The silence after the slaughter was a ringing in Kato's ears.
The enemy car's headlights cut a sterile, white path through the snow, illuminating the still, dark shapes of the men Pavel had killed. They lay where they had fallen, twisted and broken. The only sound was the wind, whispering through the pines like a mournful ghost.
Pavel emerged from the darkness. He was untouched. He walked with a steady, unhurried pace back towards their car, a phantom returning from his work.
In the back seat, Murat was a statue of pure terror, his knuckles white where he gripped the seat in front of him. He was shaking, a low, guttural sound of shock coming from his throat.
Kato got out of the car. Her legs felt unsteady, but her mind was a shard of ice.
She didn't comfort Murat. She didn't praise Pavel.
She walked to the nearest body, a dark shape sprawled in the pristine snow. She knelt, the cold seeping through the thin fabric of her trousers, and began to search him. Her movements were methodical, detached.
"Check them," she ordered, her voice flat and hard, cutting through Murat's terrified whimpers. "Ammunition. Papers. Car keys. We take anything useful."
Her fingers found the cold, hard shape of a submachine gun, a German MP-18. She pried it from the dead man's stiffening fingers. His warm blood, still sticky, smeared across her own hand. She didn't flinch. She just wiped her hand on the dead man's coat and checked the magazine. It was full.
This was her new reality. The queen of spies was gone. In her place was a scavenger, picking through the bones of her enemies.
"Kato..." Murat finally stammered, his voice trembling as he forced himself out of the car. "What is this? Who were they?"
He stumbled towards another body, his movements jerky. He reached into the man's coat and pulled out a wallet. Inside, tucked behind some currency, was a small, coded document.
He held it up to the headlights, his eyes scanning the markings. His face went white.
"It's not British," he whispered, his voice cracking. "The markings... the eagle... they're German."
A bolt of pure, freezing ice shot through Kato's heart. She snatched the document from his hand. She didn't need a cipher. She recognized the operational prefix.
It was one of Nicolai's.
They weren't British agents. They were cleaners. A German kill team, sent to erase a failed operation and its embarrassing, inconvenient loose ends.
Her brilliant lie, the story that was supposed to save her, had been nothing more than her own death warrant. Nicolai had never believed her. He had praised her competence while sending assassins to put a bullet in her head.
The world shifted on its axis.
They weren't running to a new mission. They were running from their own spymaster. Petrograd was no longer an objective assigned by a superior.
It was the only place on Earth Nicolai might hesitate to send another kill team. Koba was too important to German interests to risk a messy public execution of his former lover on his doorstep.
Her mission to leash the demon had just become her only desperate, pathetic hope for survival.
Using the assassins' own car, they pushed the felled tree from the road. An hour later, they were driving again, the captured submachine gun resting on the seat between Kato and Pavel.
The mood in their Volvo was thick with a new, colder dread. In the back, Ivan's condition had worsened. He was no longer just moaning. He was delirious, muttering in a fevered, nonsensical Georgian. The foul, sweet smell of his infected wound filled the small car, a constant reminder of their weakness.
He was a burden. A dead weight. A ticking clock, slowing them down with every painful kilometer.
Hours later, the needle on the fuel gauge was hovering on empty. They limped into a tiny, sleeping Swedish town, a ghost town of dark windows and silent streets. Only a single, 24-hour gas station cast a lonely, pale light onto the snow.
Across the street from it was a small, whitewashed building with a single, faded red cross painted on the door. A clinic.
Murat's gaze flickered from the delirious, sweating face of Ivan to the symbol of hope across the road.
"Kato, we have to," he pleaded, his voice cracking with a desperate humanity that sounded alien in their cold, silent car. "We can't just let him die. He was one of us. He needs a doctor."
Pavel, sitting motionless in the driver's seat, said nothing. He simply looked at Kato in the rearview mirror.
His blank stare was more powerful than any argument. It was the voice of pure, cold, reptilian logic.
The mission is survival. The wounded man compromises the mission. He makes noise. He slows us down. His presence requires us to stop in populated areas. He is a liability. The logical course of action is to remove the liability.
He was the voice of the monster she had created, the pure survival instinct she had been trying to suppress.
Kato looked at Ivan's pale face, at the tremor in his hands. She saw the faces of the German assassins, their eyes cold and professional. She saw Nicolai's face, smiling, as he signed her death order.
The old Kato, the one who fought for her men, the one who wept for comrades, died in that silent, freezing car. The Queen of Ashes took her place.
"You're right, Murat," she said softly, her voice a strange, gentle thing that made the hairs on Murat's arms stand up. "He needs a doctor."
She reached into their medical kit and took out the last morphine syringe. "This will help with the pain until we can get him inside."
She administered the rest of the vial—a massive, lethal overdose—into Ivan's arm. His pained muttering softened, then ceased altogether.
"Go pay for the gas," she said to Murat. "Use the cash we took from them. Don't take too long."
While Murat was inside, his back to them, Kato and Pavel lifted Ivan's now-limp body from the car.
They didn't take him to the clinic door.
They carried him to a cold, wooden bench in the shadows, away from the direct light of the gas station. They left him there, propped up as if he were sleeping, and placed the bag with the remaining medical supplies beside him. A final, empty gesture of a compassion that no longer existed.
They were back in the car and pulling away before Murat even came out of the station.
As they drove away, leaving Ivan to his fate, Murat looked back, his face a mask of horrified confusion.
He saw Kato's face reflected in the window. Her expression was calm. Her eyes were dry. Cold.
Utterly empty.
And he realized, with a sudden, gut-wrenching certainty, that he wasn't traveling with a commander anymore.
He was trapped in a car with a monster. And its ghost.