Page 121 of The Dangerous Dance

"I know someone at the TLC," Conor says. He's already typing.

Declan is looking at the table. He looks up at me. "If it's Brennan's brother⁠—"

"It's not Brennan's brother," I say. "It's Viktor's contact who found Brennan's brother." I hold Declan's gaze. "Brennan doesn't know. His brother doesn't know. The liability is Viktor's methodology, not our people."

Declan absorbs this. Then he says, with the flat quality of a man making a decision: "My part in it."

I look at him.

"The fracture," he says. "The six months of it. The men at Red Hook tonight—" He stops. His jaw works. "I know the attack would have happened regardless. I know the Connolly situation and the rotation breach are separate problems." He meets my eyes. "But the fracture meant we were running at less than full capacity. We had men in the wrong places for six months because we were managing internal division instead of external threat." He pauses. "Some of what happened tonight is on that."

The briefing room is quiet.

"Declan—" I start.

"I'm not asking for absolution," he says. "I'm stating it. Because Donnelly and Gallagher and Pearse deserve to have the full picture stated." He holds my gaze. "And because I'm going to stand in front of every man in this family today and tell them that the fracture is done and that whatever Viktor has planned for us next is going to meet something he hasn't seen yet, which is what we look like when we're unified." He pauses. "If you'll let me do that."

I look at my brother.

"Yes," I say.

He nods. He looks at Nadia. "The cab driver. The fare. What else do we need."

"The fare's identity," she says. "And his connection to Viktor's network. If we can trace it, we can identify which arm of Viktor's operation is running the social extraction, which tells us who's doing his ground work in this city, which is more useful than the rotation breach itself."

"Why," Declan says.

"Because the rotation breach is a tactic," she says. "Understanding which arm of his operation deployed it tells us about his organizational structure. Where he's thin, where he's heavy, where he's going to move next." She meets Declan's eyes directly, which is the first time she's done so in this room, and what passes between them is the specific acknowledgment of two people who have been cautiously deciding whether the other is worth taking seriously and have arrived at a provisional yes. "Viktor is not attacking randomly. He has a sequence. And every piece of his methodology that we understand is a piece of the sequence we can see coming."

Declan looks at her for a moment.

"All right," he says.

Then he stands and he goes to find his men, and through the window of the briefing room I can see him moving through the compound with the quality he has when he has decided something and is acting on it — focused, direct, the specific authority of a man who knows who he is and where he stands.

He gathers them in the main hall.

I watch from the window.

He speaks to them for twelve minutes, which I can't hear through the glass but which I can see — the room's response, the specific shift of a group of men receiving something from someone they've been waiting to hear it from. Not a speech. Something more like an accounting, given plainly, received fully.

By the end of it the room has a different quality.

I turn from the window.

Nadia is looking at the incident map. "The TLC records will take a few hours," she says. "In the meantime, I want to look at the attack pattern more carefully. The timing between the three locations tells us something about their coordination capacity that we should document."

"All right," I say.

"Liam." She looks up from the map. "The men tonight. I'm—" She stops. "I'm sorry."

The words are simple and she says them with the specific weight of someone who means them in multiple directions simultaneously — for the men, for the attack, for the chain of events that started with her arrival in a city that didn't care she was there and has arrived at this briefing room at five in the morning.

"I know," I say.

"I know you know." She holds my gaze. "I'm going to find who's doing Viktor's ground work in this city," she says. "And then we're going to take it apart."

I look at her.