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Blood. There was so much blood.

And for a moment everything seemed to fall to pieces. She could see Boscard again, Adam, Zaf... Swallowing slightly, she forced herself to look at him. His face was contorted in pain, his hand reaching out as if he had been trying to escape...

She remembered briefly his arms around her, the shaky friendship that had grown stronger.
How brave he was.
How hard it had been for him to fit into the team.
How young he was.
Like Zaf, like Adam.

She now had another to add to her list. Another friend who died alongside her. Another colleague who could so easily have switched places with her...

Ben.

She knelt beside him, unafraid to show her tears.

Someone was going to pay for this.
Someone was going to hell.

Members of her team couldn't die on her watch. For the first time in weeks, she felt tears pricking at her eyes.

People didn't get to die on her orders.

There were too many. Too many on her list. Zaf, Ruth, Adam, Harry?
And now Ben. Ben who'd stumbled upon this world, this world that killed him.

It was killing her too, just in a different way. Sucking every ounce of humanity out of her soul until one day she just wouldn't be anymore.

That didn't matter, because with every death like this, it hurt to be.

He felt sick to his stomach. The boy was barely in his late twenties, the youngest member of the team he'd been on forever. He watched people come and go, every year, every time there was a crisis.

He'd seen so many people through the service, Tom, Zoe, Danny, Colin, Zaf, Adam... to list but a few. Watched them enter, peak to the top of their careers or maybe even not quite reach that far before dying, cracking, being exiled...

He'd always be the silent watcher, waiting for the next end to come. It should be him. He'd spent more than his fair share of time here, in comparison. He should be next, but somehow he knew he wouldn't.

He watched Jo kneeling beside her cold, lifeless friend, and wondered if it would be her...

He'd been away less than a day. Incapacitated, something like that.
And his youngest team member had been annihilated.
He wanted to take it out on someone, on something. But there was no time for that. No scope to feel. Not in this line of work.

Somehow seeing Ros steely eyed with slightly tear smudged mascara made it worse. She was the toughest section chief he'd ever had, and she was breaking.

And his oldest friend had done this to him.

He could list people who had betrayed him, too many to count. But somehow he'd thought she was different.

But she'd killed one of her own, and that... that was worse than the betrayal.

He knew now that he was the one to talk to Ben Kaplan last. The last friend he ever spoke to. The last ally.

He knew that had he not gotten into that fight with the FSB agent, Ben might have gotten out of the archives in time.

He wasn't the sort of person to mull things over, but Ben's death played on his mind.
The kid had had a future, a chance in MI5. He'd had potential, more than anyone had admitted, even voiced.

Lucas North had a long list of people he'd caused the deaths of, but somehow this one hurt the most.
Because had he been a tiny bit quicker, cleverer, readier, he might have been able to change something.

Maybe.

She smiled, almost insanely, as they led her away.
Ben - she'd had no choice...

But his dying breath would haunt her until the day she died, somewhere in the back of a mind that had long since turned to betrayal, darkness and treachery.