Page 77 of The Dangerous Dance

"Old way," I say. "Tomorrow morning. You and me. No weapons. Winner is the head of the Irish and the loser accepts it and we move forward."

The room is very quiet.

Declan looks at me for a long moment. The way he looked at me when we were boys and I told him something he didn't want to hear but recognized as true.

"Connolly first," he says. "Before tomorrow."

"Yes."

"Tonight."

"That's what I was thinking," I say.

Something shifts in his face. The complicated weight of the last six months moving, not lifting entirely, but shifting into a different arrangement.

"All right," he says.

"All right to the fight or all right to Connolly."

"Both," he says. He meets my eyes. "But Connolly first."

I nod.

"Liam," Declan says.

I look at him.

"If you'd told me sooner. About Connolly. Would it have—" He stops.

"I don't know," I say honestly. "Maybe. Maybe not. He'd been working on you for months before I had anything to bring you." I hold his gaze. "But I should have tried."

He nods.

Connolly is at the bar he keeps on the south side. The one he's owned for fifteen years. The one where his men drink and his couriers pass envelopes and where he holds court three nights a week with the particular ease of a man who has built a small kingdom inside a larger one and stopped questioning whether the larger one will tolerate it indefinitely.

Conor pulls the car up at the rear entrance at half past nine. Declan and I get out. Two of Conor's men go in ahead and clear the back room and the office. By the time Connolly is brought back from the bar he is already past the point where any version of the next twenty minutes ends with him walking out, and he knows it. I can see him know it.

He sits in the chair we put him in. He puts his hands flat on his thighs. He looks at me, and then at Declan, and the second look takes longer than the first because Declan is the part of this he wasn't expecting to see.

"Liam," he says. The word is calm. Connolly has always been calm. It's part of what made him useful for as long as he was useful. "Whatever you've been told⁠—"

"Don't," I say.

He stops.

I take the folder out of my coat and put it on the table between us. I don't open it. I don't need to. He knows what's in it because he's the one who structured the payments inside it.

"Antwerp shell," I say. "Eight months. Viktor."

Connolly looks at the folder. He looks at me. He looks at Declan.

"Declan," he says, and there is a note in his voice that I recognize as the beginning of the speech he prepared for this contingency — the version where he turns to my brother and reminds him of the things he's been saying for months and asks him to consider, before he commits, what side of this he's actually on.

Declan looks at him.

"No," Declan says. Quietly. "You don't get to do that one."

Connolly closes his mouth.