Page 37 of The Dangerous Dance

She looks at me. Something in her face changes — not dramatically, not a collapse of anything. Just a small internal shift, the kind that happens when someone says a true thing that you have been carrying as a question for long enough that hearing it stated as a fact does something you didn't entirely expect.

"You were trained as one," I say. "That's different."

She is quiet for a moment. Then she picks up her mug and finds it empty and looks at it with the expression of someone who has run out of something to hold.

I get up and take it to the kitchen and refill it without asking, and when I bring it back she takes it with both hands and says nothing, which is sometimes the most complete response available.

We sit in the quiet above the laundromat.

Outside, the car park is lit by one yellow security light that throws long shadows across the concrete. The city does its city thing beyond it, constant and indifferent.

I stay on the couch.

She stays on the floor.

And neither of us suggests anything different, which is its own kind of answer to a question neither of us has asked yet.

CHAPTER 15

Nadia

Liam leaves at eight-fifteen with the specific quality of someone who has checked three things twice and is still not entirely comfortable leaving. He tells Roise what he needs from the Cork contact by end of day. He tells Mackenzie — and this is delivered with the weighted directness of a man who knows he's not going to be fully obeyed and is issuing the instruction anyway — not to do anything he'd need to be informed of. He looks at me last, and what's in his expression is a thing I'm getting better at reading. The version of trust that comes with conditions attached. I'm extending this because I've decided to, not because I don't see the risk.

"I'll be back by four," he says.

"We'll be fine," Mackenzie says, in the tone of someone who has already planned her afternoon.

He looks at her. He looks at me. He leaves.

The door closes.

The three of us exist in the flat together for a moment of mutual assessment that is almost formal in its structure, and then Mackenzie puts the kettle on and Roise opens her tablet and I go to the window and look at the car park because I need something to do with my eyes that isn't the room.

I've been at this safehouse five days.

I came here with Liam after I walked into his warehouse, handed him the receiver Viktor gave me, and told him I was finished running the operation I'd been sent to run. I gave him the timeline. I gave him the device locations. I gave him the next three phases of what I'd been asked to do and which contacts I'd been asked to make. I did all of this without asking him for anything in return except — and I was specific about this — that he not call it in until I'd had a night to think about whether I could stand what I'd just done.

That was four days ago. I haven't been able to leave since, partly because Liam is not yet sure I'm what I appear to be, partly because Viktor will know I've gone dark within forty-eight hours of my next missed check-in and the safehouse is the only place I have where the answer to that doesn't matter yet, and partly because I haven't been able to fully answer the question I told Liam I needed the night to think about, which was whether I have the texture to be a person who walked away rather than a person who fell.

So the position I'm in, which is the position that depends on whether the woman across the kitchen with the tablet is in love with the man whose decisions are currently keeping me alive, is precarious in a way I am still calibrating against. Roise is the closest thing this organization has to a director of operations. If she decides I'm a threat to him, she has the leverage to make that decision into a logistical fact. Liam has held it back. So far.

The problem with Roise is that she is very good at her job.

I identified this within the first hour of her being here yesterday. Someone who is bad at their job presents exploitable gaps. Someone who is good at it presents a surface. Roise is all surface. Her responses to Liam are efficient and competent and give me nothing to work with in terms of understanding the interior of the situation, which I need to understand because the interior of the situation directly affects whether I'm safe under this roof.

She is also, very clearly, in love with him. This I identified within approximately four minutes of her arrival yesterday, and I have since confirmed it through seventeen separate data points that I have not shared with anyone because doing so would serve no operational purpose and would also reveal that I've been counting.

She knows that I know. I can see it in the way she looks at me when she thinks I'm not looking, which is the specific look of someone who has accurately assessed a threat and has decided to treat it as professionally as possible. She is treating me as professionally as possible. It is impressively done. It is also making me want to do something petty, which is not a quality I'm proud of and which I'm blaming on five days in a safehouse above a laundromat.

Mackenzie sets a mug of tea down beside Roise and another beside my elbow at the window and stays in the kitchen, which I note. Liam asked her to bring me in. Mackenzie has interpreted bring me in as stay in the room while she is in the room with anyone whose loyalty isn't already accounted for. This is correct of her. It is also the reason I'm about to say what I'm going to say in front of both of them rather than just to Roise.

I turn from the window.

"The Galway-7 file," I say. "Is that the Cork financing route, or the supplemental Bayonne analysis?"

Roise looks up. Her expression is neutral. "I'm not going to discuss the contents of the Cork correspondence with you."

"I'm not asking you to." I cross to the table and sit. "I'm telling you what's in it, and then you can decide whether what I have to add is worth your time."