The summons hung in the damp air, a death sentence and a royal invitation rolled into one. An hour. They had one hour before they had to walk into a room with a man they knew—or at least, a man Jake knew and Kamo was now willing to suspect—was a high-level traitor.
Kamo was already in motion, his mind fully engaged in the coming confrontation. "We'll need to circle the print shop first. Check for watchers. Pyotr, you find Arsen, tell him—"
"Wait," Jake interrupted.
Kamo stopped, turning to him with an impatient glare. "Wait? Soso, the clock is running."
"I have to go back first," Jake said, his voice quiet but unyielding.
"Back where?" Kamo scoffed. "There is no 'back.' That apartment is compromised. We agreed."
"To Kato's," Jake clarified. "I have to see her."
Kamo stared at him as if he'd just suggested they surrender to the Tsar. "Are you mad? There is no time for wives! Our lives could depend on the next hour, and you want to go and hold your wife's hand?" The contempt in his voice was thick. For Kamo, the personal was a weakness, a dangerous distraction from the great, impersonal Cause.
But for Jake, it was the entire point. The memory of Kato's face, her desperate plea, was a wound that hadn't stopped bleeding. He couldn't walk into that meeting, couldn't continue this descent, without seeing her one last time. Without facing the damage he had already done.
"I am not asking for your permission, Kamo," Jake said, his voice hardening with an authority that surprised even himself. "I am the senior man in this cell. I am going. You will wait for me. We will go to the meeting together."
The unspoken threat was clear: You need me for this. You need my plan. So you will wait.
Kamo's jaw tightened, but he gave a sharp, angry nod. "Five minutes, Soso. Then we leave, with or without you."
Before he left the cellar, Jake's gaze was drawn to the corner where Giorgi was being tended to. The boy was no longer screaming, no longer crying. He was just sitting on a crate, huddled under a thin, filthy blanket while the female revolutionary bandaged his arm. His eyes, dark and wide, were fixed on some point on the far wall. They were vacant. Empty. The revolutionary fire Jake had seen just hours before had been utterly extinguished, replaced by the thousand-yard stare of a trauma victim.
As Jake approached, the boy flinched, pulling his knees up to his chest like a cornered animal. He didn't look at Jake. He just stared at the wall, lost in the horror of the alley. This was the cost of his "victory." This shattered child. The sight was a silent, searing indictment that burned hotter than any lantern flame. Jake wanted to say something—I'm sorry. It was necessary.—but the words were obscene, meaningless. He turned away, the boy's silent scream following him out of the cellar.
The walk through the pre-dawn streets was a journey through a ghost world. The city was still asleep, shrouded in a cold, grey mist that clung to the cobblestones. The adrenaline of the ambush had long since faded, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness and the haunting, flickering images of the violence. The sound of the gunshots. The sight of the fallen men. The weight of the dead man's notebook against his ribs.
He reached the apartment building and climbed the stairs, each step heavier than the last. He paused outside the door, took a deep, shuddering breath, and went inside.
She was exactly where he had left her, sitting upright in the simple wooden chair, a rosary of dark wooden beads clutched in her white-knuckled hands. She hadn't slept. A single candle burned on the table, casting long, dancing shadows that made the small room feel like a tomb.
She looked up as he entered, her head turning slowly. She didn't rush to him. She didn't cry out his name. She simply watched him, her dark eyes searching his face, peeling back the layers of grime and exhaustion, looking for the man she knew. For her Soso.
"Is it done?" she asked. Her voice was quiet, brittle, devoid of all emotion.
Jake could only nod. The single word felt like a boulder in his throat.
"The boy… Giorgi?" she trailed off, her voice cracking slightly, unable to bring herself to finish the question.
"He's alive," Jake said. The words were a technical truth that hid a more profound lie. He had kept the boy's body alive while murdering his spirit. He couldn't bring himself to describe the vacant look in Giorgi's eyes. He was already building the wall between them, brick by bloody brick, under the guise of protecting her from the ugliness of his world.
Kato stood, her movements slow and deliberate. She crossed the room, but not to embrace him. She stopped just before him, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her, a warmth he knew he no longer deserved. She looked up, her gaze not on his face, but directly into his eyes, as if they were windows into a ruined house.
"Your eyes," she whispered, and the quiet words held more condemnation than any shout. "They are different."
She reached up a hesitant hand, as if to touch his face, but stopped just short. "The man who left this room… he was afraid. I saw it. But you…" She shook her head slowly, a deep, sorrowful disappointment filling her expression. "You are just empty. There is nothing there."
Her prophecy had come true. The man who came back was not the one who left. She saw it. She saw the void where a piece of his soul used to be. She stepped back, putting a new, unbridgeable distance between them. It wasn't hatred or anger he saw in her face. It was a quiet, heartbreaking fear. She was afraid of him.
He stood there, frozen, shattered by her quiet judgment. The full, crushing weight of his moral compromise crashed down on him. There was no comfort here. There was no absolution. There was only the reflection of his own damnation in the eyes of the one person he was trying to save.
The door opened without a knock, startling them both.
It was Kamo. His face was a grim, impatient mask. The world of politics and violence was intruding once again, with no regard for the human wreckage it left behind.
"It's time," he said, his voice flat. "The meeting is now."
He looked from Jake's hollow expression to Kato's fearful one and grunted, dismissing it all as irrelevant weakness. Jake was ripped away from the personal devastation he had caused, with no time to process or repent, and thrown directly back into the fire.
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