drink the coffee instead. It is good. He knows how I take it.
What happened last night was adrenaline.
That is the clinical fact of it. Elevated cortisol and norepinephrine flooded the system after a high-risk operation, triggering the survival response that manifests as hunger, aggression, or sexual arousal.
The closet and the shooting and his blood on my hands and the muscle memory of a body I mapped in Moscow before I was old enough to understand what I was losing all converged at once.
The combination would have broken anyone's discipline.
Mine held longer than most people's would.
The fact that I can still feel him inside me when I stand up is a physiological aftereffect, not a sentimental one.
I shower in water hot enough to scald and let the heat dissolve the evidence. The mark on my shoulder stays, angry and visible above the neckline of any shirt I own, and the placement is either careless or calculated. With Roman, the odds favor calculated.
The flight back to Montana takes hours that I spend reviewing the intelligence we gathered.
Tommy arranged the extraction, and Roman is waiting at the aircraft when I arrive.
He leans against the fuselage with his injured shoulder held carefully and the rest of him held not at all, loose and patient in the predawn grey, a man who could wait at the edge of a runway or the edge of a kill zone with the same unhurried stillness.
His eyes find mine when I cross the tarmac.
The look is brief, assessing, and carries a possessive weight that has nothing to do with warmth and everything to do with confirmation.
He is checking that I am intact. He is filing the answer somewhere behind those pale eyes where he keeps the things he considers his, and the arrogance of it, the quiet certainty that I belong on that list, makes me want to hit him again.
I take the seat farthest from his and open my laptop.
The surveillance devices we planted are already transmitting, and the data feed shows Committee personnel moving through the Margaretenstrasse safe house in patterns Tommy's systems are logging in real time.
Names will come later, once facial recognition runs the imagery against the databases Victoria Cross spent a decade building and Marcus Webb has been trying to burn.
Those are my databases. My contacts built them. My dead paid for them.
I work through the flight and I do not look at Roman, and the not-looking is its own kind of discipline that costs more than I am willing to examine.
Echo Base welcomes us with the silence of a facility carved into the belly of a mountain.
The corridors are cool and lit by overhead fixtures that hum at a frequency I have grown accustomed to, and I know this place now in a way that makes refusal difficult.
I know where the coffee is kept and how long to let my shower run before the water pressure stabilizes and that Tommy keeps dark chocolate in the second drawer of his workstation.
These are survival details, not emotional attachments.
I request a briefing within the hour. Kane grants it.
The operations center fills with the team in the ordered way I have learned to expect.
Kane takes the head of the table. Sarah positions herself at the signals intelligence console, her screens already populated with the Vienna data feed.
Tommy hunches over his own station, fingers racing across keyboards faster than any human should manage without errors, though Tommy rarely makes errors.
Stryker leans against the wall. Dylan sits with his arms crossed.
Micah takes a chair near Sarah. Roman enters last and takes the back wall, shoulders squared against the concrete, arms folded, weight balanced on both feet in a defensible position he chose by instinct.
He doesn't sit. Roman rarely sits in briefings.
He watches from the margins, cataloging threats and exits out of a habit too old and too ingrained to switch off, and the effect is a presence that stays in peripheral vision whether I want it there or not.
I present the Vienna operation with the clinical precision of an intelligence officer delivering an assessment to a committee she respects but does not yet trust. I cover the safe house layout, the device placement, the patrol complication and the extraction under fire.
I keep my account devoid of any detail that is not operationally relevant.
I do not mention the closet. I do not mention Roman's hand over my mouth, the pressure of his palm and the heat of his chest against my back in a space too small for two bodies to occupy without becoming one. I do not mention the hours after.
"The devices are producing viable intelligence," I tell the room.
"Committee personnel are moving through the Margaretenstrasse facility in patterns that confirm what my dossiers suspected, that it functions as a transit point for operatives rotating between Eastern and Western European assignments.
Tommy's systems are capturing facial imagery, communications metadata, and movement patterns.
Cross-referenced against my existing intelligence, we should be able to identify the operatives and begin mapping their deployment cycles within days. "
"Quality of the signal?" Sarah asks. She is watching me with the focused attention of a woman whose profession is finding patterns in data, and I can feel her gaze tracking the details I am leaving out the way a radar system tracks objects at the edge of its range.
"Strong on both devices. The communications node is capturing encrypted traffic that Tommy's working to decrypt. The junction box unit is logging entry and exit patterns."
Sarah nods, makes a note on her tablet, and lets her gaze linger a beat longer than professional interest requires.
My posture or my voice or whatever tells I am failing to suppress has registered, and Sarah is too good at her job to miss a data point once it's appeared on her screen.
She doesn't push. My jaw tightens anyway.
I turn back to the room.
Tommy pulls his headphones down around his neck and swivels toward Kane. "I've got something from the Committee intercepts. Not from the Vienna devices, but from the broader signals traffic we've been monitoring since Zurich. Volkov knows someone is targeting his infrastructure."
The room goes quiet. Kane leans forward. "Details."
"Encrypted communications between Volkov's operational cell and Committee regional coordinators.
The language is guarded, but the substance is clear.
He's referencing security failures across multiple sites, and he's mobilizing additional protection for remaining assets.
" Tommy's fingers tap the edge of his keyboard.
"He used the phrase 'active threat assessment.
' I flagged it because it showed up in the intercept traffic Victoria's feeds have been pulling since Zurich. "
"Active threat assessment." I turn the phrase over. I have heard it before, in Committee communications I cataloged years ago. "That's their designation for an organized campaign. Not isolated incidents. He knows someone is running coordinated operations against his infrastructure."
"Exactly." Tommy looks at Kane. "The Zurich hit rattled him. Vienna confirmed the pattern. He's going to harden every target we haven't reached yet."
The implication settles over the room. Every day we wait is a day Volkov uses to consolidate, to reinforce, to make the next strike harder.
"Then we accelerate," I say. "Berlin is next.
Baumann is the last contact in my network still transmitting, and if Volkov is hardening his security, Baumann is exposed.
He's been feeding me intelligence on Committee logistics for years.
If Volkov identifies him before we reach him, we lose the best source we have inside their European operations. "
Kane studies me for a moment. His expression gives nothing away, the careful blankness of a commander who learned long ago that the most dangerous proposals are the ones that sound the most reasonable.