Page 145 of The Dangerous Dance

We get in the car.

The city moves around us on the way home, indifferent and continuous.

I drive.

She sits with her shoulder against mine and her eyes closed, and I drive, and the house in Carroll Gardens gets closer with every block, and the fig tree that never produces figs is in the garden waiting, and all the things that need to happen after tonight will happen after tonight.

Tonight she's back.

That's all tonight needs to be.

CHAPTER 38

Nadia

I try to leave on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically. Not with a bag packed and a speech prepared. I simply wake up before he does and I sit in the kitchen of the house in Carroll Gardens with the specific quality of someone who has been turning a problem in the dark and has arrived at a shape for it, and the shape is this: I have given him everything I have to give, and the giving has cost him three men and a broken arm and a shoulder laceration and a Sunday night in Brooklyn, and the correct thing — the fair thing — is to go.

Not from him. I am past the point where going from him is something I can construct a justification for, and I know it and I'm not pretending otherwise. From the situation. From being the thing that Viktor moves against, the thing that draws the fire, the specific liability of being someone whose handler wants her dead and whose continued presence in this house makes this house a target.

I get my coat.

He is in the doorway before I reach the front door.

He does not look like someone who has just woken up. He looks like someone who has been awake for a while and has been waiting to see what I would do, which is the thing about him that I find most difficult and most — him.

"Where," he says.

"Away," I say. "Not from you. From this. From being the thing Viktor aims at when he wants to reach you."

He looks at me.

"You don't owe me anything," I say. "The operation is over. We have what we need to move against the Vore. You don't need me here anymore in any capacity that justifies the cost of⁠—"

"Stop," he says.

"Liam—"

"Stop," he says again, with the specific quality of a man who has heard enough and is done letting it continue. He crosses the hall and he stands in front of me and he takes the coat from my hands and he sets it on the chair and he holds my gaze with everything that doesn't have a clean word. "You're not a liability I'm managing. You're not an asset I'm protecting. You're—" He finds it. "Mine. In the specific way that means something in this world and in every other world and I don't care what Viktor aims at because Viktor is going to find that aiming at you means aiming at everything I have and everything I'm building and I will burn down whatever he's built before I let him have that."

I look at him.

"You're mine," he says. Simply. Completely. "That's not a condition or a contract. It's just true."

I look at him for a long moment.

"That's a very large claim for a Tuesday morning," I say.

"I mean every word of it."

I believe him. This is the thing about him that I've been building toward for two months, the thing underneath the operational precision and the managed exterior — he says true things directly and he means them and he does not say things he doesn't mean.

I believe every word of it.

"All right," I say.

He looks at me. "All right you'll stay."