Page 78 of The Dangerous Dance

I watch the recalculation move through his face. The same recalculation I've seen in other men in other rooms — the moment they stop running through escape routes and start running through what they can preserve by being useful in the final minutes. Connolly is good at that math. He starts speaking before either of us has to ask.

He gives us the names — three I expected and two I didn't. He gives us the contact protocol Viktor used. He gives us the locations of two drops he was scheduled to make this month and the timing of the next confirmation Viktor was expecting from him. He talks for eleven minutes without being interrupted, and when he is finished he stops, and the room is quiet, and he knows what comes next.

"For what it's worth," he says.

I wait.

"I believed some of it." He meets my eyes. "About the Italians. Not all. Some."

"I know," I say. "It's what made you good at it."

Declan steps forward.

I look at my brother. He looks at me. There is no question in either of our faces about who is doing this.

Declan does it. Once, clean, with the small handgun Conor handed him at the door. Connolly is on the floor before the sound has fully finished moving through the room.

Declan stands looking down at him for a moment longer than the act required. Then he hands the weapon back to Conor and walks out into the back hall without speaking.

I follow him.

In the back hall he stops with one hand against the wall. He breathes. He doesn't say anything for a long minute. Then: "I have done that before. It's never been someone I knew that well."

"I know."

He pushes off the wall.

We go out to the car.

Afterward, Declan and I stand in the courtyard at the compound in the cold and neither of us says anything for a while.

Then he says: "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," I agree.

We go back inside.

CHAPTER 24

Liam

The morning of the fight is a Friday that smells like cold concrete and the particular quiet that precedes things that can't be taken back.

I'm up at five. Not because I slept badly — I slept with the specific completeness of someone whose body has accepted that rest is a practical requirement rather than a luxury — but because there is a quality to the morning before something significant that I've never been able to sleep through. I don't try. I get up and I make coffee and I stand at the window and I think about what today is.

The courtyard behind the compound is where these things happen. Have always happened, in our family — the specific geography of it is part of the tradition, the grey rectangle of it that was my father's before it was mine, that has seen a version of this same thing play out in previous generations when men who shared blood reached the point where words had stopped doing the necessary work and something else was required.

I'm not romantic about it. It's a practical solution to a specific problem, and the fact that it's also what my father would have done is incidental. I'm doing it because it's the thing that will reach Declan in a register that conversation and intermediaries and partial truces haven't reached him, and because after last night — after Connolly, and what we did about Connolly, and the way Declan's face looked in the courtyard after — today is the right day.

Conor knows. He's been managing the logistics since yesterday, which means the space will be clear and the necessary people will be present and the unnecessary people will not be.

Finn and Gianna arrived last night. I heard them come in at half past ten, heard Gianna's voice in the hall, heard Finn say something to Conor in the low register he uses when he's assessing a situation. I didn't go down. They know where I am and they'll find me when they're ready and I wasn't ready for conversation last night.

I stand at the window and drink my coffee and wait for the morning to decide what it is.

Finn finds me at half past six.

He comes into the study with the particular quality he has — unhurried, observant, carrying the weight of his own history with this family in a way that has changed over the years from something oppressive to something more like hard-won ballast. He looks at me. I look at him. He pours himself a coffee from the pot I've made and sits in the chair across from the desk.