Page 15 of The Dangerous Dance

I look at her.

She looks back at me.

"No," I say.

"I'm not asking permission."

"Kenzie, if Declan thinks you're there on my behalf⁠—"

"He won't think that if I'm not there on your behalf." She picks up her mug again. "I'm his sister. I'm going to see him. I'm going to bring food and have conversations and be present in his life because that's what family does, and if in the course of being his family I happen to be a reasonable alternative voice to Connolly and Brennan, that's just a natural consequence." She tilts her head. "You're not using me, Liam. I'm making a choice. There's a difference."

I study her face and think, not for the first time, that she has grown into someone I didn't entirely see coming. She was always sharp, always quick, always the one in any room absorbing more than she appeared to. But the Mackenzie who left for the UK two years ago was still partly a kid, still partly protected by the distance we'd all maintained between her and the sharp edges of this life. The version in front of me now has closed that distance herself, from her end, without being asked.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I know how I feel about it as her brother. As the head of this family, it's more complicated.

"If it ever gets to a point where you feel like you're not safe," I say.

"I'll tell you."

"Or if Declan⁠—"

"Liam." Her voice is gentle but the word is a full stop. "I know how to handle Declan. I've known how to handle Declan since I was nine and he was seventeen and convinced himself I was too young to come to Mam's birthday dinner. I sat outside the restaurant in the cold for twenty minutes before he came out and got me himself." She smiles, small and certain. "He always comes out and gets me."

I look at her for a moment longer. Then I pick up my coffee. "If you're going to be useful around him," I say, keeping my tone even, practical, "you should understand the full picture. Not the version I've been sending in updates. The actual picture."

She straightens very slightly. Not surprise exactly. More like the confirmation of something she was already holding space for.

"The loyalists have been more organized than I've let on," I say. "Connolly has contacts I haven't fully traced yet. The shot near Declan's meeting spot — that wasn't random. Someone knew he'd be there, which means someone's talking to someone they shouldn't be, and it may be in Declan's circle rather than in mine." I pause. "I need to know if Declan is part of that or if he's being used by it. I can't get close enough to find out. You can."

She holds my gaze steadily. "That's not nothing you're asking."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

A moment of quiet. Then she nods, once, with the quality of someone making a decision they've already considered from every angle. "Then I'll need to know everything you know. Not summaries. Everything."

"All right."

"And you stop making decisions about what I can handle."

I look at the ceiling briefly. "All right."

"And you get someone to have a word with the red-haired one at the east building."

"Mackenzie."

"Those are my terms, Liam."

I take a slow sip of coffee. Outside the kitchen window the city is doing its usual relentless thing — cars and noise and a grey-white sky that hasn't decided yet whether it means to snow. Inside, my twenty-two-year-old sister is looking at me with the calm authority of someone twice her experience, and I am thinking about loyalists and tracker apps and the particular footage of a woman leaving a ballet studio loose and warm in the afternoon cold.

There's a shape forming to all of this. A way through it that I couldn't see a week ago. It requires Mackenzie, and it requires Declan to come far enough back that I can reach him, and it requires the Irish to stop fracturing from the inside long enough for me to address what is fracturing from the outside.

None of that is simple. None of it is guaranteed.

But it's more than I had last week.

"I'll arrange a proper briefing," I tell her. "Tomorrow morning. You, me, and Conor."

She raises her mug. "See. That wasn't so hard."