Page 35 of The Dangerous Dance

"Because you're here," she says simply. "If it were just operational, you'd have handled it operationally."

I look at my twenty-two-year-old sister, who is standing in a safehouse above a laundromat in Sunnyside telling me things I already know with a clarity I find both useful and quietly humbling. "Her father was Aleksei Volkov," I say.

"The assassin."

"You know the name."

"I've been doing my reading." She crosses her arms. "He's dead."

"Three years. Killed by his own handlers for declining an assignment."

Something shifts in her expression. "And she knows this."

"Yes."

"And she's still working for the organization that killed him."

"She was," I say. "The situation is—" I stop. "Complicated."

Mackenzie looks at me for a long moment. Then she uncrosses her arms, which is her version of standing down. "Bring me in," she says. "Not as an observer. Actually bring me in. I can be useful here if you let me."

I look at her. I think about what I said to Declan — you were supposed to be here — and what it costs when people who should be beside you aren't. "All right," I say.

Her expression does the brief thing that means she wasn't entirely certain I'd say that. "Good." She picks up a grocery bag. "I'm going to put the food away and introduce myself properly and then you're going to stop treating this flat like a bunker and let some air in."

She goes to the kitchen. I hear her say something to Roise, who responds in a tone that is professionally warm and personally careful, and then I hear her cross toward the bedroom doorway and I hear her say to Nadia: "I'm making eggs. Do you eat eggs?"

A pause. Then Nadia's voice: "Yes."

"Good." A beat. "I'm also going to tell you that if you're playing my brother, I will make your life extremely difficult in ways that don't require physical violence and are therefore much harder to anticipate. Just so we both know where we stand."

Another pause. Longer.

Then Nadia says: "I appreciate the directness."

"Good," Mackenzie says again. "Eggs, then."

I give Roise the Cork materials and the Bayonne supplementals and find that having her here, working at the kitchen table with the focused competence she always brings, is less uncomfortable than I anticipated. She doesn't look at me with the weight she was carrying in the office. She looks at her screen, asks two clarifying questions about the Galway-7 encryption, and proceeds. Whatever she's feeling about the configuration of this flat and who is in it, she has placed it somewhere that isn't the surface of her work.

Mackenzie makes eggs for all four of us, which is a thing I wouldn't have predicted at seven this morning and which happens with a domestic ease that is either entirely genuine or is Mackenzie's most sophisticated social operation, and I honestly can't tell which.

We eat. Roise stays at the table. Mackenzie asks Nadia about the ballet studio, which produces the first real conversation I've heard Nadia have with someone other than me or Dara, and what I observe is this: she is different with Mackenzie than she is with me. Not less guarded, but guarded in a different register — she's not performing, she's not calculating, she's doing the thing I saw her do in the footage when she was with Dara at the café, which is being approximately herself. It's tentative. She hasn't decided yet whether Mackenzie is safe. But she's not deciding against it either.

Mackenzie, for her part, is doing what Mackenzie does with everyone she's assessing — asking questions that seem conversational and are actually precise, listening to the answers with the part of her that remembers everything, filing.

After lunch, Roise goes back to the correspondence and Mackenzie corners me in the hallway.

"Trojan horse," she says, quietly.

"What."

"I'm not saying she is one. I'm saying you need to be accounting for the possibility." She keeps her voice low and even. "She came to your warehouse voluntarily. She handed you the receiver. She's here in your safehouse telling you she wants to help. All of that is consistent with someone who has genuinely shifted her position." She meets my eyes. "It's also consistent with someone who's been tasked with getting as close to you as possible so that when the moment comes, she's already inside."

I hold her gaze. "I know."

"Say it like you're keeping it in the front of your mind rather than the back."

"Mackenzie—"