Page 142 of The Dangerous Dance

"Say it like you mean it rather than like you're managing me."

I look at my brother, who flew across the country because I asked and who has been sitting at this table since two in the morning and who understands, from the specific vantage point of someone who has been where I currently am, exactly what this costs.

"I come out with her," I say. The way he asked for it.

He nods.

At six I call Ailish.

She answers on the second ring, which means she wasn't sleeping, which means the hospital has failed to enforce the rest they prescribed. "Liam," she says.

"How are you."

"Don't ask me how I am, tell me what you need."

"I need you to be somewhere safe tonight," I say. "Not because I think Viktor will move against you again — I don't, he's occupied — but because I need to know where everyone is."

"The Rosso safehouse," she says. "Mackenzie's already there."

"I sent Mackenzie there yesterday. She went without arguing, which tells me the shoulder is speaking louder than her independence."

"The shoulder is significant," Ailish says. A pause. "And Dara."

"What about her."

"Nadia's friend. The redhead. She came to the compound yesterday morning. She'd heard — I don't know how, through whatever channel she uses — and she came." A pause. "She's been sitting in the kitchen since ten last night. Conor made her tea and she's been sitting with it."

I absorb this. "Tell her," I say. "Tonight. Whatever the outcome is, tell her."

"I will," Ailish says. "Liam." A pause that has several things in it. "Bring her home."

"Yes," I say.

At seven, Gianna finds me at the window.

She comes in from the kitchen with two cups and she hands me one without asking and she stands beside me and looks at the compound in the early morning dark. She doesn't say anything for a while, which is its own kind of presence — not the silence of someone waiting to speak but the silence of someone who has decided that being in the room is the thing.

Then she says: "Finn told me what she did. At the gala. In the safehouse. All of it."

"Yes," I say.

"She went back in for us," Gianna says. "Not for the Irish or for the Italians. For—" She pauses. "For all of it. For the thing we're building." She holds her cup with both hands. "She's part of this, Liam. Whatever it looks like formally, she's part of this."

I look at the compound.

"I know," I say.

"Then go get her," Gianna says, with the specific simplicity of someone who has distilled a complicated situation to its essential truth.

I finish my coffee.

The Italian safehouse call happens at eight.

I call Mackenzie directly, which I do because she deserves the directness and because asking someone else to tell her felt like the wrong approach.

"Tonight," I say.

"I know. Ailish told me."