Page 42 of The Dangerous Dance

I look at him. "That's the version where you've decided the risk of keeping me close outweighs the benefit."

"It's the version where I'm trying to find something sustainable."

"It's the version where you've decided to be sensible about this."

He holds my gaze. "Nadia⁠—"

"I don't want to go back to the apartment," I say.

The words come out before I've fully decided to say them, which is the thing that has been happening with him since the warehouse, the failure of the usual gap between deciding and saying. He looks at me and I look at him and the flat is very quiet.

"What do you want," he says. Not challenging. Actually asking.

I look at him in the kitchen of this flat above a laundromat on a Sunday morning in a city that didn't care that I arrived in it, and I think about what I want with the specific honesty that his actual question seems to require.

"I want to be useful," I say. "Not to Viktor. To — something that isn't Viktor." I move away from the window, toward the table, toward him, not with the choreography of the attempt three days ago but with something more direct and therefore more difficult. "I have things Viktor doesn't know I have. Contacts my father left me. Names and routes and financing details that aren't in any operational file because my father kept them separate, and when he died he left them in a form only I can access." I stop at the edge of the table. "I can give you those. I can be an asset. A real one, not a managed one."

He is very still. "You'd burn your father's network."

"I'd use it. For something he'd have wanted it used for." I hold his gaze. "My father didn't die because he was loyal to the wrong people. He died because he eventually wasn't, and they found out before he had somewhere else to be." I pause. "I want somewhere else to be."

"With the Irish."

"With you," I say. And then, because I've apparently abandoned the pretense entirely this evening: "Under your protection. Working for your operation. Earning it." I hold his eyes. "Please."

The please lands the way it lands when it's real rather than strategic, which he can hear because he's been listening for the difference for five days.

He stands.

He moves around the table and stops in front of me. We are standing approximately where we've been standing in the warehouse and the studio and the market — the specific geography of two people who keep arriving at the same proximity — and this time neither of us is pretending to be there for a different reason.

"If I give you protection," he says, "it means you're under my authority. Which means when I tell you something, you take it seriously. When I tell you something is dangerous, you don't decide you know better."

"I often do know better."

"I know you do." Something at the corner of his mouth. "I'm asking you to tell me when you think that and let me decide, rather than just acting on it."

"That's a significant constraint."

"Yes."

"For someone with my skill set."

"Especially for someone with your skill set." He holds my gaze. "Do you understand what I'm actually asking."

I look at him. "You're asking me to trust you."

"Yes."

"That's very direct."

"I've found it's the only approach that works."

I look at him for a long moment. At the tired eyes and the careful face and the man who checked the circulation twice and left the window unlatched and brought the coffee back without asking and has been sitting two feet away from me for five days making an argument to himself that I've been watching him make and waiting to see which way it landed.

I reach up.

I close the distance.