Page 101 of The Dangerous Dance

He looks at me.

"She needs the strategy conversation in person. The endgame, the Italian piece, what Nadia's position looks like after Viktor. It's not a phone call." I pause. "Move her the way you'd move me. Full protocol. I don't want her car within four blocks of this address."

"Understood. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow."

He nods. He picks up his bag. He'll take the second-floor spare for the duration. He goes upstairs.

I call Mackenzie at ten.

She picks up immediately, which means she's been waiting. "Where are you."

"Somewhere I'm not telling you the location of," I say. "Not because I don't trust you. Because the fewer people who know, the smaller the surface."

A pause. "She's with you."

"Yes."

"How is she."

"Processing. She's upstairs. She found out tonight that Viktor recruited her specifically to use her and then kill her. The same way they killed her father."

Mackenzie is quiet. When she speaks again her voice is different — quieter, the register I've heard her use maybe four times in twenty-two years. "What do you need."

"For you to stay at the compound. Be present where Declan and Conor are coordinating. Be the version of normal that signals to the men watching that nothing is unusual." I pause. "And tell her — when this part is over and she can have visitors again — that you'll come and you'll bring food and you'll be in the room. Tell her that now. She needs to know it's a thing that exists on the other side of this week."

"Put her on."

"Kenzie—"

"Put her on. Briefly. I want her to hear it from me."

I go up. Nadia is in the spare bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in the lamp light, not doing anything in particular, which from her is the version of stillness that means everything is loud inside.

"My sister," I say. "Briefly."

She takes the phone.

"Hi," she says. Then: "I know." Then: "Yes." Then, after a longer pause: "Thank you."

She hands the phone back.

I take it. "All right."

"All right," Mackenzie says. "Liam — handle this carefully. Both of you. Carefully."

"I know."

She hangs up.

Nadia is looking at her hands. She doesn't look up.

"What did she say," I ask.

"She said that whatever I needed to be tonight was allowed to be what I was tonight. And that I didn't have to be useful for the next week. And that she was waiting for me on the other side of it." She is quiet. "And that I should eat the bread that's in the kitchen because she dropped it off at the compound for me three days ago and you brought it here."

I look at her.