ROMAN'S POV
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Roman stares at Otto's message and feels something he has not felt in three years.
Completely unprepared.
He has prepared for everything. He spent three years preparing - studying timelines, running calculations, tracking Nadia from a distance, building contingency plans for every scenario he could imagine. He prepared for her to run. He prepared for her to attack him. He prepared for the removal faction to move early and the Opposition to interfere and Daniel to accelerate his plans.
He did not prepare for a traitor inside the Watchers.
He turns the phone face down on the table.
Nadia is watching him with those dark eyes that miss absolutely nothing and he knows - he knows - that she clocked every micro-expression that just crossed his face and filed all of them. She is the most dangerous audience he has ever had to perform composure in front of because she doesn't watch people the way most people do. She watches the way a surgeon does. Looking for the thing underneath the thing.
He picks up his coffee. Sets it down. Decides.
More truth than he planned. Right now. Because the moment she finds out he held back - and she will find out, she finds out everything - he loses the only thing keeping him in this equation.
Her decision to stay.
"The Watchers were formed forty years ago," he says. "There were seven of us originally. People who had experienced death and come back changed - not the same way you did, smaller versions, early cases. We started documenting others like us. Building a record." He keeps his voice level and factual because she responds to facts the way other people respond to comfort. "Over time the organization grew. We brought in researchers, analysts, field operatives. We tracked returned subjects across different regions. Studied what they became. What they could do."
"How many?" she asks.
"Total documented cases over forty years - sixty-one."
She doesn't react. Just nods once. Keep going.
"Most returned subjects come back disoriented. Fractured. The death experience breaks something in them and they can't rebuild it. They make erratic decisions. They destabilize the people around them. In eleven documented cases the subject became actively dangerous - not because they were evil, but because they came back with abilities they couldn't control and fear they couldn't manage." He pauses. "Those timelines collapsed. Faster than they would have without the subject returning at all."
"So the removal faction has data," she says.
"They have selective data. They count the failures and ignore the variables that caused them - isolation, lack of support, no one to help the subject understand what they were becoming." He looks at her directly. "You are different. You came back with full memory intact, with the ability to feel what you carry without being consumed by it, and within seventy-two hours you were already building. Not breaking. Building." He watches something move briefly across her face. Not pride. Recognition. "I have never seen that before. In forty years of records, no returned subject has done what you are doing."
She is quiet for three full seconds.
"You weren't sent to remove me," she says. Not a question.
"No. I was sent to protect you. By the original seven - the ones who still believe in what the organization was supposed to be." He sets both hands flat on the table. "Someone inside the Watchers disagrees with that mission. Someone who has been feeding information to the removal faction from inside my team. Until Otto's message thirty seconds ago I did not know who."
"But now you do."
"Now I know it's someone I trusted." The words cost something. He keeps his face neutral and pays the cost quietly where she can't see it. "Which means everything I thought was secure - my communications, my plans, my knowledge of your location - may have been compromised from the beginning."
Nadia absorbs this without flinching. He watches her do it - the way she takes a piece of terrible information and simply integrates it, adjusts, moves forward. It is one of the most remarkable things he has ever watched a person do.
"How many returned subjects have been eliminated?" she asks.
He knew this question was coming. He has been dreading it since he sat down.
"Seven," he says.
She doesn't blink. Doesn't look away. Doesn't give him the reaction he braced for.
Instead she says, "Then we need to move faster than your people expect."
Roman stares at her.
In all his preparation. In every scenario he ran. In three years of studying Nadia Voss across two timelines - he did not plan for her to say that. He planned for fear. He planned for anger. He planned for the careful, controlled retreat of a woman deciding whether to trust him.
He did not plan for her to immediately start strategizing.
"You're not going to ask me about the seven," he says.
"I will. Later. Right now it's information I can't act on and I only deal with what I can act on." She leans forward slightly. "You have a traitor in your organization who knows where I am, what I'm building, and how much you've told me. Which means we have a window - right now, today - before they report back and whoever is coming for me adjusts their plan." Her eyes are very steady. "So tell me everything you haven't told me yet. All of it. Fast."
Roman looks at this woman - twenty-nine years old, eight days back from death, managing a divorce, a collapsing timeline, a traitorous organization, and a husband who has been slowly poisoning her for years - and feels something shift in his chest that he does not have a clean word for.
He starts talking.
He tells her about the mark and what it means. He tells her about the thing in her chest - the name the researchers gave it, what it does, what it will become if she survives long enough. He tells her about the original seven and why they chose him for this mission. He tells her everything he has been rationing carefully across days of calculated reveals.
It takes eleven minutes.
When he finishes, she is quiet.
Then she stands. "Call Otto. Tell him to send you the security footage now." She picks up her bag. "I want to see the face of whoever was in my hospital."
Roman calls Otto immediately. The footage loads on his phone. He turns it toward Nadia.
She goes completely still.
On the screen, walking through Mercy General's corridor at 11 PM the previous night, is a face she clearly recognizes.
Not someone from the Watchers.
Someone from her previous life. Someone who was supposed to be dead. Someone she watched the infected tear apart with her own eyes in the final week before she died.
She looks up from the phone.
"That's impossible," she whispers.
Roman says nothing.
Because he has no explanation. Not yet. And he refuses to lie to her.