Chapter 2
ROMAN
The cab drops us in Shoreditch and Victoria doesn't wait for me to pay the driver.
She's out of the vehicle before it stops rolling, go-bag over one shoulder, one hand buried in her coat pocket where I know the weapon is, moving toward the building entrance with the smooth, lethal purpose of someone who has arrived at safe houses in foreign cities more times than she can count.
I catch up in three strides, key the entry code into the panel beside the door, and hold it open.
She walks past without looking at me, close enough that I catch the scent of her, gunpowder residue layered over the warmth beneath it, unchanged after a decade. It hits me like a fist beneath the ribs.
The flat is on the third floor. I've maintained it for Echo Ridge operations for years, a clean space with secured sight lines and a communications setup behind a false panel in the wardrobe.
Victoria scans it the way I scanned hers, checking exits and entry points, assessing the reinforced windows and the secondary lock system on the door.
She does all of this without a word. She hasn't spoken since the cab, since she sat as far from me as the seat allowed and watched London pass like a city she was already mourning.
The quiet is worse than her fury would be. Fury I can work with. Fury means she still cares enough to fight. This is Victoria deciding I'm not worth the expenditure of energy, and I would rather she put a knife between my ribs than watch her file me under irrelevant.
I secure the door, check the perimeter sensors, and pull the blackout curtains across every window.
The flat goes dark. Victoria sets her go-bag on the kitchen counter and begins unpacking, sorting passports and currency and equipment into groups that make sense only to her internal filing system.
Her fingers move with the precision I remember: quick, deliberate, no wasted motion.
Those hands stripped a Beretta faster than anyone else at the MI6 range. I stood behind her the first time I watched her do it, close enough to see the tendons shift beneath her skin, and thought: This woman is going to destroy me.
I wasn't wrong.
I should give her space. I'm supposed to be good at that.
But every instinct I have is pulling toward her like gravity, and restraining it feels like holding a door shut against a storm.
My hands want to find her shoulder, the back of her neck, anywhere they can reach, and the fact that I've lost the right to touch her is a punishment no Committee interrogator ever managed to match.
The satellite phone is in the wardrobe behind the false panel, along with a compact communications array and a backup laptop loaded with Echo Base's encrypted protocols. I power up the system and key in the authentication sequence that routes through relay nodes before connecting to Echo Base.
Kane picks up before the signal finishes routing.
"Frost. Status."
"Secondary location. Shoreditch flat. She's here." I keep my voice low. Victoria is across the room, and the flat isn't large enough for privacy. "Her primary safe house is burned. Everything wiped clean before we left, but Webb's people will find it within hours."
"Her network?"
"Burning. You're tracking it?"
"Tommy has it in real time. Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Marseille." Kane doesn't need to list names. The data speaks for itself. "We're seeing dedicated Committee resources deployed. Not contractors."
"That matches what Victoria's pulled from her own channels. This is a priority operation with full institutional backing."
Kane is quiet for a moment. I can hear the hum of Echo Base's command center behind him, the low murmur of equipment doing its work inside the mountain. "What's your read?"
"Webb's making a statement. Victoria fed intelligence to Echo Ridge that helped expose the source of the compromised intel.
This is punishment, but it's also a warning to anyone else in the broker community who might consider working against Committee interests.
He's not just burning her network. He's salting the ground. "
"Extraction timeline?"
"She's not going to come willingly." I glance toward the kitchen.
Victoria has finished sorting her equipment and is sitting on the counter with her encrypted phone in one hand, scrolling through damage reports.
The phone's glow catches the line of her jaw, the elegant angle of her throat.
She wore her hair pulled back when I knew her, dark and practical and out of the way.
Now it's threaded with silver, and the part of me that should be focused on operational logistics is tracing that line where dark meets light instead.
"She'll want to fight, rebuild, hit back. "
"She can hit back from Echo Base. We have the infrastructure.
" Kane's voice carries the flat authority of a man who runs covert operations from inside a mountain.
"Get her out of London. Brussels or Amsterdam as a staging point, then we arrange transport.
Tommy's working on satellite coverage for your route.
I'll have him feed you intercepts on Committee search patterns. "
"Copy."
"And Frost." A pause. "How is she?"
I look at Victoria. She hasn't moved from the counter. Her expression holds the stillness of someone who has decided that feeling is a luxury she'll attend to later. I know the look. I've worn it for a decade.
"Operational," I say. It's the only word that fits.
Kane disconnects. I power down the satellite link and sit in the chair beside the wardrobe, and the room settles into stillness with texture: rain against the windows, the distant rumble of a lorry on the main road, Victoria's breathing steady and controlled from the kitchen.
I count each exhale without meaning to, the way I always have with her. In Budapest, I could hear her breathe through a wall and know whether she was reading, sleeping, or loading a weapon.
I close my eyes and Budapest finds me the way it always does.
The safe house on Andrássy Avenue had been compromised before we arrived.
I knew it the moment we crossed the threshold, something wrong in the air, the smell of cigarette smoke where no one on our team smoked.
I had seconds to process that information before the first shot punched through the window and buried itself in the plaster beside my head.
Victoria was on comms, coordinating with the MI6 handler who was already selling us out, though neither of us knew that yet.
I shoved her behind the kitchen island and returned fire, dropping two Committee operatives in the hallway before a third put a round through my left shoulder.
The impact spun me into the counter, blood spraying across white tile, and I could hear Victoria screaming my name through the comm link because by then they'd separated us, driven her toward the extraction point while the rest of the team closed in on me.
MI6 burned me within the hour. My handler declared the operation compromised, pulled Victoria and the remaining assets, and left me bleeding in a Budapest kitchen with Committee soldiers converging on my position. Official status: killed in action, body unrecoverable.
I wasn't dead. The Committee found me before I bled out, which was worse.
They wanted information about MI6's network in Eastern Europe.
I gave them nothing useful for days, and when the information didn't come, a man named Volkov decided I was worth more dead than tortured.
He ordered the execution filmed. Insurance, he called it. Proof of consequence.
What Volkov didn't account for was the guard who owed a debt to a Serbian arms dealer I'd done business with years earlier. The guard left a door unlocked. I walked out of that facility in a dead man's boots with a bullet hole in my shoulder and no identity, no country, and no way home.
The Committee released the execution footage.
They manufactured the kill shot from an angle that hid the substitution, spliced it with real footage of my interrogation, and distributed it through channels they knew MI6 would intercept.
The agency confirmed the death, case closed, and Roman Frost became a line item in a classified file while Victoria mourned a body that never existed.
I could have resurfaced. In those first weeks, hiding in a flat in Zagreb while my shoulder healed, I planned it. I drafted messages I never sent, laying out how I would contact MI6, prove I was alive, demand reinstatement.
But MI6 had already burned me. My handler had seen to that. And if I surfaced, the Committee would know their execution had failed. They would come looking, not just for me but for everyone connected to me, everyone I'd ever worked with, every asset, every contact.
Victoria.
If the Committee learned I was alive, they would use every tool at their disposal to find me. And the fastest way to find a dead man is to watch the people who loved him. Victoria would become a target, not for what she knew, but for what she meant.
I chose her safety over everything else. Over my own name. Over the decade we might have had. Over the sound of her voice, which I heard in my sleep for years afterward, screaming my name through a comm link while Budapest burned around us.
I stayed dead. And I have lived with the cost of that decision every day since.
The memory releases me slowly, reluctantly, with the taste of old blood at the back of my throat. I open my eyes to dark walls, rain on glass, the glow of Victoria's phone across the room.
She's moved to the sofa. Her shoes are off, feet tucked beneath her, and the phone rests on her knee while she scrolls through the wreckage. The silver threading through her hair catches the glow from her phone screen.