The warmth of Roman's arm through both of our jackets is steady and close and completely at odds with everything I should be feeling, and the words leave my mouth before I've decided to speak them.
"Istanbul," I say. The word comes out quiet, pitched beneath the hum of the engines and aimed at the space between us rather than at him directly. "The bar on Istiklal Street. You ordered raki and pretended you didn't hate it."
Roman goes still in a way that is different from his usual stillness, deeper and more complete. I don't look at him. I look at the dark window and the nothing beyond it and feel the heat of his attention against the side of my face.
"I remember everything, Roman." My voice holds steady, and holding it there takes more from me than I will ever let him know. "That's why I can't forgive you."
The engines hum. The cabin holds its silence. And somewhere beneath the armrest that separates us, his hand rests on the seat with his fingers open, not reaching, not retreating, and I don't take it and I don't move away, and the space between his hand and mine is the most honest we've been with each other since Vienna.
16
ROMAN
The corridor outside my quarters is silent at this hour, the overhead lights dimmed to the nocturnal setting that Echo Base runs between midnight and dawn. My boots make no sound on the floor. Years of fieldwork built the habit, and the habit doesn't care that the only threat in this mountain is the woman sleeping down the corridor who told me she remembers everything and then used the memory like a blade.
Istanbul comes back first. The bar on Istiklal Street. The one where I watched her arguing with the station chief. The one with the raki that tasted like liquid anise and poor judgment. But this time Vix was across the table from me with her hair down and her guard lowered for one of the only times I ever witnessed it. She laughed that night, not the controlled sound she deploys like a tool in professional settings, but the real one, unguarded and slightly too loud, the laugh of a woman who hadn't yet learned that the man sitting across from her would disappear and let her grieve a corpse that didn't exist.
She remembers the raki. She remembers that I pretended not to hate it. She turned that memory into a weapon and used it to tell me exactly how much I cost her, and the precision of it is socompletely Vix that I would have smiled if the blade hadn't still been landing.
It was the opposite of what I'd told myself would happen. I had believed that time would erode what we had, that distance and grief would smooth the edges until what remained was abstract enough to survive. Instead, Vix preserved it all, cataloged it, filed it alongside the loss and the rage, and now she carries the complete record of everything I destroyed, sharp enough to draw blood after ten years.
The mess hall is empty except for Dylan Rourke, who sits at the far table with a mug that stopped steaming a while ago and the stare of a man whose ghosts keep the same hours he does. I pour coffee from the pot that someone left warming and take the chair across from him without asking, because Dylan and I share the understanding of men who have lost the people they loved most and believe they could have prevented it.
"Can't sleep?" Dylan's voice is low, roughened by fatigue and the kind of grief that never fully heals. His wife Lisa and his daughter Maya died in a Committee bombing that targeted witnesses to an operation, and the official language called it collateral damage, wrong place at the wrong time. The phrase is supposed to make it random, impersonal. Dylan knows better.
"Istanbul."
Dylan watches me over the rim of his mug. "Victoria?"
"On the flight. She sat beside me close enough to touch and brought up a night we had in Istanbul, years ago. Remembered every detail I'd convinced myself she'd forgotten." I drink the coffee and let the bitterness settle. "Then she told me that's why she can't forgive me."
Dylan turns the cold mug between his hands. "You want me to tell you it gets better?"
"I want you to tell me the truth."
"The truth is you can't undo it. You can only decide what happens next." He meets my eyes, and the steadiness in his gaze is earned from places I wouldn't wish on anyone. "Reagan knows everything about me. The drinking, the anger, what I was like after I lost Lisa and Maya. She walked into it with her eyes open and chose to stay. That's the difference, Roman. She had the truth. You took that from Victoria. You decided what she could handle, and you were wrong."
The words land with the accuracy of a man who knows exactly where the target is. I don't flinch, because flinching would be an insult to the honesty Dylan is offering, and honesty between men who've buried the people they love is the only currency that means anything in this conversation.
"She's not going to make it easy," I say.
"Good." Dylan's mouth shifts, not quite a smile. "If she made it easy, she wouldn't be worth the fight."
He pushes back from the table, takes his mug to the sink, rinses it with the discipline of a man who maintains order in small things because the large ones resist it.
He pauses at the doorway. "For what it's worth, Stryker said she sat beside you. On an aircraft full of empty seats, she chose the one next to yours. That's not nothing, Roman."
Then he's gone, and I sit with the coffee and the quiet and the knowledge that Dylan Rourke just told me more about hope than anyone has since Budapest.
Sleep doesn't come after that. I spend the remaining hours before dawn reviewing the intelligence that Baumann transmitted through Tommy's encrypted device, and by the time the morning briefing schedule activates across Echo Base's internal network, I've read the Prague data enough times to have it committed to memory.
Kane authorized the Prague planning session within hours of our return, and Tommy had Baumann's data decoded andmapped before breakfast. The full team briefing is scheduled for this afternoon, but Kane wants Vix and me to build the initial approach framework first, her intelligence paired with my operational knowledge of Committee field protocols. The briefing room is ours until noon.
Vix is already at the table when I arrive. She sits with her laptop open and a cup of coffee positioned at her right hand, and she doesn't look up when I enter. The not-looking is deliberate, a calibrated distance I recognize, and it tells me everything about how the rest of this planning session is going to go.
Her sleeves are pushed up to her elbows, and the line of her forearms against the table is a piece of information I don't need and can't stop collecting.
"Fane," she says, by way of greeting. The display shows a photograph and a dossier for a man I've never met but have tracked through Committee intelligence for years. Aldric Fane was former German intelligence, recruited by Webb after his career imploded under circumstances that made him unhirable by anyone with oversight committees and parliamentary review. "Webb's deputy. He handles the coordination between Webb's strategic planning and Volkov's field operations. If Webb is the brain, Fane is the nervous system."
