Somewhere past Liège, she puts the phone down. Her eyes close, and I watch the transition happen in stages, the rigid control softening first in her hands, then in her shoulders, then in the muscles of her face. Sleep takes her the way water takes a stone, gradually and without permission. Her head tips toward the window, and the silver-streaked hair falls across her cheek.
I could reach across the table and brush it back. The distance between my hand and her face is small enough to cross in a heartbeat and vast enough to hold a decade of choices I can't undo.
I don't reach.
Instead I watch her sleep and catalog the changes. The silver that wasn't there a decade ago, threading through the dark hair I used to wind around my fingers in the dark. A scar along her collarbone that disappears into the neckline of her shirt, thinand precise, the work of a blade rather than shrapnel. Lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that speak of years spent holding her face still while the world tried to break it.
She is harder than the woman I knew. Sharper. More dangerous in ways that go beyond tradecraft and into something structural, as though the decade I left her alone didn't just change her but reforged her entirely. The woman who screamed my name through a comm link in Budapest was brilliant and fierce and still capable of being surprised by betrayal. The woman sleeping across from me has filed betrayal under standard operating procedure and built her entire existence around the assumption that everyone she trusts will eventually disappear.
I did that to her. Not Webb, not the Committee, not MI6. Me. My choice, my silence, my arrogant belief that I knew what was best for her safety. I looked at the woman I loved and decided she couldn't handle the risk, and in doing so I became the risk she never saw coming.
The train rocks gently through the Ardennes. Outside the window, the forests are dark and deep, and Vix sleeps on with her bandaged hand curled against her chest, protecting knuckles she split on my jaw. The bruise she gave me will fade in days. The damage I did to her will take considerably longer.
I don't sleep. I keep watch.
That, at least, is something I know how to do.
5
VICTORIA
Prague is a city built on ghosts. I've always known this about it, the medieval architecture and the cobblestones and the Vltava running dark beneath bridges that have seen centuries of occupation and resistance. I ran operations here for years, used this city's particular talent for secrecy to move information across borders that larger, louder capitals couldn't manage. I recruited assets in its cafés, ran countersurveillance through its parks, built dead drops into the cracks of buildings that survived two world wars and a half-century of Soviet control.
Now the ghosts are mine.
Roman walks beside me through Vinohrady, matching my pace without crowding. He's changed into clothes he pulled from a locker at the train station, a dark jacket and dark trousers that make him look like every other European professional heading to work on a Tuesday morning. The bruise on his jaw has settled into a deep purple that his collar doesn't quite hide, and the stubble he's let grow around it gives him a rougher edge than the Roman I knew in the MI6 corridors. He scans the street, mirroring my sweep, checking windows, doorways, parked cars. We're both looking for the same things. We're both findingnothing, which in a Committee-heavy city is more alarming than finding something.
His hand finds the small of my back as we cross the tram tracks, steering me around a delivery van without breaking stride. The touch is brief, gone before I can object. My skin registers it anyway, warmth bleeding through the fabric of my jacket into muscle memory that has no business being this intact after a decade.
Tommy's satellite imagery cleared the approach route an hour ago. The surveillance post I flagged from the Brussels safe house is still there, a nondescript panel van parked on a residential street, but Tommy confirmed it's been stationary for weeks with no signs of active monitoring. Dormant, not abandoned. We routed around it.
Marek's building is a renovated Art Nouveau apartment block on a tree-lined street that smells like coffee and diesel and the particular damp of Central European autumn. I've been here before, climbed these stairs, sat in Marek's kitchen while he fed me Committee shipping routes through Eastern Europe and complained about the price of good beer. He's an information broker, not an idealist. He works for money, not principle, which is why he's survived this long in a profession that kills the principled first.
I press the buzzer for the third-floor flat and wait. Nothing happens for long enough that my chest tightens. Then the intercom crackles.
"Ano?" The voice is cautious, stripped of the jovial confidence I associate with Marek.
"It's Cross."
A long pause follows. I can hear him breathing. Roman stands at the base of the steps with his eyes on the street, his body angled so that anyone approaching the entrance would have to go through him first, protective and territorial in thesame stance. The man I want to hate and the operative I need are maddeningly the same person.
The door buzzes open. Roman catches my eye and gives a single nod. He'll hold the entrance. I take the stairs alone.
Marek's flat shows the evidence of a man preparing to run: cabinets open, clothes piled on the sofa, the contents of a desk drawer spread across the kitchen table in the chaotic taxonomy of someone trying to decide what's worth carrying and what gets left behind. Marek himself stands in the middle of it all, a stocky Czech with a week's worth of stubble and the hollow look of someone who hasn't slept since the killing started.
"Victoria." He says my name like a prayer and a curse at the same time. "I thought you were dead."
"Not yet." I close the door behind me and scan the flat from habit, checking sight lines and exits the way I check my own pulse. "You need to disappear, Marek. Today. Right now."
"I know." He runs a hand through his hair, and it comes away damp. He's sweating despite the cool air. "I heard about Ines. And Henrik. And the courier in Berlin." His eyes search mine. "How many, Victoria?"
I don't answer, because the number is still growing and speaking it aloud would make the ledger permanent. Instead I reach into my jacket and pull out the emergency cash that Roman provided from an Echo Ridge operational fund. I didn't ask where the money came from. I didn't want to owe him the debt of asking.
"This will get you out of the country and set up somewhere new. Pick a city you've never mentioned to me, never visited professionally, never used as a transit point. Don't tell me where you go." I set the envelope on the table between a passport and a half-eaten sandwich. "Don't contact me. Don't contact anyone connected to the old network. It's gone, Marek. All of it."
He picks up the envelope and feels the thickness without counting. "Are you running?"
"I'm relocating."
