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. Váš prítel.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 theCommittee 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 markedpeople 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 saysI heard youandI'm hereand 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 processthe 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 underfuture 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.
6
