Page 146 of The Dangerous Dance

"All right I'll stay," I say. "But Liam. The house is not safe. Viktor knows this address now — he has to, after Sunday. Staying here means staying in a location he can move against again and I won't be the reason⁠—"

"I know," he says. "I've been thinking about that."

"Have you arrived at something."

"Not yet. But someone might have."

Gianna arrives at ten.

She comes with the specific energy she brings everywhere, which is the energy of someone who has already been thinking about a problem and has arrived at a position and is ready to present it. She sits at the kitchen table where we've had breakfast and she looks at me with the directness she's applied since the girl's day at the compound.

"I spoke to Vito," she says. "Last night."

Liam looks at her. "About."

"About Nadia. About the situation." She holds her brother-in-law's gaze. "The Russians know virtually nothing about the Italian network. The safehouses, the locations, the personnel — Viktor has been so focused on the Irish-Italian alliance as a target that he hasn't invested in mapping the Italian infrastructure itself." She pauses. "Which means if Nadia were in an Italian safehouse, she'd be in the safest possible location while the Vore operation resolves."

"Gianna—" Liam starts.

"Vito agreed," she says. "Before you argue with me, he agreed. Not as a condition, not with strings. As the partnership doing what a partnership does." She meets his eyes. "His word."

Liam looks at his sister-in-law. Something moves through his face — the specific quality of a man receiving something that is both what he needs and more than he expected to receive, which is the quality that comes with understanding that what you've been building has become something you can rely on.

"It's temporary," Gianna says. "Until the Vore is dismantled and Viktor is no longer a functional threat." She looks at me. "But it's real. You'd have full access to their intelligence network, their operational infrastructure. You could continue working on the Vore analysis from inside their network." She pauses. "Vito specifically said — and I'm quoting him because the wording matters — that the woman who identified the Connolly asset and walked back into a hostile operation to get the intelligence we needed deserves a safe place to work from while we use it."

I look at Gianna.

She looks back with the expression of someone who has just delivered something they've been carrying carefully and is glad to set it down.

"Vito said that," I say.

"Word for word," she says.

I look at Liam.

He is watching me with the expression that lives in the space where the structural quality used to be and isn't anymore, the one that simply sees.

"It's the right call," he says. "Operationally."

"I know," I say.

"And I'll be there," he says. "The Vore operation, the strategy meetings — I'll be where you are more than I won't be."

"I know that too," I say.

He holds my gaze. "Say yes," he says.

I look at him for a moment. At the man who crossed a hall on a Tuesday morning and took my coat and said mine with the specific weight of something that is simply true.

"Yes," I say.

Gianna, across the table, does not perform satisfaction, which is the thing about her that I've come to rely on — she receives outcomes without theater. She simply picks up her coffee and drinks it.

The call to my mother happens that afternoon.

Not planned. I'm sitting in the east-facing room on the top floor, the one with the morning light that was the reason he bought the house, and the burner is in my hand and the Moscow number is in it and I've been looking at it for ten minutes with the specific paralysis of someone who knows they need to do something and has been waiting for the precise moment of readiness.

There is no precise moment. There is just the calling.