Chapter 6 #2
"You don't know that." She holds my gaze, the same challenge she's been throwing at me since London, the same refusal to accept reassurance from a man who proved his promises aren't worth the breath they cost.
"I know you." I keep my voice low, level, and I don't look away. "You don't destroy what you protect."
Vix is quiet for a long time after that. When she turns back to the window, the set of her jaw has changed. I recognize the shift, a decision locked into place and fortified.
Montana announces itself in the gray light of early dawn, mountains rising through the cloud cover like the spine of something ancient and patient.
Vix leans toward the glass, mapping the terrain below with the forensic attention she applied to the Prague streets, cataloging ridge lines, valleys, access roads, defensive positions.
The habit is operational and bone-deep. She can't help it. Neither can I.
The airstrip is a private facility on ranch land that belongs to a trust Kane established years ago, with no tower, no manifest, no record of our arrival. The Gulfstream touches down on packed earth, and the engines wind down into silence so complete it feels manufactured.
A man is waiting beside a black SUV with the engine running.
Dark-haired, mid-thirties, with the contained stillness of someone who has traded in violence long enough that it no longer registers as effort.
Vix studies him through the aircraft window before we disembark, and I see the recognition land.
"Rourke," she says, quiet enough that only I hear it.
Dylan Rourke. Former Committee operative turned Echo Ridge. The man who lost his wife and daughter to the organization he once served. Vix knows pieces of his history the way she knows pieces of all their histories, fragments assembled from intelligence product and operational inference.
We deplane into air that carries the cold bite of mountain altitude and the mineral smell of snow that hasn't fallen yet. Dylan nods at Stryker, at Mercer, and his gaze settles on Vix with the look of a man who evaluates fast because getting it wrong has cost him everything at least once.
"Cross." He opens the rear passenger door. "Long flight."
"Long week." Vix gets in without ceremony. I take the seat beside her, our shoulders almost touching in the confines of the SUV. Stryker and Mercer load the tactical cases into the back and climb in behind us.
Dylan drives with controlled precision, hands quiet on the wheel, the kind of restrained capability that suggests violence is a resting state rather than an escalation.
The road climbs through pine forest thick enough to block the dawn light, switchbacking up terrain that would be impassable in anything less capable than the modified SUV.
Vix watches the landscape through her window, and I can almost see the mental map forming behind her eyes, every turn logged, every switchback cataloged, every point where the road narrows enough that a single vehicle could block passage.
Old habits, hers and mine both. I'm running the same calculations from the other window, noting the chokepoints.
We've been operating in parallel for a decade without knowing it, trained by the same profession, shaped by the same threats, and now sitting shoulder to shoulder in a vehicle carrying us both toward a place I’ve never seen.
It was years of encrypted communications, operational briefings delivered over satellite links, intelligence passed through dead drops and secure channels.
I've never walked these corridors, never slept in these quarters, never stood in the command center where Kane makes the decisions that have kept this team alive while the Committee tried to find them.
I operated in the field because the field was where Kane needed me, and I didn't question it because field work was all I had left after MI6 burned me and the Committee tried to bury me.
Now I'm coming in from the cold, and the woman beside me is the reason.
The SUV slows at a point where the road appears to end in a cluster of fallen timber and brush.
Dylan stops, reaches through the window, and works his hand inside a hollow log positioned against the barrier.
A keypad, hidden where no casual observer would think to look.
He enters a code, and the obstruction shifts aside on hydraulic lifts disguised to look natural.
The road continues through a final corridor, narrow and shadowed, until a cave mouth opens in the mountainside, wide enough for the vehicle, angled to defeat aerial surveillance.
We pull inside. Motion-activated lights flicker on, revealing a tunnel that extends deep into the mountain.
Natural rock gives way to steel-reinforced walls.
Blast doors stand ready to seal the entrance.
The air changes, cooler, filtered, carrying the hum of ventilation systems and the faint ozone tang of electronics running constantly.
Vix's expression doesn't change. But her posture shifts, an almost imperceptible straightening, and I recognize the tell from years of watching her walk into secure facilities across Europe. She's impressed and she won't show it.
I'm impressed too. This is what Kane built. This is what I traded for, feeding intelligence from the shadows, watching Vix from distances I chose, choosing duty and security over the woman sitting beside me. The facility is real. The mission is real. The team is real.
Whether any of it was worth the cost is a calculation I'm not prepared to finish.
Vix gets out of the SUV before Dylan has fully stopped.
The tunnel opens into the main chamber, and the man who must be Kane is standing at the tactical table with his hands flat on the surface, watching us approach.
He's exactly the man his voice promised over years of comms: solid, commanding, authority worn the way other men wear scars. Deep, settled, permanent.
She crosses the distance to Kane with a stride that announces negotiation, not gratitude, and when Kane extends his hand, she takes it with a grip that I know from experience is firmer than most men expect.
"Cross. Welcome to Echo Ridge."
"I'm not here for sanctuary, Kane." She places each word with the precision of a woman drawing a line in the dirt. "I'm here to dismantle Webb's European operations piece by piece. If Echo Ridge wants to help, I'm listening. If not, I'll do it alone."
Kane almost smiles. Almost. The expression gets as far as the corners of his mouth before his operational discipline catches it.
"I think you'll find we speak the same language.
" His gaze shifts to me, and I catch what might be approval, or the closest thing Kane allows himself.
"Frost. Good to finally have you inside. "
"Good to finally be here."
"Dylan, show them to quarters. We brief in two hours." Kane turns back to the tactical table, reaching for a communications headset, his attention already on the next priority.
Dylan leads us into a corridor that branches toward what he identifies as the residential wing.
For years I've fed intelligence into this facility, and now I'm being walked through it like a visiting dignitary.
The irony sits like a stone behind my teeth.
We pass a room banked with surveillance feeds and workstations that can only be the operations center, then a reinforced door with a biometric lock that Dylan passes without comment.
I don't need him to label that one. Farther down, a light glows behind frosted glass, and the faint antiseptic smell identifies the medical bay before Dylan confirms it with a nod.
Echo Base unfolds around us, hewn from the mountain itself, and every room we pass is a piece of the life I chose when I chose to stay dead, the mission I served while Vix built her network on the wreckage of my grave.
She walks beside me, her sleeve brushing mine with each step, and she doesn't pull away.
She's cataloging everything: the reinforced corridors, the security stations, the evidence of a team that has lived and fought and bled inside this mountain.
I watch her fingers trail the rock wall as we walk, reading the facility the way she reads everything.
By touch, by instinct, by the information the surface gives up under pressure.
Dylan stops at a door halfway down the residential corridor. "Cross, you're here." He glances at me. "Frost, end of the hall." He waits long enough to confirm we've registered the information, then heads back the way we came, his footsteps fading into the rock.
Vix looks at the door, then at me. Her gaze flicks once toward the end of the corridor where Dylan pointed, then comes back.
The corridor is narrow, and we're standing close enough that the hours of recycled cabin air and transatlantic distance fall away and all that's left is the warmth underneath, the scent that is just her, unchanged in all the years between.
The scent that found me in borrowed beds across Europe and dragged me out of sleep with my hands reaching for a woman who wasn't there, reminding me exactly what I'd sacrificed and exactly why I deserved the empty sheets.
She holds my gaze for a beat longer than professional distance requires. The look is logistical. What it does to the space between us is not.
She opens the door, steps inside, and turns back to face me from the threshold.
The light from the corridor cuts across her face, illuminating the exhaustion, the fury, the razor-sharp intelligence that has kept her alive long enough to stand in a mountain in Montana and declare war on the most dangerous criminal organization in Europe.
"Two hours," she says.
"I'll be here."
She closes the door. The lock engages with a quiet click that echoes through the reinforced rock. Behind that door, Victoria Cross is taking the first steps into a life that looks nothing like the one she built and nothing like the one I took from her.
On my side of the door, I press my palm flat against the surface and hold it there. A gesture she'll never see. A promise I don't have the right to make and can't stop making anyway.
I drop my hand. The steel holds the warmth for a moment, then lets it go the way I should have let her go, cleanly and without leaving a mark.
I never could. And standing in this corridor with her warmth fading from the metal under my hand and her voice still ringing off the rock, I know I never will.