Chapter 5 #2
And I am standing in a Prague park with no money, no network, no safe houses, and no way to get out of Europe on my own.
Everything I built since I believed Roman died in Budapest has been reduced to ash, and the only resource I have left is standing beside me, watching me with a patience that has nothing careful about it.
Patient the way a man is patient with a detonator, waiting not because he's uncertain but because the timing isn't his to choose.
Roman moves closer, not a full step but a shift of weight that brings his shoulder against mine at the overlook railing, solid and unhurried, the heat of him bleeding through layers of fabric into the cold that has settled beneath my skin.
He stays there, pressed against me, as if this is where he's meant to stand and the decade between us was just an inconvenient detour.
"Kane has the extraction coordinates," he says after a silence that stretches long enough to hold the weight of everything I've lost. "Echo Base. You'd be safe there."
"Safe." The word tastes like iron in my mouth. "I don't want safe, Roman. I want Webb to understand that destroying my network was a critical error. And I mean to make him pay for it."
"Then come in." He turns to face me, and the movement puts his mouth at the edge of my vision, the hard line of it set against the mark I left on his jaw.
"Echo Ridge has the resources. The personnel.
Intelligence infrastructure Webb hasn't been able to touch.
" His voice is low, carrying the authority of someone accustomed to issuing orders that don't get questioned.
"Kane's offering partnership, not charity.
But this isn't a request, Vix. You stay in Europe, you're dead inside a week, and I didn't spend ten years keeping you alive from the shadows to watch you throw it away out of stubbornness. "
The words land somewhere below my ribs, where anger and want have been tangled together since London. I hold his gaze and refuse to step back, even though the proximity is doing things to my pulse that I resent with every functioning brain cell.
"You've been with them for years. Operating in my theatre, gathering intelligence on the same targets, running parallel operations." I'm not asking a question. I'm restating facts, laying them out the way I'd lay out evidence on an analyst's desk. "You believe in what they do."
"They gave me a purpose when I had nothing.
No country, no identity, no right to exist." His voice is even, direct, stripped of the careful distance he's been maintaining since London.
Those eyes don't leave mine, and at this range I can see the fracture lines in the composure he wears like body armour, the places where the decade shows in the faint creases at the corners and the darker ring around the pale iris that I used to trace with my thumb in Moscow hotel rooms when the missions were done and the world narrowed to the width of a shared bed.
"They need you, Vix. What's in your head. What you've built."
"You could have told Kane to bring me in years ago." The words come out sharper than I intend, but I let them stand. "You had opinions about my safety, my network, my operations. You just delivered them through Kane instead of to my face."
Roman holds my gaze without flinching. "I was dead, Vix. Dead men don't get to have opinions about the living."
The line lands with the flat finality of a justification rehearsed in every safe house and borrowed bed across a continent, and I can hear in the way he says it that he half believes it and half knows it's the most convenient lie he's ever told himself.
His jaw is tight around the words, and standing this close I can see the way his pulse moves beneath the skin of his throat, steady and controlled and utterly at odds with the heat banked behind those ice-blue eyes.
I look at him. I mean that I actually look at him, for the first time since he walked through my door in London and turned my world to rubble, not through the filter of rage or grief or the decade of betrayal that sits between us like a wall I've been reinforcing with every conversation.
I look at him the way I used to, before Budapest, when looking at Roman Frost was the most dangerous thing I did in a profession full of dangerous things.
He's older. The lines around his eyes are deeper, the gray at his temples more pronounced, and there's a stillness in him that wasn't there before, forged by years of operating alone in hostile territory with no backup and no one who knew his real name.
The man I loved was sharp and certain and sometimes reckless with his own safety.
This version of him is tempered, the recklessness burned away by a decade of consequences, and what's left underneath is harder, quieter, more dangerous than the original.
Roman sees me looking. His whole body changes, a fractional shift in weight, shoulders drawing back, chin dropping a degree, the recalibration of something dangerous that knows it's being watched.
He doesn't move closer. He doesn't have to.
The autumn air carries his scent, clean sweat and leather and an undertone I catalogued a decade ago and my body has apparently filed under permanent reference.
I look away, and the looking away costs me. A physical pull, like tearing adhesive from skin, the kind that leaves a mark even when nothing visible remains.
My phone vibrates. I glance at the screen and go still.
The message is from a building contact I cultivated years ago, a retired woman on Marek's floor who waters his plants when he travels and has my number stored under a false name.
She uses it only when something is wrong.
The message is three words in Czech, the phrase I taught her: Policie. Vá? p?ítel. Police. Your friend.
My stomach drops. I read the message once, then again, and the implication refuses to rearrange itself into anything other than what it is.
Marek is dead. Police are at his apartment in Vinohrady.
We left him only a short time ago.
The phone is heavy in my hand. Marek was alive when I walked down his staircase.
He was holding the envelope I gave him and planning his escape and breathing the same air I was breathing.
Now he's a police report and a crime scene, and the Committee killed him so quickly after my visit that they were either already watching his building or they followed us there.
Roman sees my face, and whatever question he might have asked becomes unnecessary.
He reads everything about me with a precision I've never been able to match or defend against. His hand closes around my upper arm, not gentle, not rough, the pressure of each finger specific and grounding.
My body maps the grip before my mind catches up.
"How long ago?" is all he asks, his voice gone to gravel, the clipped consonants of his accent harder than usual.
"Less than an hour."
His jaw tightens. The calculation behind his eyes is fast and brutal.
If the Committee followed us, they know where we are.
If they were already watching Marek, they may not know about us, but they know someone warned him, and they'll be looking for whoever it was.
His thumb shifts against the inside of my bicep, a movement so small it could be involuntary, and the friction of it sends heat cascading through nerve endings that have no right to be this responsive during a crisis.
"We need to move." The words come out quiet, clipped, carrying no room for discussion.
"I know." My voice comes out level and steady.
The ledger in my head adds another name, another debt, another entry in the column marked people who trusted me and paid for it with their lives.
Marek survived years in this business by being careful and skeptical and difficult to find.
I walked to his door and led death straight to him, and the emergency cash I left on his kitchen table will still be sitting there when the police finish processing the scene.
I step out of Roman's grip. The phantom pressure lingers on my arm, cooling slowly in the autumn air.
I delete the message. I hand Roman the phone.
"Tell Kane I accept the extraction." Each word is measured, a woman signing a contract she has read in full and understood the terms. "Not because I need his protection.
Because I need his resources, his team, and his operational infrastructure to burn Marcus Webb and his organization to the ground.
If Echo Ridge wants a war, I'm bringing them one. "
Roman takes the phone. His fingers close over mine during the transfer, deliberate this time, held a beat longer than function requires, his thumb pressing against the heel of my palm in a way that says I heard you and I'm here and a third thing that neither of us is going to name in a park after my last European contact just died.
My skin burns where he touches it, warmth cutting through the numbness, the living proof that destruction isn't all my hands know.
I pull my hand back. Roman lets me go, but the release is slow, his fingers trailing across my palm, and the drag of callused skin against mine leaves a sensation that will take longer to fade than I want it to.
"The extraction point," I say. "Where?"
"A private airfield outside the city. Kane adjusted the coordinates when we diverted from Ghent. Transport is already en route."
I start walking. Roman falls into step beside me, closer than before, his shoulder brushing mine with each stride, already keying the phone with his other hand, relaying my acceptance to Echo Base in the clipped shorthand of a man accustomed to delivering operational updates while moving through hostile territory.
The points of contact between us, shoulder, arm, the occasional brush of knuckles, are too frequent to be accidental and too subtle to challenge.
Behind us, Prague spreads across the river valley in the autumn light, and somewhere in Vinohrady, police are at a renovated Art Nouveau building on a tree-lined street to process the body of a man who was alive when I told him to run, and dead because I didn't tell him fast enough.
The vendetta was personal before. James in Bratislava, Ines in Marseille, Henrik in Copenhagen, Fedorov in Warsaw, Sato silent long enough that the silence has become its own answer.
I carry their names behind my sternum like a second heart, each one beating with a fury that I've kept organized, categorized, filed under future business.
Marek changes the calculus. Marek was alive when I left him. Marek died because I came.
Webb isn't just destroying my network. He's using me as the weapon. Every contact I try to save becomes a target the moment I reach out. Every warning I deliver is a death sentence dressed as mercy.
The only way to stop the killing is to stop Webb.
And the only people with the resources to do that are waiting inside a mountain in Montana, who have been working with a ghost who broke my heart a decade ago and is walking beside me now with my phone in his hand and his shoulder pressed against mine as if proximity is a right he earned and never relinquished, not even in death.
I don't look at Roman. I look at the road ahead and let the fury settle into something useful, something with edges and direction and the cold, clean clarity of a woman who has lost everything except her mind, her will, and her absolute certainty that Marcus Webb is going to regret the day he decided to make an example of Victoria Cross.
The extraction vehicle is waiting at the coordinates Kane provided. I get in without looking back.
Prague disappears behind me. I don't say goodbye. Goodbyes are for people who plan to return.