Page 143 of The Dangerous Dance

"You stay at the safehouse."

"I know that too." A pause. "Liam. She told me she loves you. At dinner, that night. She said it to me when you were in the other room." A pause. "I thought you should know she said it to more than just you."

I stand with the phone and the morning and the weight of that.

"Thank you," I say.

"Come back," she says. "Both of you."

The plan goes into motion at nine Sunday night.

Not the time I announced to the compound — I told them ten, then moved it an hour, which is the kind of operational misdirection that matters when you can't be entirely certain who's hearing what through which channel. Conor knew. Declan knew. The Rosso four knew. That's the full list.

The city at nine on a Sunday has the specific quality of something winding down, which works in our favor — less traffic, fewer variables, the particular emptiness of a service road in Brooklyn on a winter night. We approach from three directions simultaneously, which is the plan, and the plan holds for the first four minutes, which is longer than plans usually hold.

I go in through the roof access.

The roof of the building is flat and cold and gives me a view of the service road below where, on the western approach, the Rosso four are doing what Marco described as their specialty, which is making a significant disturbance that draws attention with the specific efficiency of people who have been doing this for forty years.

Viktor's perimeter responds west.

I go down.

The interior stairwell is dark and I move through it with the specific quality I've developed over twenty years of moving through buildings that didn't want to be moved through, which is quickly and without any unnecessary part of my attention being elsewhere.

All of it is elsewhere, briefly, and I pull it back.

One thing. One outcome.

Below, through the building's structure, I can hear Declan's approach from the east — not loudly, just the particular way sound travels through concrete and tells you something is happening that wasn't happening before.

The subterranean level is accessed through a door at the bottom of the stairwell that is locked with a bolt I have the override for, courtesy of the Rosso file and a contact of Marco's who knew this building from the previous operation.

I open the door.

The corridor beyond is chaos.

Viktor's men responding to the three-directional approach, moving toward the noise, the rotation collapsed, the attention fragmented in exactly the way a split approach is designed to fragment it. I move through the chaos the way I've learned to move through things — like they're expected, like I've been here before, like the chaos is just the ambient condition of the space.

And then I see her.

She is in the corridor.

Not in the room. In the corridor, moving toward me, with the specific quality of someone who has decided where she's going and is going there. Her hands are free. There is a guard behind her who is down in the specific way of someone who has been hit efficiently and is not getting up immediately.

She sees me.

She stops.

I stop.

We are in a subterranean corridor in Brooklyn on a Sunday night and she has gotten herself out of the room she was being held in, which I will ask her about later, and she is looking at me with the expression that lives in the unlabeled section that isn't unlabeled anymore.

"You're early," she says.

"Two weeks was too long," I say.

She crosses the corridor.