He hadn’t seen this face in over a year. When he saw it through the bars of the cell, he felt nothing. No resentment, nor relief, nor anything much. His eyes had lost what little gravity they had ever had, his lips were bloodless, his muscles deteriorated and his athletic frame now merely thin and littered with a treasury of cuts and bruises. Still he refused to tell MI6 what had happened to him. Sebastian had experienced far worse pain than these injuries, and in the circumstances it hardly even registered. His spymaster was dead. Not just disappeared, not imprisoned, not even just a false identity. He was dead. Sebastian had watched it happen. That he was still alive was only by the grace of British Intelligence. He would much rather he wasn’t, frankly. But when they’d found him bleeding on the floor of some innocent pensioner’s flat a few miles out from the wreckage of the assassination in Budapest he’d been unconscious, and so had little choice in the matter.
He swallowed thickly, his pale eyes flitting up to Prince from where he was sat, elbows resting on his knees, on the floor. ‘I didn’t know you worked for South House.’ His voice was thin and soft. Dr Prince looked the opposite. She looked successful. She looked expensive. He wondered whether she was going to interrogate him. ‘Do you have any vodka?’
