Page 73 of The Dangerous Dance

I help her stand. She is unsteady and I steady her, my hands at her waist, and then I pull her toward me. I need the contact that is not about urgency.

She comes willingly. She wraps her arms around my bare back and presses her face into my neck and we stand there in the grey light, naked, the desk a disaster behind us, and I hold her and she holds me and nothing about this is clean or managed or operational.

"I am going to need a minute," she says against my neck.

"Take as many as you need."

She pulls back slightly. Looks at me. "That was."

"Yeah."

"Is it always going to be like this."

I think about weeks of wanting more of this. I think about the way she looked putting the case on the desk and choosing me over Viktor. I think about how always is a word I do not use, have not used in years, and how I want to use it now.

"I do not know," I say honestly. "I hope so."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Then she leans up and kisses me, soft this time, unhurried, and I feel the kiss all the way through me.

I gather her clothes from the floor. She gathers mine. We dress in the quiet of a room that has not quite returned to being a room. The Brennan file is on the floor. The case is in the drawer. The grey light has gone the colour of late afternoon turning into evening.

She crosses to the couch. She does not ask. She lowers herself onto it the way someone does when they have decided to be there for a while.

I follow her.

I sit. She turns into me. My arm goes around her and her head finds the place on my shoulder where it apparently fits, and we sit like that, dressed but not really, the office around us settling into the specific quiet of a room that has been used for something other than its usual purpose.

I look at the ceiling.

I file the way she fits against me under the growing collection of things Nadia does to me that I will never be able to explain in a debrief.

"You're thinking very loudly," she says, without looking at me.

"Occupational habit."

"What are you thinking about."

I look at the ceiling. "Friday," I say. "And all the things between now and Friday."

She turns her head. "Declan."

"Yes."

"Are you ready."

I consider the question with the honesty it deserves. "I don't know if ready is the right measure for it." I look at the ceiling. "I know what I'm going to do. I know why I'm going to do it. Whether I'm ready for the version of it that actually happens — that's a different question."

She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Tell him about Connolly before."

"I know."

"I mean it. The order matters."

"I know it does." I turn my head to look at her. "You told me. Finn told me. Apparently it's obvious to everyone except the person who has to do it."

"It's obvious because we're not you," she says. "We don't have twenty years of brother in the room." She holds my gaze. "That's the thing you'll be fighting in there as much as Declan. Your own history with him."

I look at her.