The smell of gunpowder and blood clung to the sailors' greatcoats, the raw, metallic scent of his own personal treason.
Jake stood in the cavernous, frozen dark of a derelict warehouse by the Neva. Before him stood the five surviving members of the rescue team, their faces smeared with grime and lit by the flickering glow of a single oil lantern. They were no longer soldiers of the revolution. They were his men. Fugitives.
Shliapnikov stood beside him, a silent, grim-faced giant. He had waited here for them, a lone guard over their desperate rebellion.
Anatoly, the petty officer with the jagged scar bisecting his eyebrow, stepped forward to make his report. He held a captured Cheka pistol, a modern Mauser C96 with a wooden stock. He didn't hold it like a piece of evidence. He held it like a trophy of war, taken from a foreign enemy.
"We got her out, Commander," Anatoly said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. "Lost two men. Kirill and Sasha. One other, young Pyotr, was wounded and taken. The Cheka were professionals, but they weren't expecting a fight. They came for a quiet arrest. We gave them a war."
Jake's gut clenched. Kirill and Sasha. He remembered their faces from Kronstadt, young men who had cheered his name. Now they were dead, their bodies lying in a cold Petrograd apartment, killed by their own side. On his order.
He felt a conflicting storm of emotions: a fierce, burning pride in the absolute loyalty of the men before him; a crushing, soul-deep guilt for the ones who had fallen; and a cold, terrifying certainty that there was no going back. He had crossed the Rubicon. He had shed the blood of his own government's enforcers.
"Where is she now?" Jake asked, his voice steady despite the turmoil inside him.
"Safe," Anatoly said. "With the Finn. He had a secondary extraction team waiting. He's moving her to a new location, a place even we don't know. He said he would send word when it was clear."
As if on cue, a small shadow detached itself from the deeper darkness of the warehouse entrance. It was a young boy, no more than ten, one of the Finn's network of street urchins. He ran to Jake, pressed a folded note into his hand, and vanished back into the night without a word.
Jake unfolded the note. The message was simple. The nurse was secure in a temporary location. She wished to see him. Alone. It gave an address for a deconsecrated church nearby.
"Anatoly, take the men and disappear," Jake commanded. "Use the network. Find a new place to lie low. Wait for my signal."
The scarred sailor nodded, a look of fierce devotion in his eyes. "We follow the Demon," he said, a simple statement of faith. Then he and his men melted back into the shadows, ghosts in their own city.
Jake and Shliapnikov walked to the church. It was a ruin, its dome shattered by an errant shell during the October fighting. Jake stopped at the entrance to the crypt.
"Wait for me here," he told his friend. "If I'm not back in an hour…"
"I will burn this city to the ground to find you," Shliapnikov finished, his voice a low vow.
Jake descended the stone steps into the cold, silent dark. The crypt was lit by a single lantern, its light casting long, dancing shadows. A figure in a simple grey nurse's habit stood with her back to him. Sister Anna.
"Sister," he said, his voice echoing in the stone chamber. "Are you harmed?"
The woman turned. She was still for a long moment, studying him from the shadows. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, she reached up and pulled off the white wimple that had hidden her hair and framed her face.
The dark hair cascaded down to her shoulders. The face was thinner than he remembered, harder, the lines around her eyes and mouth carved from ice. But the eyes themselves, a piercing, intelligent gray that saw right through him, were the same.
It was Kato Svanidze.
Jake's world stopped. His breath caught in his throat. It wasn't a ghost. It wasn't an echo of a memory. It was her. He felt a tidal wave of shock, of confusion, of a buried, unresolved emotion he couldn't begin to name.
His entire understanding of the past few months imploded. The brilliant, untouchable Sister Anna, the Saint of the Smolny, the key to his entire Romanov mission… had been the queen of his fallen Stockholm kingdom all along.
The silence in the crypt was absolute, broken only by the faint hiss of the lantern. They were no longer Commissar and Nurse. They were Jake and Kato, two survivors staring at each other across an abyss of lies and secrets.
Kato spoke first. Her voice was devoid of all warmth, a tool for pure analysis. "So. The Golden Demon. You've been busy."
Jake was still reeling, his mind struggling to process the impossible reality before him. "Kato… I thought you were dead. In Norway… Oberst Nicolai…"
"Nicolai is a problem I have dealt with," she said, dismissing the German spymaster as a triviality. "Now we have a bigger one. Lenin. He just tried to have me killed. Why?"
"Not you," Jake managed, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying speed. "He was trying to get to me. He thinks you're my asset. My agent."
The realization hit them both at the same time. His secret, treasonous mission to save the Romanovs, which required the help of the compassionate "Sister Anna." Her secret mission to acquire ultimate leverage and survive, which required manipulating the powerful and reckless Commissar "Koba."
They hadn't just been allies of convenience, or unknowing rivals. They had been two master manipulators, playing a game of three-dimensional chess on the same board, each using the other as their most important piece without ever knowing it.
The shock gave way to a tense, pragmatic calculation. They were both exposed. They were both targets. They needed each other, whether they liked it or not.
"Lenin declared war on you tonight," Kato stated, her eyes narrowed. "What is your next move?"
"My next move is to disappear you," Jake said, the instinct to protect kicking in. "Get you out of the city, out of Russia, until I can handle this."
A cold, dangerous smile touched Kato's lips. It was the first real expression he had seen on her face, and it was terrifying. "I am not running, Koba. I have assets here. I have a network. I have Professor Ipatieff and the knowledge he possesses. I am not your weakness. I am your only weapon."
She stepped closer, into the full light of the lantern. The shadows on her face were sharp and unforgiving.
"You saved my life tonight," she said, her voice a blade. "Now you owe me an explanation. I want the truth. What is so important about the Tsar's jailer that you would start a civil war over a simple nurse?"
The question hung in the air between them, a demand for his greatest, most dangerous secret.