Page 140 of The Dangerous Dance

He came.

Of course he came.

I think about what he said the night before I went back, in the bedroom of the Carroll Gardens house with the go-bag between us — Two weeks maximum. After that I'm coming in regardless of what the intervals say. And the way he said it, which was not the way of someone setting a deadline but the way of someone stating a fact about what was going to happen.

It has been six days.

He came anyway.

I look at my zip-tied hands.

The guard outside the door is on his radio, turned toward the corridor, attention on the earpiece. His partner will be moving to a secondary position to respond to the perimeter breach, which means the rotation has collapsed, which means the door is currently covered by one man who is facing the wrong direction.

I have approximately forty-five seconds.

I work the zip tie.

The compression technique is uncomfortable and I do it without sound because sound is the one thing I cannot afford. My father showed me this when I was twelve, in a kitchen in Moscow, with a spare zip tie and the specific patience of a man who believed that knowing how to get out of things was as important as knowing how to get into them.

One step, Nadenka. Anyone can manage one step.

The right hand comes free.

I stand.

The cold of the room is full and present and I am not at full capacity — the shoulder, the sessions — but I am standing and my hands are free and there is a guard outside the door who is facing the wrong direction and a perimeter that is being penetrated by someone who said two weeks and came earlier.

I assess the door.

Solid. Deadbolt. I have no key and no tool.

I assess the room.

The chair. Metal, institutional, the kind with weight to it.

I pick up the chair.

I think about Mackenzie — the one who fought back, who Ailish said is the reason she has a laceration instead of something worse. I think about what it means to be someone who fights back.

I think about Liam on the other side of a perimeter that is being penetrated, moving toward this room with the specific quality of a man who has decided what he's doing and is doing it.

I am not going to be in this chair when he gets here.

I am going to be standing.

The guard's radio crackles. He turns to speak into it. His back is fully to the door.

I hit the deadbolt from the inside with the chair leg, which is not how deadbolts are supposed to open and which works on this specific lock because this specific lock has a weakness I identified two hours ago when the guard came in and the bolt didn't seat fully and I filed it in the same section I file everything.

Details, Nadenka.

The door opens.

The guard turns.

I hit him with the chair in the specific way my father taught me, which is not the way that looks most dramatic and is the way that produces the most efficient result, and he goes down and I step over him and I am in the corridor.

The corridor is chaos in the specific way of a compound under breach — movement, voices, the particular quality of an organization responding to something it didn't adequately prepare for.