Page 48 of The Dangerous Dance

"How many," she says, working.

"Three down. One critical. He'll make it."

"The product."

"Gone." I watch her hands. "It was coordinated. Professional. They knew the route."

She is quiet for a moment. "The distribution plan."

"Yes."

"Declan."

"Someone in Declan's circle," I say. "Not necessarily Declan." I say it with the specific care of a man who is trying very hard to be fair to his brother and who is finding the effort increasingly difficult. "Possibly Connolly."

She secures the dressing. She doesn't release my arm immediately, and the contact — her hands still at my wrist, warm and real — does something to the controlled temperature of my anger which is not helpful and which I cannot entirely account for.

She looks up.

We are very close in the small kitchen with the kit between us and the city outside doing its three-in-the-morning thing, and the quality of her eyes in this light is the quality I've been trying to file in the operational section of my thinking about her and which keeps failing to stay there.

She leans forward.

I stand up.

Not abruptly. Not with the quality of rejection. But with the deliberateness of a man who knows that if he doesn't move now the argument he's been making to himself is going to become a great deal more complicated.

She sits back. She reads it correctly — I can see her read it — and she doesn't push it, which is one of the things about her that I find most difficult, that she knows when not to push.

"Tell me what you're thinking," she says.

"What I'm thinking isn't useful right now."

"Tell me anyway."

I go to the window. The street below is empty in the specific way of streets at three in the morning, everything paused. "I'm thinking that Declan's been saying I've been compromised. That whatever I'm doing with a Russian operative is exactly what a man who's lost his judgment does. That my loyalists don't trust me, the Italians are watching me, three of my men are down, and I'm standing in the apartment of the person responsible for hitting the Italian supply routes instead of making the call that every clear operational instinct I have is telling me to make."

She is quiet.

"I'm thinking," I say, "that maybe he isn't wrong."

"He's wrong about the part that matters," she says. "Which is why."

"The why doesn't change the what, from outside this room."

"It changes everything, from inside it."

I look at the street. "I know." I turn around. "And that's the problem. That I'm making decisions inside this room that have consequences outside it, and the people outside it can't see the inside, and from where they're standing⁠—"

"You look like a man who's sleeping with the enemy," she says. Direct. Not cruel. Just the flat version of it.

"Yes."

She stands. She comes to where I'm standing at the window and stands beside me — not close, just in the same space, looking at the same empty street. "What do you want to do," she says.

"I need to deal with Declan," I say. "Not around him, not through Mackenzie, not through Ailish. I need to deal with him directly and finally and in a way that ends the question." I look at the window. "One way or the other."

"What does one way or the other mean."