Page 33 of The Dangerous Dance

The seduction attempt begins at two in the afternoon, which I respect on a technical level because the afternoon is the correct time for it — I've been working for six hours, my attention is on the Cork correspondence, I'm tired in the specific way of sustained concentration, and she's had the morning to observe the pattern and identify the window.

She comes to stand beside me at the table, close enough that I'm aware of her in the way I'm always aware of her in any room and more so now. She leans down to look at the screen, which brings her closer, which is the first movement. Her hand comes to rest on the table near mine, which is the second.

"What's this," she says, looking at the screen.

"Financing routes." My voice comes out even, which costs me something.

"It's encrypted."

"Yes."

"Can I look." She reaches across me, which requires her to lean across me, which is the third movement, and she is warm and she smells like the laundromat and something else underneath it, and I am forty-one years old and not a fool but I am also, in this specific moment, a man who has been sitting two feet away from her for three days and who has a file on a private server and who stood in a dry cleaner on a Tuesday morning to avoid seeing her because he wasn't ready.

I catch her wrist.

Not the grip from the warehouse — not restraint, just a stop. She goes still. We are very close. I can see her calculating, which is the thing about her that I find simultaneously maddening and more interesting than most things — the calculation is always visible if you know what to look for, the tiny adjustments as she assesses what's working and what isn't.

"Nadia," I say.

She looks at me. The calculation is still there but something else has joined it — something that was there in the warehouse when I let her go and in the studio when she asked about Rina and at the market when she told me to come on Saturdays, something that isn't performance and which she hasn't fully accounted for herself.

"Don't," I say. It comes out quieter than I intended and carrying more than the word strictly contains.

She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she straightens.

"I need to get out of here," she says. The performance is gone. It's just the true version, plain and tired. "Not forever. Not to run. I just — I can't be in this flat for another full day without—" She stops. "I'm not built for staying still."

"I know."

"Then you know this isn't going to work indefinitely."

"I know that too."

I stand. I go to the drawer beside the sink and I take out the zip ties I put there on the first day, because I've been doing this long enough to prepare for contingencies I hoped wouldn't become necessary, and I look at them and I look at her and I think about windows and what I'm trying not to be.

"The wrist," I say. "Just one. To the chair rail." I hold her eyes. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to go make some calls and come back, and then we're going to have the conversation we've been not having, and then I'm going to figure out what comes after that." I pause. "I know this isn't⁠—"

"Just do it," she says. Flat, resigned, but not frightened. She holds her wrist out.

I secure the zip tie with enough room that it won't bite and check the circulation twice, which she notices and which produces an expression I can't entirely read — something between frustration and the specific softness of someone receiving unexpected care and not knowing what to do with it.

"I'll be twenty minutes," I say.

"Liam." She says my name the way I said hers, the first time, with the weight of something that's been said privately before it's said out loud.

I stop.

"Don't take longer than twenty minutes," she says.

I don't.

CHAPTER 14

Liam

Mackenzie arrives at half past ten the following morning with Roise, a bag of groceries, and the expression of someone who has rehearsed what she's going to say and is ready to deliver it regardless of reception.

I hear them on the stairs before they knock. Two sets of footsteps — one decisive, one carefully neutral. I open the door before the knock lands.