Chapter 86

Loid comes to just in time to stop Fiona from executing the beaten Wheeler. Once the prisoner is bound, Fiona frets over whether Loid overheard her mid-fight confession of love; he misreads her expression as disappointment in his defeat and concedes he may be losing his edge. Asked about his arm, he admits the wound came from Yuri, explaining that killing him would have devastated Yor and jeopardized Operation Strix, a framing Fiona recognizes as conveniently impossible to argue with. The WISE Agent arrives in his Gascoigne disguise to help haul out both Wheeler and the immobilized Fiona, who spends the trip screaming internally at being carried on Twilight's back.

Clear of Shellbury, the agents tally a costly victory: the West's intelligence assets in Ostania are protected, but their informant inside the SSS is gone. Loid declines a celebratory drink in Berlint, reminding the others he left home on a fabricated work emergency, and confesses he cannot read Yor's feelings lately; Fiona's bid to escort him home is vetoed on account of her injuries. At the apartment, Yor greets him with a smile so unexpectedly warm his legs give out. Her earlier talk of dissatisfaction, she explains, was invented so her coworkers would find the marriage believable. Drained beyond all acting, Loid collapses flat on the floor and asks her to cover his housework for two days. Yor is delighted, telling him she has wanted him to lean on her and that he need not be perfect around the clock. Privately, Loid draws the opposite lesson from the Wheeler fight: in his world, anything short of perfection gets a spy killed.

Yuri then bursts in, and after the men trade alibis for their injuries, his eye catches Loid's right arm twitching, the same arm he shot Twilight in. His theory about Twilight hiding among people near him resurfaces, and he yanks up the sleeve to check, finding unmarked skin. In the shower afterward, Loid peels away the concealment over the real wound and warns himself that Yuri's observational gift cannot be underestimated, since one seed of doubt is enough to end a spy. He then smells smoke, fearing the SSS has returned; it is only Yor, who has set his shirt ablaze with an iron. He sinks to the floor once more.

Wheeler is taken alive and the WISE team slips out of Shellbury undetected, closing the crisis with the West's Ostanian operations preserved at the cost of the Jeffrey asset. Loid frames his choice to spare Yuri as pure operational judgment.

The marital gripe storyline dissolves when Yor reveals her complaints were staged for appearances, while Yuri entertains for the first time the possibility that Loid himself is Twilight, physically checking his arm for the gunshot wound Loid has disguised.

This chapter opens the thread of Yuri actively suspecting his brother-in-law of being Twilight. Between the digital release and Volume 13, Yor's face on page 17 is redrawn slightly.