Chapter 4 #2
She's right, and we both know it. Running to Prague is tactically reckless and strategically sound.
Webb's search patterns are designed around the assumption that Victoria will flee toward safety, not toward the epicenter of Committee operations.
Every model, every protocol, every predictive framework the Committee uses will point them west and north, toward the English-speaking world, toward established intelligence partnerships.
Prague is south and east. Prague is counterintuitive.
Prague is exactly what Victoria Cross would do, which is why I should have anticipated it.
"I'll coordinate with Tommy. Satellite coverage of Marek's neighborhood, real-time intercept feeds on Committee communications in the Prague theatre.
" I stand, and the movement puts me close enough to her that I can see the tension gathered along her collarbone, the pulse visible at her throat.
"We move tonight. Train, not air. Less surveillance, more control over the route. "
"Fine." She pushes off the doorframe and turns back toward the bedroom.
"Vix."
She stops but doesn't turn around. I can see the line of her shoulders, the rigid set of her spine, the way she holds herself together through discipline and fury and whatever reserves she hasn't yet depleted.
The bandage on her hand is spotting red.
She's reopened the cuts from hitting me, which means she's been gripping the phone hard enough to split the scabs.
"Marek is worth the risk?"
She turns her head just enough that I can see the edge of her profile, the silver threading through dark hair, the line of her jaw. "Everyone I've lost was worth the risk. That's why I'm the one who's supposed to protect them."
The words land between us with a weight that has nothing to do with Prague and everything to do with what I failed to do for a decade.
I let it settle. I don't apologize, because apologies from me have the structural integrity of wet cardboard, and she deserves better than words I've already proven are cheap.
"I'll have Tommy run the coverage," I say instead. "We leave at twenty-one hundred."
She disappears into the bedroom. The door doesn't close this time, which is either progress or an oversight.
I spend the next two hours coordinating with Echo Base.
Tommy pulls satellite imagery of Vinohrady and overlays it with Committee facility locations.
The nearest confirmed Committee safe house is in Prague 2, the municipal district that shares a border with Marek's Vinohrady neighborhood, close enough that any approach will require careful routing.
Kane signs off on the operation with the caveat that it remains extraction-focused.
Warn Marek. Get out. Move to the Ghent airfield and get Victoria on a plane to Montana.
Vix emerges twice during the planning. Once to refill the electric kettle she found in the kitchen cabinet, brewing tea with the automatic precision of a woman who has made tea in safe houses from Beirut to Berlin.
The second time to stand behind my shoulder and study the satellite imagery on my phone screen without asking permission, her breath warm against the back of my neck, close enough that I can smell the cheap soap from the bathroom mixed with something underneath that hasn't changed in ten years.
She points to a street two blocks from Marek's building. "Committee surveillance van parked there last month. Might be a permanent post."
"I'll have Tommy check current imagery."
She nods once, takes her tea, and goes back to the bedroom. The space she occupied behind me holds her warmth for a few seconds after she leaves, and I sit in it the way a man sits in the last patch of sun before winter comes.
The train to Prague departs Brussels at twenty-one thirty, a night service that will put us into the city by morning.
I book the tickets through a clean account Kane established for European operations, separate names, no connection to either Victoria's compromised aliases or my own Echo Ridge credentials.
We board in silence. The compartment is small, two seats facing each other across a fold-down table, the kind of enforced proximity that would be uncomfortable with a stranger and is something else entirely with the woman sitting across from me.
The train pulls out of Brussels, and the city falls away into darkness. Belgium scrolls past in fragments of light, villages and motorways and the occasional flare of an industrial complex against the night sky.
Vix reads intercepts on her phone for the first hour, her face lit blue by the screen, her expression unreadable.
I review Tommy's satellite coverage of the Prague approach and mark three alternate routes to Marek's building, each one designed to avoid the Committee surveillance post Victoria identified.
We work in parallel, not together, two people performing complementary tasks in the same space without acknowledging the connection between them.
Somewhere past Liège, she puts the phone down.
Her eyes close, and I watch the transition happen in stages, the rigid control softening first in her hands, then in her shoulders, then in the muscles of her face.
Sleep takes her the way water takes a stone, gradually and without permission.
Her head tips toward the window, and the silver-streaked hair falls across her cheek.
I could reach across the table and brush it back. The distance between my hand and her face is small enough to cross in a heartbeat and vast enough to hold a decade of choices I can't undo.
I don't reach.
Instead I watch her sleep and catalog the changes.
The silver that wasn't there a decade ago, threading through the dark hair I used to wind around my fingers in the dark.
A scar along her collarbone that disappears into the neckline of her shirt, thin and precise, the work of a blade rather than shrapnel.
Lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that speak of years spent holding her face still while the world tried to break it.
She is harder than the woman I knew. Sharper.
More dangerous in ways that go beyond tradecraft and into something structural, as though the decade I left her alone didn't just change her but reforged her entirely.
The woman who screamed my name through a comm link in Budapest was brilliant and fierce and still capable of being surprised by betrayal.
The woman sleeping across from me has filed betrayal under standard operating procedure and built her entire existence around the assumption that everyone she trusts will eventually disappear.
I did that to her. Not Webb, not the Committee, not MI6. Me. My choice, my silence, my arrogant belief that I knew what was best for her safety. I looked at the woman I loved and decided she couldn't handle the risk, and in doing so I became the risk she never saw coming.
The train rocks gently through the Ardennes.
Outside the window, the forests are dark and deep, and Vix sleeps on with her bandaged hand curled against her chest, protecting knuckles she split on my jaw.
The bruise she gave me will fade in days.
The damage I did to her will take considerably longer.
I don't sleep. I keep watch.
That, at least, is something I know how to do.