"The tactical kits are prepped," I say from the doorway. "Stryker's gear is staged. Communications equipment is tested and calibrated. Tommy confirmed the signals disruption protocols are in position."
Kane nods without looking up. He makes a notation on the tablet, sets it down, and turns his full attention to me, undiluted and impatient.
"Sit," he says.
I sit. Kane's invitations carry the force of orders, and the tone of his voice tells me this conversation is not about logistics.
"The compound operation is the most complex strike we've run in Europe," Kane says. "Three simultaneous targets, a hardened facility, and an interior team operating in hostile territory with limited extraction options."
"I'm aware."
"The interior team is you and Cross."
"Also aware."
Kane studies me. His eyes have the quiet calculation of a man who has sent people into situations that killed them and carried the weight of those decisions without letting the weight slow him down. I have served under commanders who operated from ego and commanders who operated from duty. Kane operates from something closer to conscience, which makes him more dangerous than either. A man driven by conscience will sacrifice anything and anyone, including himself, to meet the standard he sets.
"If it comes down to the mission or her," Kane says, and the question isn't a question. "What happens?"
"It won't come to that."
"It always comes to that." Kane's voice is flat and carries the certainty of experience. "Not every time. But often enough that every operative needs an answer ready before they step into the field."
The scenarios surface without invitation, arriving as flashes: a compound corridor where a door opens wrong and the security team is on the other side, a stairwell where the flanking position closes and only one of us has cover, the moment where the mission objective sits behind one door and Vix's extraction route sits behind another, and the clock is running, and there is no third door.
The answer has always been mission first. The math is simple when the variable you're sacrificing is your own life. It becomes something else entirely when the variable is the person who makes the rest of the missions worth running.
I hold his gaze. Kane has earned the right to ask this question. He has earned it by leading this team through ops that should have killed them, by bringing his people home when the odds said otherwise, by building a place inside this mountain where damaged operatives can do work that matters. He is not asking because he doubts me. He is asking because he has watched me look at Vix across too many briefing rooms and recognized what he sees, and a commander who ignores that variable is a commander who gets people killed.
"Then I'll find a third option," I say.
Kane holds my gaze for a beat longer. Whatever he finds in it resolves something behind his eyes, an assessment completed, a calculation filed. He picks up the tablet.
"Make sure you do," he says.
The conversation is over. I stand and turn toward the door.
Vix is in the corridor.
She is leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her head tilted at an angle that tells me she has been there long enough to hear my conversation with Kane. Her eyes move from my face to the doorway behind me and back, and the assessment she runs is fast, thorough, and entirely characteristic. She knows what Kane asked. The general shape of it is written in the tension of his office, in the way I am holding my shoulders, in the fact that Kane and I were having a conversation that stopped the moment I saw her.
She doesn't ask what I said. The decision plays out across her face in real time, the brief hesitation where curiosity and pride and something more vulnerable all compete for control, and pride wins, as it always does with Vix. She straightens fromthe wall and falls into step beside me as I walk back toward the operations center.
"Stryker wants to run the breach sequence one more time before we finalize the tactical plan," she says, as though she was not just standing outside Kane's door listening to a conversation about whether I would choose her over the mission.
"Good," I say. "I'll brief him on the interior approach after."
We walk the corridor together. Her shoulder brushes mine once, and the contact is not accidental. It is deliberate and fleeting, her shorthand for things she will not say aloud. I have spent the past weeks learning to decode this physical language, one more cipher in a career built on reading what people refuse to say. This particular touch translates roughly toI heard enoughandI trust youanddon't make me regret it, all compressed into the brief warmth of her arm against mine before the distance reasserts itself.
I want to pin her against the wall of this corridor and kiss her until the professional composure cracks. I want to feel her pulse jump under my mouth the way it did this morning when I caught her watching me across the training area. I want to back her into the nearest room and lock the door and spend the hours before deployment proving to both of us that whatever Kane is worried about is irrelevant, because there is no version of this op where I let Volkov's security detail take her from me.
I do none of it. I walk beside her to the operations center, and we spend the remainder of the day finalizing the assault plan, and my hands stay exactly where they belong while my mind runs every scenario Kane just forced me to confront.
Three days pass. I mark them by the changes in how Vix moves through Echo Base. Her stride has lost the careful vigilance of a guest and settled into something more certain. She knows where the mess hall is, what time Tommy makes coffee, which corridor leads to the range and which leadsto the common area where Khalid reads his intelligence textbooks. She takes her meals with the team instead of in her quarters. She argues with Tommy about encryption protocols with a competitiveness that Tommy meets head-on, relishing the challenge of a sparring partner worthy of the effort. She sits beside Dylan during briefing updates and asks questions about Committee operational doctrine carefully, aware that his knowledge was purchased at a price she can only estimate.
On the second night, I find her in the briefing room at an hour when the rest of the mountain is asleep. The tactical display glows with the compound's interior layout, and she has marked entry points and fallback positions across every corridor. She does not look up when I enter, but her pen stops moving, which is how I know she has registered my presence and chosen to let me approach.
"Your fallback routing through the east corridor assumes the security doors operate on a centralized system," I say, studying her annotations. "If Volkov's people have gone to independent locks, that corridor becomes a dead end."
