Page 134 of The Dangerous Dance

I go back upstairs.

The car is a black sedan two blocks from the hotel, which he had waiting because of course he had it waiting, which is the thing about him that I've learned to expect — the preparation that exists whether or not the thing it's prepared for occurs.

I get in at eleven-fifteen.

He gets in at eleven-seventeen from a different entrance, which is the appropriate operational interval and which he maintains with the professional discipline of someone who knows the rules of the thing he decided to attend anyway.

The driver takes us away from the hotel and Liam says "drive" without a destination and the driver drives and we are in the back of the car in the specific dark of a city at night and he looks at me.

"Dmitri's arm," I say. "It's the most active one. The attacks on the supply routes came from his operational budget — I found the authorization structure in what he told me about the third arm's mandate, which is external pressure on allied organizations." I watch the city outside the window. "His three locations are all in Brooklyn. I have the street-level descriptions but not addresses — I need to cross-reference against known Russian-adjacent properties in those areas to confirm." I look at Liam. "That's something Rafa's contacts might be able to do faster than⁠—"

He kisses me.

Not urgently. The specific kind of kiss that is about arrival rather than desperation, the kind that says you're here, you're back, you're in front of me rather than I was afraid I'd lose you, though both things are true and both are in it.

I let it be both.

When we separate he stays close. "Rafa's contacts," he says. "Yes. I'll call him tomorrow."

"Tonight," I say. "The granularity fades."

"Tonight," he agrees. He looks at me in the dark of the car. "You said you're out."

"I'm out," I say. "Dmitri will report back to Viktor. Viktor will have questions. By the time he gets to them, we'll have used what I have to move against all three arms, and Viktor won't have an operation to bring me back to."

"Timeline."

"A week," I say. "If we move correctly."

He nods.

He takes my hand in the dark of the car, which is a small thing and not a small thing, and the city moves around us and I think about nine days of Viktor's coffee shop and Dmitri Volkov's hand on my arm and the tracker in the lining of the evening bag and the string quartet and a service corridor and fifteen minutes.

"You were jealous," I say.

"Yes," he says. Simply.

"Of a man you knew I was running."

"Yes."

"That's not rational."

"I know," he says. "I noted it."

I look at him in the dark.

"I don't care that it's not rational," he says. "I care that it's true."

I look at him for a moment.

Then I move across the seat and I settle against him and his arm comes around me in the way it does — without ceremony, just the adjustment of two people who have been in enough proximity that the body makes the decision — and we ride through the city at night with the third arm's intelligence in my head and the gala behind us and the week ahead of us and all the things that come after the week.

"Liam," I say.

"Mm."

"I love you," I say.