Something in my tone makes him look up, and whatever he sees in my face stops him from asking the obvious follow-up. Marek has survived this long by reading people accurately, and right now I'm giving him the read of a woman who is done running and about to start moving in the other direction.
"Be careful, Victoria." He tucks the envelope into his jacket. "Webb doesn't stop. You know this. He won't stop until you're either dead or so thoroughly destroyed that no one will ever buy intelligence from you again."
"I know exactly what Webb does." I put my hand on his shoulder, briefly, because Marek is not a man who invites physical contact and neither am I. "Go. Today."
He nods once, and I leave him standing in his half-packed flat with the sound of my footsteps echoing down the stairwell. Each step feels like severing a thread, another connection cut, another piece of the network I built with my own hands dissolving into nothing. By the time I reach the ground floor, Marek is the last active contact I have left in Europe.
By the time I reach the street, I suspect he won't be for long.
Roman falls into step beside me as I turn east toward Riegrovy Sady, the park that sits at the crest of the Vinohrady hill. He doesn't ask how it went. He reads the answer in my stride, my posture, the set of my jaw. Instead he puts his phone to his ear, listens for several seconds, and the mask shifts. The jaw tightens. The pale blue of his eyes drains to something colder, and his free hand curls at his side with the precision of someone deciding where to apply force.
"Kane," he says to me, lowering the phone. His voice has dropped to the register he uses when information becomes operational, each word stripped to its weight-bearing minimum."Committee chatter intercepted in the last hour. Webb has authorized extreme measures against your network. Not just targeted eliminations. Full scorched earth. Anyone who has ever transacted with you in any capacity is being identified, assessed, and either turned or terminated."
The words land with the clinical precision of a medical diagnosis: terminal, inoperable, full system failure.
"Anyone who has ever transacted." I repeat the scope of it back to him, testing whether the words sound as annihilating out loud as they do inside my head. "Not just the network. The clients. The couriers. The one-time sources who passed me a single document and never called again."
"Yes." Roman's gaze tracks across the street, cataloging threats, but the tension in his shoulders is personal, the coiled restraint of watching damage he can't prevent land on someone he can't stop watching.
"Of course he is." I keep walking. My legs know the route to the park from years of operational habit, turning left at the intersection, crossing the tram tracks, passing the café where I once met a Russian FSB defector named Fedorov who slid me a USB drive full of Committee operational plans while ordering coffee and commenting on the quality of Prague's strudel. Fedorov is dead now. I found out through a relay channel while we were on the train. He was killed in Warsaw, at a hotel near the Vistula, days ago.
My phone vibrates. I pull it from my pocket and read the message, and the ground beneath me shifts again, another aftershock in a sequence that started in London and hasn't stopped.
My last financial accounts have been frozen, every one of them. I'd known it was coming from Roman's intercepts, but knowing and experiencing are different things. When I try to access the emergency reserves I maintained underalias identities across Europe, each one comes back locked. Simultaneously, according to the timestamps, which means Webb didn't find them one by one. He knew about all of them and waited until he could shut them down at the same time. The safe houses went the same way: Geneva, Prague, and Lisbon, raided within the same hour. London would have made one more, but I burned that one myself before Webb's people could reach it.
The systematic precision of it is almost beautiful, in the way that a killing frost is beautiful, in the way that anything perfectly engineered for destruction carries its own cold elegance. Webb didn't just dismantle my network. He studied it first, mapped every node and connection and financial thread, and then severed them all at once so that by the time I realized what was happening, there was nothing left to save.
I reach the edge of Riegrovy Sady and stop. The city spreads below me in a panorama of red roofs and church spires, the castle looming across the river, and the view is the same one I watched years ago while Fedorov told me that the Committee was expanding its arms facilitation network into Eastern Europe and that someone needed to care enough to stop them. I cared. I took his intelligence and sold it to people who could use it, and Fedorov went back to Moscow believing he had made a difference.
He's dead now. Ines is dead. Henrik is dead. The Berlin courier is dead. Sato has been silent for days. Marek has a few hours at best before they find him too.
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 witha 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 himthat 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.
