The map of Russia was spread across his desk like a death shroud.
Petrograd was a black heart at its center, a vortex of streets and canals designed to swallow him whole. Jake traced a potential smuggling route with his finger, a thin, desperate line through enemy territory.
He was planning his own funeral. The odds of survival were so low they were a rounding error. This fatalistic clarity made him reckless. It burned away the trivialities of command, of strategy, of fear.
All that was left was regret.
Kato entered the office, her footsteps silent. She placed a single sheet of paper on his desk. Sofia's report.
He didn't look at it. He looked at her.
"What did you mean?" he asked, his voice low and rough. "Earlier. In the archives."
She stood perfectly still, her professional mask sliding back into place. "It was a figure of speech, Koba. Nothing more."
"No," he said, shaking his head slowly. "It wasn't. You asked if I liked how our chapter ends."
He stood up, the chair scraping against the floorboards. He walked around the desk, closing the distance between them until they were only an arm's length apart. The air crackled with a tension that had been building for months.
"Are you with me in this book, Kato?" he demanded, his voice raw with an emotion he hadn't let himself feel in an age. "Or are you just reading over my shoulder, waiting for the final page?"
Her composure finally fractured. A flicker of anger, of pain, crossed her features. "What do you want me to say?"
"The truth!" he shot back, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. "I am walking into hell for this kingdom. This place we built. I need to know..."
His voice dropped, the anger replaced by a desperate, pleading exhaustion. "I need to know if my queen will hold the throne, or if she'll sell it the moment my back is turned."
The word hung in the air between them. Queen.
It was an accusation. A prayer. An admission of everything he couldn't say.
It broke her.
"What throne?" she cried, her voice suddenly sharp and full of a terrible, ragged grief. A file slipped from her hand, scattering papers across the floor. "There is no throne, Koba! There is only this room, this city, this prison!"
She took a step towards him, her eyes blazing with a fire he hadn't seen since the days before Vologda.
"You burned my world to the ground to build this... this fortress of ghosts," she said, her voice trembling with the force of her words. "You took my life, my love, my future, and you forged them into a key for this cage."
Tears welled in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. She was not weak. She was wounded.
"So don't you dare ask about my loyalty. Don't you dare ask where I stand."
Her voice broke on the final, whispered words. "Where else would I go? This is all that's left of us."
Us.
The word shattered the last of his defenses. In that moment, she wasn't his spymaster. He wasn't her commander. They were just two people, trapped together in a history they were bleeding to create.
He reached out, his hand shaking slightly, and gently touched her cheek.
The touch was electric. A current of shared grief, of unspoken pain, of a love that had been buried alive, passed between them. Her skin was cool, and for a second, he saw her lean into his touch, her eyes fluttering closed.
It was a fragile truce in a long and bitter war. A single, perfect moment of connection in the heart of the storm.
And then the door burst open.
Pavel stood there, his face ashen, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath. He ignored the scattered papers, ignored the charged intimacy of the scene, his eyes locked on Jake.
"Koba," he choked out. "It's Sofia."
Jake's hand dropped from Kato's face. The warmth vanished, replaced by a sudden, biting cold.
"What about her?" he asked, his voice instantly hardening back into the commander's tone. "The Okhrana?"
Pavel shook his head frantically, his eyes wide with panic. "No. Not them. A witness saw it. She went out for a walk an hour ago, by the canals. She never came back."
He took a ragged breath.
"A black motorcar. No markings. Men who moved like soldiers, not secret police. They took her."
Jake stared at Pavel, but he didn't see him. He saw a rooftop. A rifle scope. A rival spymaster with cold, intelligent eyes who had chosen not to shoot.
It wasn't the Russians.
Stern.
The hunter had stopped watching. He had taken one of Jake's pieces right off the board.
The impossible weight of his reality crashed down on him. The Germans were sending him to his death in Petrograd. His enemies were abducting his people right here in Stockholm.
He couldn't be in two places at once.
He had to go to Petrograd to save his kingdom.
He had to stay in Stockholm to save his people.
And in that moment, as he looked from Pavel's terrified face to Kato's stricken expression, he knew.
His kingdom was already starting to burn.