Page 59 of The Dangerous Dance

I go back to the March gap.

But I'm not reading the same paragraph anymore.

CHAPTER 20

Nadia

The message from Viktor comes on a Thursday morning at seven forty-two, while I am at the coffee cart on the corner of my street, which means I read it in public, which means whatever my face does when I read it happens in front of the man working the cart who has learned my order and now has opinions about my mornings.

I read it twice.

Then I put my phone in my pocket and take my coffee and walk back to the apartment and stand in the kitchen and read it again on the inside of my eyelids because I have the specific kind of memory that retains things whether or not retaining them is comfortable.

The message is operational in format. Clinical. Viktor's preferred mode. The operational content is as follows: an asset in the Italian shipping network has identified an opportunity in their lower Manhattan offices. A one-time access window, forty-eight hours, requiring a physical presence inside the building. The job is surveillance installation — the same category of work I did at the Irish secondary warehouse, scaled up. The objective is to get eyes and ears inside the Italian operational center.

The asset assigned to the job is Dara.

I set my coffee down.

I pick it up again.

I think about Dara's knee, which ended her serious dance career at seventeen and which in cold weather gives her a gait that is slightly off her center — something any competent security professional would notice in a building where you're not supposed to be noticed. I think about Dara's face when she performs composure, which is different from my face when I perform composure in the specific way that matters. She does it with her mouth and I do it with my eyes, and hers reads, to someone paying attention, as effortful. I think about the forty-eight-hour window, which means Dara has two days to execute a job inside an Italian facility where the security will be Rosso-standard.

I think about what happens when an asset is caught inside a target facility.

I sit down.

I stand up.

I call Viktor.

He answers on the third ring. "Nadia."

"The Italian job," I say. "Reassign it."

A pause. The particular pause of a man who was not expecting this specific form of response and is deciding how to handle it. "The assignment has been made."

"I know. I'm telling you to unmake it." I keep my voice even. Factual. The clinical register he responds to. "Dara is not the right asset for a physical infiltration of a Rosso-adjacent facility. Her movement pattern under pressure is identifiable. Her composure performance reads as effortful to trained observers. She'll be made within the first twenty minutes and then we lose not only the operation but the asset and whatever goodwill the Italians extend to targets they catch rather than—" I stop. "Reassign it."

"And who would you suggest instead," Viktor says, in the tone of someone already several steps ahead of where they're pretending to be.

"I'll do it."

"You're already running the Irish operation."

"The Irish operation is in a phase that doesn't require my physical presence every day." This is half true and I say it with the confidence of the half that's true. "I can run both."

"This is not your assignment."

"I'm making it my assignment." I pause. "Viktor. I need Dara out of this one. I'm giving you a better asset in exchange. That's the offer."

Another pause. Longer. "Why," he says.

The question is simple and is the most dangerous question he could ask, because why is the one that requires an answer I can't give him.

"Because she's not ready for this level of exposure," I say. "And losing her is a cost we don't need to take on when there's an alternative."

He is quiet for a long moment. I let the silence exist without filling it.