We board separately. Roman takes the seat across from me. I take the aisle, because old habits, because I want a clear line to the exit, because sitting beside him would require our shoulders to touch and I am not prepared for that kind of torment.
The train pulls out of St Pancras, and London begins to recede through the window.
Roman settles into his seat, legs stretched into the space between us, one arm resting on the armrest with the proprietary ease of a man who has never occupied less than his full share of any room. The bruise on his jaw is darkening to a deep purple against the stubble he hasn't bothered to shave.
He should look diminished by it, weakened, marked. Instead it just makes the bones of his face sharper, and my eyes have nobusiness tracing the line of his jaw when they should be tracing escape routes.
Green and gray and wet, England slides past. The silence between us has texture, filled with the low rhythm of the train and the charged awareness that comes from sitting across from someone whose body you once knew by heart.
Roman's knee is close enough to mine that I can feel the warmth without contact. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's always been skilled at occupying the exact distance that makes proximity feel like a dare.
I watch the countryside pass and think about Ines's daughter sitting in a school in Marseille, drawing pictures of ships while the world she trusted collapses around her in ways she won't understand for years.
I think about James in Bratislava, the brother I couldn't save, the last piece of family I had left before the Committee reduced the concept to an abstraction.
I think about the man sitting across from me, his jaw purpling where I hit him, his ice-blue eyes on me instead of the window, patient and unapologetic, as though he's waited a decade and intends to wait as long as it takes.
I catch him at it when I turn my head, and he doesn't look away. He doesn't pretend he was watching the countryside. He just holds my gaze with that unrelenting intensity that used to pin me against walls and drag confessions out of me in the dark.
I look away first. I tell myself it's strategy.
My knuckles throb beneath the gauze. The pain is useful. It keeps the ledger organized, keeps the data flowing through channels that don't require me to feel anything beyond the precision of my own fury.
Grief is a luxury I can't afford, not now, not until the last of my contacts has been confirmed dead or successfully warned,until the ledger is closed and the debts are tallied and the only account left unpaid is the one that belongs to Marcus Webb.
That account I intend to settle personally. Vendetta is just strategy with a personal touch.
The train enters the Channel Tunnel, and the world outside the window goes dark. Roman's reflection appears in the glass, watching mine. I keep my eyes on the ledger in my head, adding names, assigning debts, refusing to look at the ghost sitting across from me.
Refusing has never been this hard.
4
ROMAN
The safe house in the Marolles district sits above a shuttered antiques shop on a street narrow enough that the buildings lean toward each other like conspirators. I've used it twice before for Echo Ridge operations, both times alone, both times for less than a day. The flat is small and sparse, a galley kitchen, a sitting room with a sofa that folds into a bed, one bedroom and a bathroom with a shower that runs cold after ninety seconds. Two exits: the front door and a window in the bathroom that drops onto the roof of the shop next door.
Vix hasn't spoken since the Eurostar pulled into Brussels-Midi. She walked beside me through the station and into the cab and up the narrow staircase to the flat without a word, moving through the foreign city with the automatic efficiency of a woman who has arrived at safe houses on four continents and stopped noticing the decor a long time ago. When I unlocked the door, she walked past me to the bedroom, set her go-bag on the floor, and closed the door behind her.
That was forty minutes ago. Since then, I've heard her voice through the wall, clipped and British, working through what's left of her contact list. Warning people. Burning dead drops.Salting the earth of a network she spent years building so that Webb can't harvest what remains. Each call is short and controlled, the words delivered with the brisk precision of a woman issuing termination orders for her own life's work.
I sit at the kitchen table with the bruise on my jaw throbbing in time with my pulse and listen to her dismantle herself, piece by piece, contact by contact, and there isn't a thing I can do about it.
The satellite phone connects to Echo Base on the third pulse. Kane's voice comes through flat and direct, the way it always does when he's running an operation from the command center with the tactical maps spread in front of him and the team on standby.
"Frost. Status."
"Brussels. Marolles safe house. She's working her remaining network."
"How much of it is left?"
"Less every hour. She's been on the phone since we arrived, issuing burn notices. Anyone still alive is being told to go dark and scatter." I keep my voice low. The wall between the kitchen and the bedroom is thin, and Victoria doesn't need to hear me filing reports on her destruction. "Webb's people are thorough, Kane. This isn't opportunistic. It's systematic."
"Tommy's intercepts confirm that. Committee allocated a full operational team. Webb pulled resources from three regional cells to fund it." Kane pauses, and I hear the calculation in the silence. "He's making an example of her. Anyone else who considers selling Committee intelligence will think twice after watching what happened to Cross's network."
"She knows that."
"Good. Then she also knows that staying in Europe is a death sentence. We need to get her stateside. Echo Base. Full protection until we can mount a response."
