Page 81 of The Dangerous Dance

He nods once.

That's all. That's the whole of it. He nods, and I nod back, and thirty years of being brothers and six months of being at war with each other and one morning in a cold courtyard settle into something that isn't resolution exactly but is the ground from which resolution might eventually grow.

Behind me I hear Mackenzie exhale.

We sit in the room off the main hall. The one with the bad lighting. His room.

Conor has brought ice and whiskey, because Conor is a practical man who understands what follows these things, and he's left us to it and closed the door. Declan has the ice at his ribs. I have it at my face, which Mackenzie examined with the focused attention of someone taking inventory and announced was going to be difficult to explain at the Italian meeting.

We drink the whiskey.

We are quiet for a while.

"Connolly's contacts," Declan says eventually. "How many."

"Still mapping. We know of three in the west corridor. Likely more." I look at the glass in my hand. "It's going to take time to clean out properly."

"I'll do it," he says.

I look at him.

"My mess," he says. "My men, my relationships, my — I brought him in, I maintained him, I listened to him." His jaw tightens. "I'll clean it."

"All right," I say.

He drinks. "The Russian girl."

I hold his gaze steadily. "Yes."

"How long."

"Two months, operationally. Recently — differently."

"She was sent to destabilize us."

"Yes."

"And now."

"She's working with us. On the Connolly intelligence, on Viktor's timeline, on the Italian pharmaceutical case." I meet his eyes. "She handed me the proof on Connolly, Declan. It came from her."

He is quiet for a moment. Processing the specific geometry of that — the thing that gave him back his clarity came from the woman who was sent to take it. "She's the reason you know," he says.

"Yes."

He looks at the glass. "That's complicated."

"Yes," I say. "It is."

"Are you—" He stops. "Is it⁠—"

"Yes," I say, before he finishes. "It is what you're thinking it is."

He absorbs this. Then: "That's going to be a problem."

"Probably," I say. "I'm working on the shape of the problem."

He looks at me with the expression he has when he thinks I've made a decision he disagrees with and has decided the moment isn't right to press it. "The loyalists," he says instead. "The men who've been following Connolly's lead. Not the ones he turned — the ones who just agreed with him because agreeing was easier than questioning."