"And Prague is where the signals travel." I study the dossier from across the table, keeping the distance she's established. "Baumann said Volkov is meeting Fane directly. That's unusual. Fane doesn't do face-to-face unless the stakes justify the exposure."
"Which means whatever they're discussing is significant enough that encrypted communications won't satisfy his paranoia." Vix advances the display to a map of Prague. "I know this city. I ran contacts here for years. The Committee favors districts with multiple exit routes and limited surveillance coverage."
"You ran contacts here when you were an independent broker." I keep my voice neutral. "The Committee knows your history in Prague. They'll have countermeasures for every approach you'd naturally choose."
"Which is why I won't choose them." Her eyes come up from the laptop, and the coolness in them carries an edge that has nothing to do with Prague. "I know my own patterns, Roman. I've been doing this long enough to know when to break them."
"The question isn't whether you know your patterns. The question is whether you're planning this interception as a strategic operation or as the next step in a personal vendetta against the organization that killed your people."
The words leave my mouth with the flat precision of an observation delivered without softening, and I watch the impact register across her face. Vix doesn't flinch. She goes still, which is worse, the controlled stillness of a woman whose composure has just been tested by someone who knows exactly where the fault lines run.
"At least I'm present enough to have feelings about it." Her voice is quiet and cuts through the briefing room like a blade drawn across glass. "You spent a decade watching from the margins, Roman. You don't get to lecture me about strategic objectivity when your entire history since Budapest is built on the decision to stand aside and let other people bleed."
The professional veneer cracks between one sentence and the next, and what's underneath is years of silence and grief and the raw fury of two people who know each other well enough to aim where it hurts.
"Beirut." The word comes out before I've decided to speak it. "Two years after Budapest. I was scraping Committee traffic off open frequencies and your name came across a feed. Your real name, attached to a targeting assessment for a raid on a safe house in Hamra."
Vix goes still in a way I haven't seen before, not the controlled stillness she deploys as a tactic but something deeper and involuntary.
"I got to Beirut and found a vantage point across the street. A Committee team, full entry. You were on the second floor when they breached the ground level." My voice holds steady because it has to, because if I let the memory have its full weight I will not finish this sentence. "I had a rifle on the rooftop across from your window. I watched you through the scope, Vix. Crosshairs on the first man through your door, and if you hadn't gone out that window when you did, I would have pulled the trigger. Blown my cover, confirmed to the Committee that someone was watching, led them straight back to you eventually. I would have done it anyway."
"You were there." Her voice is barely above a whisper.
"I was there when I could be. Every time the Committee got within arm's reach and I could track it, I was somewhere close with a line of sight and a decision I was prepared to make." I hold her gaze across the display. "That's what I left behind, Vix. The ability to protect you openly. I gave that up when I chose to disappear, and every day since has been the price of doing it from the shadows instead."
The briefing room is silent. The display glows between us with Prague street maps and Committee dossiers and the framework of an operation neither of us is thinking about.
Vix stands. She closes the distance before I've processed the movement, and her hands grip the front of my shirt with a force that has nothing to do with affection. Her mouth finds mine because walking out of this room with ten years still rotting between us would be worse than whatever this becomes.
I don't hesitate. My hands find her waist, her hips, the curve of her lower back, and I pull her against me hard enough that the display behind me rattles against the wall. She bites my lower lipand the copper taste of blood registers a full second before the sting does, and the combination sends heat straight through my chest and lower, pooling heavy at the base of my spine.
My hand slides to the back of her neck and holds her there with a grip that makes no pretense of gentleness. Vix would see through the lie if I tried.
She pushes me against the wall and I let her, let her have the control for exactly as long as it takes me to register what happens when my thigh presses between hers. The sound catches in the back of her throat, and her hips grind forward against my leg with a pressure that is deliberate and unapologetic.
The warmth of her registers through the fabric, and ten years of disciplined absence collapses into the single, undeniable fact that my body knows hers and has never stopped wanting it.
I reverse us. Her back hits the wall, her wrists pinned above her head in one hand, and the look she gives me is furious and wanting and completely unconcerned with pretending otherwise.
I hold her there, wrists locked, my grip tight enough that she'll feel the pressure for hours, and she tests it once, a sharp twist that is assessment, not escape. Satisfied that I'll hold, she stops fighting and starts watching me with the focused intensity of a woman deciding exactly how much of herself she's willing to give.
"This doesn't fix anything," she says, breathless, and her body presses against me in direct contradiction.
"Didn't say it would."
I release her wrists and she doesn't move them, keeps her arms raised while I drag my mouth down the line of her throat. I find the pulse point beneath her jaw and press my tongue flat against it, tasting salt and the faint trace of whatever she uses on her skin, clean and sharp, the scent I used to find on hotel pillows in cities I can't think about without wanting her. Herbreath hitches. I close my teeth over the tendon at the side of her neck and the vibration of her groan resonates against my lips.
My hands drop to her waist. I pull her shirt from her trousers and slide my palms up bare skin, feeling the contraction of muscle beneath my fingers, the ridge of a scar along her ribs that wasn't there before. She sucks in a breath when my thumb traces it, and I file that reaction alongside every other piece of intelligence I'm collecting about what the years have changed and what they haven't.
Her fingers drop to my belt and work the buckle with the same precision she brings to fieldwork, and I feel the leather pull free. She unbuttons me, pushes the fabric down my hips, and when her hand wraps around the length of me I lose the thread of whatever advantage I thought I had.
Her grip is firm, sure, and she strokes once from base to tip with a slow, deliberate pressure that buckles something behind my ribs. I press my forehead against the wall beside her head and breathe through the sensation, because the alternative is finishing this before it's started, and I refuse to give her that victory.
"Look at me," she says.
I do. Her eyes are dark, the color almost swallowed by pupil, and she knows exactly what she's doing to me. She's deciding whether mercy is something I've earned.
It isn't. She strokes again, tighter this time, and I catch her wrist.
