"Don't."
The word comes out sharp enough to cut glass, and I mean it to. Whatever Roman is about to say about how complicated this is, about Budapest, about the silence while I built my entire career on the wreckage of his death, he can file it under things I cannot afford to process while Webb's kill teams are converging on my location.
His jaw sets. He's not chastened; he's recalibrating. Roman never did back down when told to. He'd go quiet, let the silence gather weight, and then come at the same objective from a different angle. He had the patience of a man who understood that control isn't about force. It's about timing.
I watched them execute him. It was surveillance footage I'd pulled from a Hungarian intelligence contact weeks after Budapest, and I watched it over and over because my mind refused to accept what my eyes were showing me. Then Iwatched once more, because grief is a kind of compulsion. Then I buried Roman Frost in a ceremony with no body and no closure, and I rebuilt myself on the foundation of what the Committee took from me.
He's alive. The foundation cracks. I feel the structure shudder, a decade of carefully constructed purpose threatening to collapse, and then I slam a mental bulkhead across the breach because I am Victoria Cross and I do not fall apart during a crisis.
"You want to explain Budapest, save it." I cross to my primary workstation: multiple monitors, a pair of encrypted laptops, and a communications array that would make most intelligence agencies envious. "Right now I need to sanitize every piece of hardware in this flat, wipe the drives, burn the dead drops, and get out of London before Webb's people arrive with considerably less courtesy than you showed. After that, once I am somewhere safe and not actively being hunted, I'll decide whether to kill you myself."
"You won't." His voice is quiet and certain, amusement ghosting across his mouth, and I hate that I noticed his mouth at all.
"Don't test that theory."
"Wouldn't dream of it." But he doesn't look away. His gaze tracks me as I move to the workstation with a focus that has nothing to do with professional distance and everything to do with the way Roman has always watched me, like I'm a puzzle he hasn't finished solving.
My fingers move through the shutdown protocols with mechanical precision, born from rehearsing this exact scenario dozens of times. Each channel receives a kill command. Each relay node gets a termination signal. Data cascades through the wipe sequences in orderly waves, years of intelligence infrastructure dissolving as the progress bars fill.
While the drives erase themselves, I pull open the phone and scan the damage reports. The situation has worsened since Roman knocked. Baumann in Berlin is forty minutes overdue for his last routine check-in. Sato in Vienna has missed his window entirely. Ines in Marseille hasn't responded to the emergency ping I sent before a dead man walked through my door.
Webb isn't retaliating. He's conducting an extermination.
"He deployed a dedicated team," Roman says from his position by the window where he’s watching the street, but his voice has shifted, lower and harder, the professionalism gone. This is the man who spent years doing things I'll probably never know about. "Committee resources, not contractors. That came from Echo Base's intercepts. Priority operation. He's targeting everyone connected to your infrastructure, working from the periphery inward." He pauses. "You're the center, Vix. If the pattern holds, he's working his way to you."
"How generous of him."
"Vix." The nickname lands differently this time, not a greeting but a claim. He says it like he's been saying it to himself for years in rooms I've never seen. "I'm serious. This isn't?—"
"I know what it is." The wipe cycles finish, leaving the primary drives dead and clean. "I've been reading Webb's strategic communication for longer than you've been resurrected. He dismantles threats connection by connection. Morrison was a blunt instrument. Webb is a scalpel."
Roman goes quiet. Perhaps he's reassessing what I've become while he spent years playing dead. The woman he knew in the MI6 corridors was good at her job but still young enough to trust institutions and believe in the fundamental decency of the systems she served. That woman doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for a long time.
I move to the secondary drives and initiate the final wipe cycle. While the last of my London operation erases itself, Igo to the bedroom. My go-bag sits in the false bottom of the wardrobe, always packed and refreshed on a strict rotation. It holds passports under different names, currency for half a dozen countries, a satellite phone and burner mobile, medical supplies, a change of clothes that won't draw attention in any European capital, and a compact weapon with spare magazines.
Roman follows me to the bedroom doorway and stops. He leans against the frame, arms crossed, filling the space without entering it. It's not politeness but choice, a studied distance that feels more charged than closeness would. His gaze moves over the room, over the narrow bed, over me, and settles with a weight I refuse to acknowledge.
I pull the bag and check the contents by touch, each item solid and accounted for beneath my fingers.
One thing remains.
On the nightstand sits a photograph in a simple silver frame. Two people at a café table in Prague, laughing at something the photographer said. Me, years ago, before the silver started threading through my hair and the permanent vigilance settled into every muscle of my face. And James, my brother, leaning back in his chair with the easy grin that could charm intelligence out of stone. The grin he wore right up until Webb's people killed him in Bratislava during a failed extraction that never should have happened. It took me months to piece together what happened from surviving contacts and intercepted Committee traffic, and every detail I uncovered carved the loss deeper.
Leave it. Sentiment is weight, and weight slows you down.
I pick it up, slide the photograph free from the frame, and tuck it inside the go-bag between the passports.
When I turn around, Roman is watching. His expression changes, the control slipping a fraction, replaced by guilt, or grief, that he doesn't hide fast enough. He knows about James. Of course he knows. Working with Echo Ridge means he knowsthat my brother died in Bratislava, that Webb ordered it, that James's death is why I started feeding intelligence exclusively to people who could hurt the Committee.
Roman was alive when James died. While my brother was dying in that safe house, Roman was breathing, walking, working, and choosing every single day to let me believe I was alone.
The rage hits so clean and bright it almost feels like clarity.
"Ready?" he asks. The word comes out softer than anything else he's said tonight, and I want to hit him for it, for the softness, for the implication that he still knows when to stop pushing, still reads me with that unsettling accuracy, still remembers where the edges are. A dead man shouldn't know me this well.
"Not remotely." I sling the go-bag over my shoulder and take a final look at the flat. The monitors are dark, the drives dead, the communications array silent. I've reduced everything here to nothing. Everything I leave behind will be worthless when Webb's people find it. That much, at least, I control.
We leave through the service entrance at the rear of the building. Roman takes point, moving down the stairwell with his weapon drawn, his body positioned between me and every corner, every threat. He's protective in a way that slides too easily toward possessive. The distinction has always been thin with Roman, and I'm not interested in examining which side this falls on.
