Page 53 of The Dangerous Dance

"And because the contact now knows I was looking, which means if Viktor has eyes on that network he'll know something was pulled on the Antwerp shell within the next forty-eight hours." She is steady, direct, giving me the full picture including the cost of the picture. "I didn't see another way to get you the confirmation in the timeframe you had."

"You burned the contact."

"I used the contact. The contact stays intact. But there's a trail that points back to someone pulling on a specific thread, and Viktor will eventually trace that thread." She pauses. "You have a window."

I nod. "All right." I look at the file. "This is good work."

She receives this without performance. "It's what I said I could do."

"I know." I meet her eyes. "One chance," I say. "That's what I told you. That's still the condition."

"I know."

"This is the chance." I hold her gaze. "Not because you've earned unlimited trust. Because you've done what you said you'd do. The trust gets built from here."

She nods. "That's fair."

"When Viktor traces the thread, what do you tell him."

"I tell him I was running a counter-intelligence check on a competing asset in the Antwerp network. That I suspected someone else was working the same territory and wanted to confirm before I reported to him." She says it with the ease of someone who built the cover at the same time she ran the operation. "It's believable. It's the kind of thing he'd expect from someone with my background."

"Will he accept it."

"For a while." She pauses. "Not indefinitely."

"How long."

"Two weeks. Three if I manage him carefully."

"Then we have two weeks," I say. "After the Declan situation is resolved, I'll bring you into a conversation about what comes next. How we use what you've given me without burning you to Viktor before we're ready."

She nods.

I look at the file. I think about four days and Marco's timeline and the fight at the end of the week and all the things that need to happen in sequence before any of this becomes something I can actually use. "Go back to the apartment tonight. I'll call you tomorrow."

She stands. "Liam."

I look up.

"When you fight Declan," she says. "Tell him about Connolly first."

"I'm planning to tell him after."

"Tell him before." She holds my gaze. "If he knows Connolly betrayed him before you fight, he's fighting the right thing. If he knows after, he'll think you told him to soften the loss." She pauses. "He needs to go in knowing."

I look at her.

She's right. She is, with the specific clarity of someone who has no personal history with Declan and can therefore see the geometry of it without the distortion of two decades of brotherhood, completely right.

"All right," I say.

She goes.

I sit in the study with the Connolly file and the Maspeth reports and the cold coffee and think about what she said about my sister calling her. About Mackenzie saying I'm proud of you and asking if she was all right.

About what it says that the two people who are apparently checking on each other are my twenty-two-year-old sister and a twenty-one-year-old Russian operative, and that the thing they seem to have found between them is something that resembles, without either of them having stated it directly, a provisional and careful form of solidarity.

I call Finn at seven.