Vix gets out of the SUV before Dylan has fully stopped. The tunnel opens into the main chamber, and the man who must be Kane is standing at the tactical table with his hands flat on the surface, watching us approach. He's exactly the man his voice promised over years of comms: solid, commanding, authority worn the way other men wear scars. Deep, settled, permanent.
She crosses the distance to Kane with a stride that announces negotiation, not gratitude, and when Kane extends his hand, she takes it with a grip that I know from experience is firmer than most men expect.
"Cross. Welcome to Echo Ridge."
"I'm not here for sanctuary, Kane." She places each word with the precision of a woman drawing a line in the dirt. "I'm here to dismantle Webb's European operations piece by piece. If Echo Ridge wants to help, I'm listening. If not, I'll do it alone."
Kane almost smiles. Almost. The expression gets as far as the corners of his mouth before his operational discipline catches it. "I think you'll find we speak the same language." His gaze shiftsto me, and I catch what might be approval, or the closest thing Kane allows himself. "Frost. Good to finally have you inside."
"Good to finally be here."
"Dylan, show them to quarters. We brief in two hours." Kane turns back to the tactical table, reaching for a communications headset, his attention already on the next priority.
Dylan leads us into a corridor that branches toward what he identifies as the residential wing. For years I've fed intelligence into this facility, and now I'm being walked through it like a visiting dignitary. The irony sits like a stone behind my teeth. We pass a room banked with surveillance feeds and workstations that can only be the operations center, then a reinforced door with a biometric lock that Dylan passes without comment. I don't need him to label that one. Farther down, a light glows behind frosted glass, and the faint antiseptic smell identifies the medical bay before Dylan confirms it with a nod. Echo Base unfolds around us, hewn from the mountain itself, and every room we pass is a piece of the life I chose when I chose to stay dead, the mission I served while Vix built her network on the wreckage of my grave.
She walks beside me, her sleeve brushing mine with each step, and she doesn't pull away. She's cataloging everything: the reinforced corridors, the security stations, the evidence of a team that has lived and fought and bled inside this mountain. I watch her fingers trail the rock wall as we walk, reading the facility the way she reads everything. By touch, by instinct, by the information the surface gives up under pressure.
Dylan stops at a door halfway down the residential corridor. "Cross, you're here." He glances at me. "Frost, end of the hall." He waits long enough to confirm we've registered the information, then heads back the way we came, his footsteps fading into the rock.
Vix looks at the door, then at me. Her gaze flicks once toward the end of the corridor where Dylan pointed, then comes back. The corridor is narrow, and we're standing close enough that the hours of recycled cabin air and transatlantic distance fall away and all that's left is the warmth underneath, the scent that is just her, unchanged in all the years between. The scent that found me in borrowed beds across Europe and dragged me out of sleep with my hands reaching for a woman who wasn't there, reminding me exactly what I'd sacrificed and exactly why I deserved the empty sheets.
She holds my gaze for a beat longer than professional distance requires. The look is logistical. What it does to the space between us is not.
She opens the door, steps inside, and turns back to face me from the threshold. The light from the corridor cuts across her face, illuminating the exhaustion, the fury, the razor-sharp intelligence that has kept her alive long enough to stand in a mountain in Montana and declare war on the most dangerous criminal organization in Europe.
"Two hours," she says.
"I'll be here."
She closes the door. The lock engages with a quiet click that echoes through the reinforced rock. Behind that door, Victoria Cross is taking the first steps into a life that looks nothing like the one she built and nothing like the one I took from her.
On my side of the door, I press my palm flat against the surface and hold it there. A gesture she'll never see. A promise I don't have the right to make and can't stop making anyway.
I drop my hand. The steel holds the warmth for a moment, then lets it go the way I should have let her go, cleanly and without leaving a mark. I never could. And standing in this corridor with her warmth fading from the metal under my hand and her voice still ringing off the rock, I know I never will.
7
VICTORIA
Echo Base, Montana
The briefing room smells like coffee and recycled air and the particular ozone tang of electronics that never shut down. I walk in with my shoulders level, my chin up, and my hands clasped behind my back because my right knuckles are still swollen from the jaw of a man who is currently leaning against the far wall watching me with those ice-blue eyes like I'm an encrypted signal he hasn't finished decoding.
I don't look at him. I don't need to, because Roman Frost's attention has a physical quality I've never been able to train myself out of registering, and a decade of grief and fury hasn't dulled the sensation. That's information I refuse to process right now.
My collarbone scar pulls with each breath, the old knife wound tight against skin that hasn't adjusted to the dry mountain air. I ignore it the way I ignore most pain: by filing it in the category of things that don't require immediate action and moving on.
Kane stands at the head of a tactical table that dominates the center of the room. Laminated maps, satellite imagery, and a tablet connected to the main display screen on the wall coverthe surface. He looks up when I enter, and his assessment is instant, a single sweep that catalogues threat level, capability, and usefulness in the time it takes me to cross the threshold. I've been assessed by men like Kane before: military commanders, intelligence directors, men who run operations from bunkers and boardrooms and the backs of armored vehicles. They all do the same thing: measure whether you'll be useful or whether you'll be a problem.
I intend to be both.
"Cross. Good. We're waiting on Tommy." Kane gestures to the table. "Take whatever seat you like."
No one is taking a seat, they’re all standing, which tells me this is a team that briefs on their feet and expects results before anyone gets comfortable. I approve.
The room is full, and I take the measure of each person the way I've taken the measure of intelligence assets and adversaries for the past two decades: quickly, thoroughly, and without letting any of them see me do it.
I’ve worked with and know some of these people and met some of them last night in the corridor and the common room and the medical bay, shook their hands while the mountain settled around us and my knuckles throbbed under Willa's bandage. But introductions over coffee tell you one thing. Watching people in a live briefing tells you everything else.
