Page 138 of The Dangerous Dance

"Yes," I say.

I go back to the house in Carroll Gardens.

It is empty in the specific way of somewhere that has a person-shaped absence in it. The kitchen where we made breakfast. The garden where the fig tree stands bare. The top floor with the east-facing windows she said yes to without finishing the sentence.

I sit at the kitchen table with the map from the compound.

I look at it for a long time.

I think about forty-eight hours and a service corridor and fifteen minutes and a car ride home through the city at night and I love you said in the specific register of someone who had decided to say it and was done waiting.

She said it.

I think about that. About the fact that she said it before this happened, which means she said it because she wanted to say it and not because she was afraid she wouldn't get another chance, which is the difference between something said from fullness and something said from fear.

She said it from fullness.

I look at the map.

Sunday night. Thirty-four hours.

I think about what she said about her father — about the distance between a man who had nowhere else to be and a woman who does.

She has somewhere to be.

I start planning.

CHAPTER 36

Nadia

The room they put me in is underground.

I know this from the quality of the silence, which is the specific silence of a space that has earth above it and on three sides — a different kind of quiet than a room at street level, more absolute, with the particular cold of somewhere that doesn't get light. There are two guards outside the door on a rotation I've been mapping since they brought me in. The door is solid and the lock is a deadbolt, which tells me the room was designed for this purpose rather than adapted to it.

Viktor is thorough. I've always known this. I built a file on his thoroughness.

My hands are zip-tied in front of me, which is the first operational mistake — in front is always better than behind, and whoever made that decision either underestimated me or was following a protocol that prioritized speed over security. I note it and file it and wait.

The waiting is the hard part.

Not because I'm afraid of what comes next — I know what comes next, I built the methodology file, I know Viktor's interrogation sequence as well as I know my own operational patterns. Not because I'm in pain, though the shoulder from the extraction is a consistent presence. Because waiting is the thing that lets the mind go to the places it's been trying not to go.

I let it go.

The first session is Viktor himself.

He comes in with the specific quality he always has — the unremarkable exterior, the absolute authority underneath it — and he sits across from me and he looks at me with the expression of someone who has revised their assessment of a situation and is deciding how to account for the revision.

"You chose him," he says.

"I chose myself," I say.

He looks at me. "Your father would be ashamed."

"My father declined an assignment," I say. "And died for it. And you recruited me six months later because I was useful to you and because having me meant you controlled the only person who might ask the right questions about how he died." I hold his gaze. "My father would recognize exactly what you are."

Something moves in Viktor's expression. Not anger. The specific quality of a man recalibrating how much the person across from him knows.