Chapter 1 #2
Roman goes quiet. Perhaps he's reassessing what I've become while he spent years playing dead.
The woman he knew in the MI6 corridors was good at her job but still young enough to trust institutions and believe in the fundamental decency of the systems she served.
That woman doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for a long time.
I move to the secondary drives and initiate the final wipe cycle.
While the last of my London operation erases itself, I go to the bedroom.
My go-bag sits in the false bottom of the wardrobe, always packed and refreshed on a strict rotation.
It holds passports under different names, currency for half a dozen countries, a satellite phone and burner mobile, medical supplies, a change of clothes that won't draw attention in any European capital, and a compact weapon with spare magazines.
Roman follows me to the bedroom doorway and stops.
He leans against the frame, arms crossed, filling the space without entering it.
It's not politeness but choice, a studied distance that feels more charged than closeness would.
His gaze moves over the room, over the narrow bed, over me, and settles with a weight I refuse to acknowledge.
I pull the bag and check the contents by touch, each item solid and accounted for beneath my fingers.
One thing remains.
On the nightstand sits a photograph in a simple silver frame.
Two people at a café table in Prague, laughing at something the photographer said.
Me, years ago, before the silver started threading through my hair and the permanent vigilance settled into every muscle of my face.
And James, my brother, leaning back in his chair with the easy grin that could charm intelligence out of stone.
The grin he wore right up until Webb's people killed him in Bratislava during a failed extraction that never should have happened.
It took me months to piece together what happened from surviving contacts and intercepted Committee traffic, and every detail I uncovered carved the loss deeper.
Leave it. Sentiment is weight, and weight slows you down.
I pick it up, slide the photograph free from the frame, and tuck it inside the go-bag between the passports.
When I turn around, Roman is watching. His expression changes, the control slipping a fraction, replaced by guilt, or grief, that he doesn't hide fast enough.
He knows about James. Of course he knows.
Working with Echo Ridge means he knows that my brother died in Bratislava, that Webb ordered it, that James's death is why I started feeding intelligence exclusively to people who could hurt the Committee.
Roman was alive when James died. While my brother was dying in that safe house, Roman was breathing, walking, working, and choosing every single day to let me believe I was alone.
The rage hits so clean and bright it almost feels like clarity.
"Ready?" he asks. The word comes out softer than anything else he's said tonight, and I want to hit him for it, for the softness, for the implication that he still knows when to stop pushing, still reads me with that unsettling accuracy, still remembers where the edges are. A dead man shouldn't know me this well.
"Not remotely." I sling the go-bag over my shoulder and take a final look at the flat.
The monitors are dark, the drives dead, the communications array silent.
I've reduced everything here to nothing.
Everything I leave behind will be worthless when Webb's people find it. That much, at least, I control.
We leave through the service entrance at the rear of the building.
Roman takes point, moving down the stairwell with his weapon drawn, his body positioned between me and every corner, every threat.
He's protective in a way that slides too easily toward possessive.
The distinction has always been thin with Roman, and I'm not interested in examining which side this falls on.
The alley smells like rain and rubbish bins.
London at night is wet and indifferent. Roman checks the street, signals clear, and we move.
His hand finds the small of my back as we cross to the vehicle, brief and automatic, as though no time has passed, as though he still has the right.
I don't shrug it off because we're in the open and flinching from a touch is a vulnerability I won't show on an unsecured street.
A black cab idles at the corner. Roman opens the rear door and I slide in.
He follows, gives the driver an address I don't recognize, and takes the opposite end of the seat.
The distance feels pointed and careful. He knows exactly how close he's allowed to be, and for now, he's chosen to observe the boundary.
The cab pulls into traffic. The city passes the windows in streaks of rain and sodium light, and the phone vibrates against my thigh.
It's a message routed through Henrik's identifier via the Copenhagen backup channel. I open it.
Two words fill the screen: Henrik compromised.
They're not Henrik's words. Someone sent this using his credentials, which means they have his equipment. Alive or dead, the result for my network is the same. Another node is gone, another person who trusted my ability to protect their identity now exposed to Webb's methodical destruction.
I close the message and delete the thread.
Roman is watching the street through the rain-streaked glass, giving me the illusion of privacy to process what I've read.
The streetlights catch his profile in intervals, cheekbone, the hard line of his mouth, the scar above his brow.
It's a face I mourned, a face I memorized in grief and am now being forced to relearn in fury.
"Another one?" he asks without turning.
"Copenhagen. Henrik."
His hand stills on his knee. "Good source. Reliable Scandinavian military channels."
He's already speaking in past tense. Roman filed Henrik under losses before I finished speaking, sorting the living from the dead with the clinical detachment I recognize in myself. MI6 trained us both to file people the way accountants file assets: active, dormant, written off.
The cab turns south toward the river. Rain hits the roof in steady percussion while London slides past, and I stay as far from Roman as the seat allows.
The space between us on the leather holds everything neither of us has said, and I can feel the heat of him from here, which is infuriating because dead men shouldn't radiate warmth.
He let me grieve for ten years. He let me build a memorial in my mind, a permanent archive of Roman Frost organized by chronology and cross-referenced with guilt and loss.
Every professional decision I made after Budapest was shaped by the absence of him, and now that absence has walked back into my life carrying intelligence from the same people I've been working with all along.
My network is dying in real time. Every contact I've cultivated, every source I've protected, every relationship I've maintained through careful work and mutual trust is being hunted down by a group who understand exactly how to destroy what I've built.
Henrik, Sato, Baumann: people with faces and families who put their safety in my hands because I promised them my discretion was worth the risk.
Webb is sending a message with every one of them. Each death is a word in a sentence designed to tell me that opposing the Committee costs other people their lives.
I understand his message. I've been reading Webb's brand of strategic communication for years.
But Webb has miscalculated. He thinks destroying my network destroys me. He thinks burning every bridge and killing every contact strips me down to nothing, a woman without resources, without teeth.
Webb doesn't know what I was before the network, before the contacts and the channels and the relationships that made me valuable. I was an MI6-trained intelligence officer and now I have a fury that sharpens with every person the Committee has taken from me.
My hand finds the weapon in my lap. Across the seat, Roman watches the rain streak the glass, and I let myself think the one thing I've been holding back since he walked through my door.
Kane didn't send him to save me. Kane sent him to collect me.