Page 118 of The Dangerous Dance

His hand finds mine at some point in the second block, which happens the way things happen between us that neither of us has decided on consciously — just the thing that occurs when two people have been in enough proximity for long enough and the body makes the decision the mind hasn't gotten to yet.

The rain comes down.

The city reflects it in the street.

We walk.

By the time we reach the house we are thoroughly wet in the specific way of people who have been in the rain long enough to stop minding it and have arrived at the other side of minding, which is the place where it's just weather and you're just in it.

He unlocks the front door.

Inside the house is warm.

He closes the door and we stand in the front hall, wet and slightly laughing, and he looks at me with the expression that is the fully realized version of everything I've been reading in fragments for two months.

"Tea," he says.

"Yes," I say.

We go to the kitchen.

The house is warm and the rain is outside and the fig tree in the garden is being rained on, which I think is what it needed, and tomorrow Viktor will still be somewhere recalibrating and the Vore will still be a word in an intelligence summary and Marco will still be waiting to meet me and all of it will still be what it is.

But tonight we make tea in the kitchen with wet coats on the hooks and the rain on the windows and the particular warmth of a house that is beginning, in ways I didn't plan for when I stepped off a plane in New York with a cover story and a mission, to feel like somewhere I might want to be.

Not a box.

Not a target location.

Not an operational asset's temporary housing.

Somewhere.

I hold my tea with both hands.

He holds his.

Outside the rain commits to the night.

Inside, we are warm.

CHAPTER 31

Liam

The offensive hits on a Tuesday before dawn.

Not one location. Three, simultaneously, which is the thing that tells me immediately that this is not opportunistic — opportunistic attacks are singular, they find the gap and they exploit it and they leave. Simultaneous attacks on three separate supply route points in a forty-minute window are orchestrated, are the result of planning that has been running in parallel to everything else, are the evidence of an organization that has been patient and is now done being patient.

I'm at the house when Conor calls. He uses the emergency protocol, which I established six years ago and which has been used four times since, and the sound of it — the specific triple vibration that means now, means everything else stops — brings me from sleep to standing in approximately three seconds.

"Three locations," Conor says, when I answer. "The Greenpoint route, the Red Hook distribution point, and the secondary warehouse on the west side." A pause. "Liam. We have casualties."

I am already moving. "How many."

"Confirmed three. Possible fifth. The Red Hook point was the worst — they came in from two directions and the men there didn't have time to—" He stops. The stopping tells me more than the rest of the sentence would have. "Red Hook was the worst."

"I'll be at the compound in twenty minutes."