He feels that same stab when the intel comes in, cold and bitter, and he's in the middle of Ops Center without her fingertips to warm him.  The others speak of this new Rambaldi artifact with hushed tones, equal parts awe and fear.  A simple figure of blown glass, but with the potential…

He doesn't wait for the potential.  He tries four phone numbers and three email accounts. 

Nothing.  Not one word.

He closes his eyes and pictures her body on the warm sand, the silk of her skirt whipping against his legs.  She smiled at him, warm and serene.  He should have wondered, he should have asked – no.  He was distracted then, by the feel of her touch and her skirt and her skin.  Distracted by the things she whispered to him, so low he could barely hear over the surf.  Distracted by the lies she was so bent on telling, the illusion she was so determined to give him.  It was her gift to him, he knows.  The happy ending he always wanted, never admitted to wanting.  Just like Irina, to give him a lie. 

The object is hidden in a monastery on a cliffside, buildings little more than caves carved into the stone.  He shudders at the sight of the arched windows, looking over a sparkling sea and minute stretch of white sand, hundreds of feet below.

He hears the report over his comm link, the hurried, hushed words of the team entering the building, an agent's light gasp when they find her.  They have her surrounded, backed into the proverbial corner. 

And he knows in their sudden silence what choice she has made; knows even before she makes it. 

Because this is what he knows of her:  he knows she will rage, she will burn, and die out like a flash of fire, searing his skin.  No whispered last words or drawn-out deathbed confessionals for Irina.  She leaves this life in silence, arms stretched straight out as she falls, no sign of fear as she tumbles from the sky.  

He finds her on the warm sand, body bent and slack like a child's discarded sack of marbles.  The Rambaldi artifact is beside her, shattered into pieces that glitter like diamonds on the sand.  He kneels down beside her wrist, flung out beside her, as if still reaching for the shattered remnants.  He can see the edge of something white poking out from her sleeve, and he lifts her wrist, lifts it where he once felt her pulse, warm and strong and erratic. 

That pulse is still now, absent beneath her still-warm skin. 

He slides the paper from her sleeve and turns it over, already knowing what he will find.  The picture of their daughter, his favorite, the one her fingers once curled around in her sleep.  The photo itself is curled now, and dull as if it has spent many days against her skin.  He slides back her sleeve, ready to replace it against her wrist, to let it remain where it belongs.  Then he freezes, not believing at first what he sees.

Red lines like nail-marks, drawn upon her skin.  Letters carved deep, like the letters she carved into the doorposts, but these are far more personal, far more prominent.  And far more permanent, now that she has lost the ability to heal. 

Four letters, marked on her skin. 

Jack.

******

They ask him to explain, to sum up, to tell them what he learned from her, whether she was a sinner or a saint.  He closes his eyes, pictures her smiling beside the blood-red sunrise, and he tells them she was both, and tells them she was neither.  He says only that she lived just as she died: caught between her daughter, her husband, and her obsession.

He does not say the final part, does not tell them about the markings.  Does not tell them what they mean: that he never understood her love, the only way she knew to give it, but that he understands it now. 

That this last mark, he knows, is the deepest of all.