Page 18 of The Dangerous Dance

"Now I've confirmed." The apartment is quiet. Dara's light is visible under her door. I'm standing in the kitchen in my coat because I haven't taken it off yet, and the cold from outside is still on me, and I am very tired in the specific way of someone who has been performing two different versions of themselves for the past week. "The listening device will be placed tomorrow night. I'll have results for you by Friday."

"And Costello."

"Being managed," I say.

"He let you go once. He may not be inclined toward patience a second time."

"He's not holding women," I say. "Not anymore. I know his history. I know why he won't." I say it with confidence, because I do know this, and because it is the thing I've built my operational approach around — his specific guilt, his specific need to be a different kind of leader than he's been. But there is a small and inconvenient part of me that knows I'm also using it as reassurance about something else, some other question about him that I'm not ready to look at directly.

"Don't rely on sentiment," Viktor says. "Men like Costello have histories. Histories end."

"I know."

"The device by Friday, Nadia."

"The device by Friday."

He hangs up.

I stand in my kitchen for a moment longer. I take my coat off and hang it on the back of a chair and stand there with it in my hand before I put it down.

The tracker is in the coat lining. A small, clever thing. The size of a button.

He put it on me during the thirty seconds he had me on the warehouse floor, which means his hands were doing two things at once, which means he was thinking past the immediate problem to the next one even while the immediate problem was still happening.

I sit down at the kitchen table. I press my thumb against the coat lining until I can feel the small hard shape of it through the fabric.

He thought ahead. He planned for the possibility that letting me go would mean losing me, and he prepared for it before he made the decision. That is not the behavior of a man acting on sentiment. That is the behavior of a man who is, underneath whatever guilt or history or changing values he is carrying, still very good at this.

I should be more worried about that than I am.

I leave the coat on the chair and go to bed.

I think about the tracker for longer than I should, and then I think about his face in the dark warehouse, and then I make myself stop thinking about either of those things and close my eyes.

Friday, the device. Then the next thing, and the thing after that.

One step, then the next. My father's voice, steady and specific.

One step, Nadenka. Anyone can manage one step.

I close my eyes.

I almost sleep.

CHAPTER 8

Nadia

He comes on a Thursday.

I know it's him before I see his face, which is a fact I find annoying and file away to examine later when I have the energy for self-honesty. What I tell myself in the moment is that it's the quality of the stillness in the doorway — the way people who are used to being the most dangerous thing in a room stand when they enter a new space. A contained readiness that doesn't announce itself but is visible if you know what to look for. I know what to look for. I've been trained to know.

What I don't tell myself in the moment, because it isn't useful, is that I've been half-expecting him.

Petya is running a small group through centre work when he arrives. There are four of us in the studio today — me, Dara, a teenage girl named Cora who has real talent and no discipline yet, and a woman in her thirties named Brigid who comes three times a week with the focused dedication of someone treating ballet as a form of controlled suffering. Petya has us moving through a sequence she's been refining for the past week, with a particular emphasis on the transition between positions.

You can't fake a transition, she told me on Tuesday. The audience forgives a held position that isn't perfect. They don't forgive a transition that isn't true. The transition is where you find out who someone actually is.