Page 67 of The Dangerous Dance

She is very quiet for a moment. "Are you going to do it."

I look at the case. At the two capsules, clear and small and precise. "He told me I matter," I say.

Dara looks at me.

"He said it like it was a fact," I say. "Not like he was trying to convince me of it. Like it was just a thing that was true and he was telling me because I should know." I look up at her. "I don't know what to do with that."

"I think you do know," she says gently. "I think that's why you're sitting here telling me about it instead of already having done it."

"If I don't do it he'll give it to you."

"Maybe." She wraps both hands around her cup. "Or maybe it's time to stop letting Viktor decide what happens to both of us." She meets my eyes. "You've been building something there. With him, with the Irish. I can see it in the way you talk about it. I can see it in the way you don't talk about it." She pauses. "That's worth more than Viktor's next assignment."

"It could get you killed," I say. "If I go against him and he retaliates and you're⁠—"

"I know the risks I'm in," she says. "I've been in them since before you arrived. Don't make your decision based on what you think I need." She holds my gaze. "Make it based on what's true."

I look at the case.

What's true is that I have two capsules in a contact lens case and a man who said you matter and a choice that my father made once at forty-four and that I'm being asked to make at twenty-one, except mine is the inverse — not declining to hurt someone, but declining to hurt someone, which sounds like the same thing and is a different thing entirely.

"If I go back," I say. "If I walk back in there. He's going to know I left. He's going to know I went to Viktor."

"Yes."

"He'll be angry."

"Probably."

"He might not—" I stop. "He might decide it's too much. That the risk of me is too high to continue."

"He might," Dara says. "That's a real possibility." She looks at me steadily. "Is it a reason not to go."

I sit with the question.

I think about everything I've thought about this morning and the morning before it and the mornings before that, all the things I've filed in the unlabeled section and refused to look at directly. I open the section. I look.

The case goes in my pocket.

Not to use it. To carry it back to him and put it on the table between us the way I put the receiver on the table in the warehouse, which is the gesture that means: here is the thing I could do, and here is me not doing it, and I need you to know both of those things are true.

"I'm going back," I say.

Dara exhales. Not with relief exactly. With the specific quality of someone releasing something they've been holding without knowing they were holding it. "Okay."

"If Viktor moves against you⁠—"

"Tell Liam," she says. "If you trust him, trust him with that too."

I look at her.

"Go," she says. "And Nadia." She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine briefly, once. "Come back from this one."

"I always come back," I say.

"I know," she says. "I just needed to say it."

I stand. I put on my coat. I pick up the burner and I walk to the door and I stop.