Page 136 of The Dangerous Dance

I go in.

Mackenzie is sitting up on the treatment bed under protest, shoulder bandaged, a closed cut above her eyebrow. She looks like someone who got in a fight and didn't entirely lose. When she sees me her face does the sequencing it always does — relief, then bright eyes, then set jaw.

I sit on the edge of the bed and take her face in my hands and look at her.

"I'm fine," she says.

"I know," I say. "Give me a minute to see it."

She closes her mouth.

I look at her. At the cut and the bandage and the evidence of a Saturday morning gone wrong in the specific way things go wrong for people connected to me — suddenly, violently, because someone is trying to reach something through them.

"Three of them," she says, when I've had the minute. "They didn't expect us to fight back. Ailish saw them first. She's why I'm sitting here with a laceration instead of something worse." Her jaw tightens. "The one who grabbed me is walking wrong for a week."

"Good," I say.

"Liam." She looks at me directly. "You'll get her back."

Not comfort. A fact, delivered with the same certainty Declan uses. My sister, who has been at kitchen tables and briefing rooms and girl's days for two months, who has made her own assessment.

"Yes," I say.

Ailish's bay is next. She's lying down because they've made her lie down. Cast from wrist to elbow, the expression of someone in moderate pain refusing to perform it at full volume.

"Don't," she says, when she sees me.

"Don't what."

"Look at me like it's your fault."

I sit beside the bed. "Conor said you went down pulling Mackenzie clear."

"I pulled her clear," she says. Specific correction. "The broken arm is inconvenient. I'll manage."

I look at her. "Declan's in the corridor," I say. "He's been there since before I arrived."

Something moves in her face. The smallest possible adjustment. "I know," she says. To the ceiling.

"He's not⁠—"

"Liam." Her voice draws the line clearly. "Not today."

I nod. I stand. At the entrance I stop. "Ailish. Thank you. For Mackenzie."

"Go find Nadia," she says.

Back in the corridor, Declan is where I left him. His jaw is tight in the way it gets when he's containing something he won't name in a hospital hallway. He looks at the bay door. "Has she asked—" He stops.

"She knows you're here," I say.

He nods. Looks at the floor.

I look at my brother and I recognize what I'm seeing because I've been wearing my version of it since November. I don't say anything about it. This is not the moment. This is my brother learning something about himself in a corridor, and the correct response is to let it be.

"The compound," I say. "We're pulling everything on Viktor's locations."

He straightens. Rolls his shoulders. Becomes the version of himself that has decided what it's doing. "Let's go," he says.