A single gold coin spun on the polished oak table.
It was a perfect, hypnotic blur of light, catching the lazy curl of smoke from the German's cigarette. The air in the room was thick with the sharp, clean scent of expensive tobacco.
Oberst Walter Nicolai smiled, a thin, precise expression that never reached his eyes. "A masterpiece of applied violence, my dear Warlock."
He leaned back in his leather chair, the fabric groaning softly. "The Kronan. A ghost ship sunk by a ghost. Berlin is… profoundly pleased."
Jake—Koba—said nothing. He just watched the coin, the last wobble before it settled. Heads. Always heads when the Germans were involved.
"That, however," Nicolai continued, his voice a smooth, cultured purr, "was merely the audition. The first part of our bargain is complete. Now, for the second."
He finally looked at Jake, his gray eyes like chips of granite. He saw a tool, not a man. A very, very useful tool.
"Germany's goals have evolved. We no longer wish to simply bleed the Tsar on the battlefield. We wish to infect him with a fever he cannot survive."
Jake felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He knew this part of the history. He knew exactly what was coming next.
"We have identified a certain… political party. Radical. Impotent for now, but filled with promising revolutionary fervor." Nicolai tapped a folder on the desk. "A man named Ulyanov. You may know him."
Lenin. Of course.
"He and his Bolsheviks need more than pamphlets. They need fuel for their fire," Nicolai said, steepling his fingers. "They need gold."
He pushed the folder across the table. It slid to a stop inches from Jake's hand.
"A shipment of bullion. Enough to fund a thousand agitators, to print a million papers, to buy an army's worth of loyalty."
Jake didn't touch the folder. "Send it through your usual channels. The Swiss banks. The smugglers."
Nicolai's smile widened, showing a hint of teeth. "Ah, but that is the problem. The Okhrana is watching the banks. The British are watching the smugglers. We need a delivery method that is completely invisible."
He leaned forward, the smell of tobacco growing stronger.
"We need a ghost."
The silence stretched, thick and heavy. Jake knew the answer before the man even said the words. He was the ghost.
"You will personally oversee the delivery," Nicolai stated, his voice losing its purr and taking on the hard edge of command. "You will take the gold from here, get it across the border, and deliver it to our Bolshevik contacts in Petrograd."
Petrograd. The name landed like a punch to the gut. It wasn't St. Petersburg anymore. It was the heart of the enemy's empire.
"That's a suicide mission," Jake said, his voice flat.
"Yes," Nicolai agreed without a flicker of hesitation. "For anyone else."
He finally pushed the coin towards Jake. "But you are the Warlock. The man who walked out of the Vologda wilderness. The man who can predict the movement of armies."
"Anyone can sink a ship, my dear Warlock," he finished, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "It takes a ghost to walk back into his own graveyard. Petrograd is waiting for you."
Jake stared at the gold coin. It wasn't a reward. It was a leash.
His entire kingdom—Ipatieff's lab, Pavel's loyalty, Kato's safety—it was all funded by this man. By German gold.
And the bill had just come due.
"And if I refuse?" Jake asked, the words tasting like ash.
Nicolai's smile finally vanished. "Then this fortress of ghosts you've built in Stockholm will vanish overnight. The funds will cease. Your people will scatter. And we will leak your location to the Tsar's secret police ourselves."
He stood up, signaling the meeting was over.
"You are a gilded bird in a beautiful cage, Koba. But do not forget who built it. Do not forget who holds the key."
The headquarters felt different when he returned.
The quiet efficiency, the sense of purpose—it all felt like a lie. It wasn't his kingdom. It was a German outpost with him as its well-paid warden.
The air was cold. Sterile. A beautiful prison.
He walked past the communications room, the clatter of the telegraph machine sounding like chains rattling. He ignored Pavel's questioning look. He needed to be somewhere else.
He found her in the archives.
The room smelled of old paper and drying ink, a scent he usually found comforting. Tonight, it smelled like a tomb. Kato was at her desk, working under the dim glow of a single green-shaded lamp.
She was bent over her work, her dark hair pinned up, revealing the pale, delicate line of her neck. Her focus was absolute, her pen scratching softly across the page. She was his spymaster, the coldest, most efficient part of his machine.
But as he stood there in the shadows of the doorway, he didn't see the machine.
He saw the woman he had pulled from the Vologda snow. The woman whose warmth he remembered in a world that had turned to ice.
He walked into the room, his footsteps silent on the worn rug. He stood behind her, close enough to feel the faint warmth radiating from her body.
She was writing in her own book. Her secret ledger, filled with codes he couldn't break. He knew he should be angry, suspicious. He felt nothing but a profound, aching weariness.
He didn't ask about the book. He didn't ask about her work. He asked something else entirely.
"Do you ever miss the sun, Kato?"
His voice was quiet, rough. It sounded alien in the silence of the room.
Her hand froze mid-stroke. The pen hovered over the paper, a droplet of ink swelling at its tip. But she did not turn around.
"We have sun in Stockholm, Koba," she replied, her tone perfectly level. Purely professional.
"No," he said, moving a step closer. "I mean real sun. The kind that burns your skin. The kind that makes the air thick and heavy with the smell of dust and grapes."
He was talking about Georgia. He was talking about home. A home neither of them could ever return to.
Her shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. A tiny crack in her perfect, icy armor.
"Nostalgia is a weakness," she said, her voice a little too sharp. "It is not a productive line of thought."
"Perhaps," he conceded. He looked past her, at the shelves of files, the maps of Russia, the architecture of their shared prison. "But I find my thoughts have been… unproductive, lately."
He was a dead man walking. A 21st-century ghost sent to haunt a past that was determined to kill him. And in that moment, he felt so utterly, crushingly alone.
He needed to know if he was alone in this room.
He waited. The silence was a physical weight. The only sound was the soft hiss of the gas lamp.
Finally, with a slow, deliberate movement, she put down her pen. She turned in her chair to face him, the faint light catching the sharp planes of her face, leaving her eyes in shadow.
She looked him up and down. Not like an archivist looking at her director. Not like a subordinate looking at her commander.
She looked at him like a woman who saw straight through the monster to the man trapped inside.
"You look at this world like a man reading a book he already knows the ending to," she said, her voice low and dangerously soft. "Tell me, Koba..."
She paused, and her dark eyes seemed to pierce right through him, pinning him to the wall.
"Do you like how our chapter ends?"