Jake was preparing to begin the final phase of Pyotr's transformation — the memorization of Luka's false confession — when the door creaked open.
Kamo stood there. The man's usual stoic mask was gone, replaced by something uneasy, almost haunted. He looked less like a soldier and more like someone who had seen a ghost.
"Soso," he began quietly. "Forgive the interruption. This… isn't about operations."
Jake turned, irritation flashing across his face. His focus was absolute, his mind sharpened to a single, perfect edge. He didn't have time for distractions — not now, not when he was so close.
"What is it, Kamo? If the house is compromised, you know what to do."
Kamo shook his head. "No. The house is secure. It's… someone at headquarters. A visitor. She's asking for you."
"I don't see visitors," Jake snapped. "Not now. No one."
Kamo hesitated. His next words came slowly, as if he feared them. "She says her name is Kato Svanidze. She says you sent her a message. That you told her it was safe to come back."
The name struck like a gunshot in the quiet room.
Kato.
For a moment, Jake stopped breathing. The entire machinery of his world — the plans, the lies, the re-creation of a man's soul — ground to a halt. The cold architect, the self-forged Stalin, vanished. In his place stood Jake Vance — the history teacher who'd fallen through time and buried himself under masks. His heart thudded violently in his chest.
Kato. The one name that could pierce the armor he'd built. The last fragment of a life that had once been human.
His face — usually unreadable — broke open in shock. Kamo saw it and faltered.
"I— I sent for her," Kamo admitted, eyes downcast. "After London, after the victory. I thought you'd want her here. I thought it would give you peace. I told her the city was safe. That you missed her."
Jake stared at him, stunned. "You did what?" The words came out as a whisper, sharp and low.
"I'll send her away," Kamo said quickly. "She'll be gone within the hour."
"No," Jake said after a long pause. His mind was spinning back into motion, grasping for control. "No, stay here. Keep working with him." He gestured vaguely toward Pyotr, who sat blank-eyed on his cot. "Go through the list again. The names. The movements. Don't let anyone in."
He walked out, stiff and mechanical.
The short walk from the safe house to the main headquarters felt endless. The cool night air did nothing to settle the storm in his head. One half of him — the strategist — screamed at the absurdity of it. A catastrophic variable. A personal connection, reintroduced into a perfect machine. A weakness exposed.
The other half — the remnant of Jake Vance — ached with something raw and human. She was alive. She was here.
The main headquarters was a storm of quiet activity. Men cleaned rifles, whispered about the latest rumors from the Citadel. The air was thick with tension, the illusion of a plan Jake knew would never unfold.
When he entered, conversation died. All eyes turned to him. He ignored them, his focus narrowing on the figure standing by the window.
It was her.
Thinner than he remembered, her face drawn with exhaustion and worry. But she was there — real, alive, impossibly familiar. She turned as he entered, and her face lit up with something that cut him to the bone: hope.
"Soso," she said softly. It wasn't a comrade's greeting. It was the voice of someone who still believed he could be saved.
She stepped toward him. "I got your message," she said, her tone hushed. "I came as soon as I could. I was so worried."
He had to respond — to say something that made sense, to build a bridge between the man she remembered and the one standing before her. But the words came out uneven, rough.
"Kato," he said, his voice low and unsteady. "You shouldn't have come. Kamo was mistaken. It isn't safe. The city's a powder keg."
She heard the pain but not the warning. Her expression softened with sympathy.
"Then let me help," she said. And before he could step back, she reached for his hand.
The touch was a jolt — warmth, human and immediate. He froze. The sensation tore through the cold layers he'd built around himself. Her hand, small and steady, clasped his like it belonged there.
"You don't have to carry this alone," she whispered. "Whatever it is — this terrible burden — let me share it. Like before."
Her eyes were full of the same gentleness that had once kept him tethered to the world.
He stared at her, and for one unbearable instant, everything collapsed. He wasn't Stalin. He wasn't a revolutionary leader or a manipulator of men. He was just Jake — a man caught between two lives, holding the hand of a woman who still believed he had a soul.
And even as his chest ached with guilt and longing, something cold and ruthless moved beneath it — a whisper rising from the pit he had dug inside himself.
Stolypin doesn't know she exists.
The thought was immediate, unbidden — and horrifying.
She isn't in the Okhrana files. She left before my rise. She's invisible to them.
He felt sick. The woman who represented the last piece of his humanity had walked into his life again — and his mind, the machine he'd become, was already measuring her value, her potential use.
He looked down at her hand in his, the warmth of it. And he wondered, with a surge of self-loathing, whether there was anything left in him that could feel without calculating.
Was he still Jake Vance at all — or just the ghost of the man he had created?