Chapter 14
ROMAN
The perimeter trail hits an incline at the north ridge, and I take it at a pace that makes the bullet graze on my shoulder burn in protest. Good, I want it to burn.
The pain is specific, localized, a problem with edges I can measure, unlike the other thing, which has no edges at all and fills every space I give it.
Vix tasted the same. After a decade, after Budapest and the manufactured death and the years of borrowed names in borrowed rooms across a continent that should have killed me, she tasted exactly the same, like coffee and resolve and the faint copper of a woman who bites her own lip when she is deciding whether to let herself want something.
I cataloged the taste in Vienna while she arched against me in a rented flat, and now I carry the knowledge like a loaded weapon I've pointed at my own chest.
She left the common room last night without looking at me.
I watched her go, cataloging her movements the way I catalog everything about her in this place.
Kane intercepted her in the corridor before she reached her quarters.
I couldn't hear the words from across the common room, but I could read the posture, his stillness and her spine going straight, and then her voice carried just enough for me to catch the cadence, clipped and British and unmistakably the rhythm she uses when she's lying and means to be believed.
Montana at dawn smells like pine resin and frost and the mineral tang of rock that hasn't seen sunlight since the last ice age.
The trail loops the mountain's shoulder above the tree line, exposed enough that I can see the valley floor spreading out below in a gray wash of early light.
Odin ran with me for the first stretch, all controlled energy and military precision, before something in the underbrush caught his attention and he disappeared into the tree line with the single-minded focus of an animal who does not need to complicate his objectives with sentiment.
I should take notes.
The decade sits in my legs as I run, not in the joints, though those object to the cold with an eloquence I could do without, but in the muscle memory itself, the body remembering all the places it has carried me while the rest of the world believed I was dead.
I ran through safe houses in Zagreb and Lisbon and lived in a fishing village on the Dalmatian coast where I spent an entire winter teaching myself to gut mackerel because the fisherman who rented me the cottage expected his tenant to contribute.
The aliases stacked like geological layers: Thomas Sayer in Portugal, David Calder in Croatia, Stefan Voss in Austria, each one a life I inhabited long enough to develop habits and short enough to abandon without mourning.
The loneliness was the worst of it, not the danger, not the Committee's hunters, not the slow erosion of identity that comes from answering to names that don't belong to you.
The loneliness was knowing that Vix was alive in London, building her network, growing brilliantly dangerous, and that every day I stayed dead was a day she grieved a man who was tracking the echoes of her work through back channels and rumor and the occasional name that surfaced in intelligence circles, close enough to confirm she was alive and too far away to do anything about it.
I told myself she was safer without me. The logic was sound at the time.
It is still sound. The Committee would have used her to find me, and finding me would have meant finding Kane's operation before it was ready to survive the exposure.
My death protected her. My silence protected Echo Base. The arithmetic was clean.
The arithmetic does not account for the sound she made in Vienna when I put my mouth against the hollow of her throat, the involuntary catch in her breathing that told me the years of absence hadn't erased the map she drew of my preferences in Moscow.
It does not account for the way she turned her back to my chest in the dark and then threaded her fingers through mine, the contradiction of distance and want captured in a single gesture.
The arithmetic is bullshit, and I've known it for years.
I stayed dead because staying dead was easier than standing in front of her and admitting that every tactical justification I constructed was scaffolding around a simple, indefensible failure of nerve.
I don't forgive myself for it, and I won't. Absolution is for men who've earned it, and I haven't earned a damn thing where Vix is concerned.
My shoulder burns. I lean into the incline and push harder.
Mercer appears on the trail ahead, coming from the opposite direction, which means he's been running the perimeter in the reverse loop and we've met at the apex by coincidence or by design.
With Mercer, the odds favor design. He runs the way he does everything else, controlled and unhurried, his body carrying the compact efficiency of someone who spent too long in captivity to waste energy on anything that isn't necessary.
He slows as I approach and falls into step beside me. We run together for a stretch without speaking, and the silence holds the comfortable weight of two people who don't need to fill it.
"You look like hell," he says eventually. His voice is flat, observational, carrying no judgment and no sympathy.
"Shoulder's stiff."
"Not talking about the shoulder." Mercer's pace doesn't change. His eyes stay forward. "Delaney said you and Cross came back from Vienna running on fumes and tension. Her word was 'combustible.'"
"Delaney should confine her profiling to operational targets."
"Delaney was FBI. She profiles everyone. It's reflexive." Mercer gives me a sidelong look. "You going to tell me what happened, or do I get to guess?"
"You don't get to guess. You don't get to profile. And you don't get to play relationship counselor on a mountain at six in the morning."
"Fair enough." He runs for a long silence before speaking again. "She's not going to forgive you because you deserve it. You know that."
The words land with flat precision. Mercer spent months in captivity before Kane's team extracted him, and the recovery afterwards rewired everything he understood about control and vulnerability.
He earned Delaney's trust by letting her see the damage, not by pretending it wasn't there. He knows this terrain.
"I'm aware," I say.
"Then stop trying to explain yourself and start showing up." He glances at me. "Every time you give her a reason, you're asking her to process your guilt for you. That's your job, not hers. She doesn't need reasons. She needs evidence."
The advice is good. It is also the kind that lands harder when you've already arrived at the same conclusion independently and haven't done a damn thing about it.
"Anything else?" I keep my pace steady, because this conversation has gone on long enough and Mercer knows it.
"No. That's it." He reads the dismissal accurately and lets it stand.
We reach the crest of the ridge and Mercer stops, hands on his knees, breathing controlled.
The valley opens below us in the pale morning light, and Echo Base is invisible beneath the mountain's shoulder, buried in granite and purpose.
From up here, the landscape looks empty and indifferent, Montana's particular brand of beauty that doesn't care whether you survive it or not.
"How's Khalid?" I ask.
"Reading everything Victoria gives him. Asking questions that are too good for his age." Mercer straightens. "She's good with him."
"She's good with everyone." The words come out before I've approved them, and Mercer's mouth twitches at the corner.
"You've got it bad, Frost."
"Noted. Move on."
Mercer turns back toward the base entrance, and I fall into step beside him.
The run has done what I needed it to do, burned off the worst of the restlessness and left behind the kind of fatigue I chose instead of the kind that happens to me.
My encrypted phone buzzes against my thigh as we descend the switchback toward the tree line, and the vibration pattern is one I recognize, a European contact I cultivated through Echo Ridge's network, an asset positioned close enough to Committee operations to track their movements across the continent.
I stop on the trail and pull the phone. The message is brief, encrypted, routed through a relay that bounces through proxy servers before it reaches my device.
The content drains the heat from my legs.
Volkov has received a new directive from Webb.
The instruction goes beyond securing Committee assets and hardening operational security.
Webb has tasked Volkov with locating the operational base of the team targeting his European infrastructure.
Victoria's extraction from Prague was partially tracked, not far enough to identify Echo Base's location, but the charter flight's tail number was flagged by a compromised aviation contact at the airfield, and the flight plan's westward trajectory confirmed a connection to the American northwest. Volkov has surveillance teams assembling for a systematic search of the region.
Webb is not just retaliating. He is hunting us. "Problem?" Mercer reads my face the way he reads rooms, fast and accurate, without wasting a second glance.
"The kind that doesn't wait." I pocket the phone. "I need Kane."
Mercer nods once and does not ask for details. We move down the trail at a pace that is no longer a run but something closer to an approach, moving fast because intelligence has a shelf life and this one is already expiring.