I'm on my feet before I've consciously decided to move, crossing the distance between the sofa and the kitchen before either of us has time to reconsider, and my fist connects with his jaw. The impact jolts through my arm, sharp and immediate, and I feel my knuckles split against the bone of his face. Heat flares across my hand. I don't care.
Roman takes it. He doesn't step back, doesn't raise his hands, doesn't turn his head with the blow the way anyone with combat training would instinctively do. He plants his feet and lets my fist find his face with the full commitment of a man who believes he deserves it.
His body barely moves. The sheer immovable solidity of him, bone and muscle and will, reverberates through my hand and up into my chest.
Good. He deserves it.
"Ten years." My voice is quiet in the aftermath, steady despite the blood welling across my knuckles. "You watched me grieve you. You watched me build this network on the foundation of what they did to you in Budapest, every contact and every channel and every relationship constructed on the wreckage of losing you. And James died in Bratislava, and you were alive the entire time, and you still said nothing."
Roman's jaw is already darkening where I hit him, a bruise that will deepen over the coming hours, visible proof of a decade of lies wearing its consequences on the surface. He meets my eyes without flinching, and I can see the calculations running behind that gaze, the cost-benefit analysis of every possible response measured against the reality that none of them will be sufficient.
Underneath the calculations, though, there is something else. The way he's looking at me isn't the look of a man being punished. It's the look of a man who would let me hit him again just to keep me close enough to touch.
I resent my nervous system for noticing.
"Yes," he says.
Not an excuse. Not a justification. Not the tactical reasoning about Committee retribution and my safety that he laid out last night while I stood in front of him and tried to decide whether understanding his logic made it better or worse. Just the word, the admission, bare and unshielded, that my brother died and Roman chose silence. His voice is rough with it, scraped raw in a way that no amount of composure can smooth over.
My hand throbs. Blood is seeping from the split knuckles, smearing across my fingers in thin lines that will need cleaningand bandaging before we travel. Roman's eyes drop to the blood, and his whole body shifts, a fractional movement toward me that carries the pull of instinct rather than decision.
His hand starts to reach for mine. I see the moment he catches himself, his fingers curling closed, pulling back with a restraint that turns his knuckles white. Smart. If he touches me right now, I will break his wrist. Or I won't, and that possibility is worse.
"We leave within the hour," I say, and I walk to the bathroom to clean my hand.
The mirror shows me a woman I barely recognize. Silver-threaded hair pulled back from a face that has aged in the last day more than it has in the previous year. Eyes carrying the flat detachment of someone who has spent a sleepless night converting human beings into data points because the alternative is drowning. Knuckles split and bleeding over a sink in a Shoreditch safe house that belongs to a dead man who isn't dead.
I run cold water over the cuts and let the sting replace the larger pain that sits behind my sternum.
Ines is dead. James has been dead for years. My network is in ruins, and the man responsible for the ruins is Marcus Webb, and the man responsible for the decade of lies that preceded them is standing in the kitchen wearing my fist print on his jaw.
In the mirror, I watch my own expression settle back into the composure that has kept me alive and solvent and operational for longer than most people survive this profession. The grief will come later, in private, where no one can see it, where it can't be used against me.
Roman knocks once on the bathroom door. Not a request — a single, measured impact that saysI know you're in there and I'm not leaving.
"Vix. Eurostar departs St Pancras in ninety minutes. I've arranged tickets through one of Kane's clean travel accounts. Separate bookings. Picked your name from your back up passports."
"Fine."
There is a pause. "Your hand needs bandaging." His voice is lower now, closer to the door.
I can picture him on the other side of it, his shoulder against the frame, his head tipped forward, occupying the threshold because Roman has always treated boundaries between his space and mine as suggestions he's choosing to observe rather than rules he's obligated to follow.
"I'm aware."
Another pause follows, longer this time, loaded with everything he isn't saying. I can feel him through the door the way I felt him through the bedroom wall, a gravitational pull that hasn't weakened despite a decade of distance and a fresh bruise.
Then his footsteps move away, unhurried, and I hear him begin the quiet business of packing the safe house, securing the communications equipment, wiping surfaces. Even the sounds of him moving through a room carry ownership.
I dry my hand and wrap it with gauze from the first aid kit in my go-bag, winding the fabric tight across the split knuckles until the bleeding stops. The wrapping is neat and professional, because even my injuries are tidy. Even my rage is organized.
We leave the Shoreditch flat in silence, two ghosts moving through a London morning that smells like rain and diesel. Roman carries both bags because my wrapped hand makes the straps difficult, and I let him because practicality outweighs pride when you're running from a man who kills intelligence brokers the way other people cancel subscriptions.
He walks half a step ahead of me, shoulders cutting through the morning crowd, and my body recognizes the shelter ofhis frame before my mind can object. Old pattern. Roman positioning himself between me and the street isn't chivalry. It's territorial, the same instinct that puts his hand on the small of my back in crowded rooms and his body between mine and every doorway. I used to find it infuriating, and other things I'm not going to catalogue right now.
The Eurostar terminal at St Pancras is crowded enough to provide cover and public enough to make a Committee extraction unlikely. Roman handles the tickets while I stand near a coffee stand and scan the concourse with the practiced vigilance of a woman who has been hunted before, though never quite like this, never with the entire infrastructure of her professional life burning behind her.
Across the terminal, I watch Roman move through the queue, and even at a distance his bearing is wrong for a civilian. He is too measured, too aware, his gaze sweeping the platform exits without his head turning — a man pretending to be ordinary and failing at it in ways only someone trained to notice would catch.
