Page 87 of The Dangerous Dance

"Sunday," she says. "West corridor briefing."

"I'll be there," I say.

She goes.

Declan is the last to leave. He comes to the study door and he looks at his brother and he says: "The men. Tomorrow. Two of them came back already."

"Good," Liam says.

"Two others won't." He says it without inflection. "I'll handle it."

"I know you will."

A pause. Declan looks at me briefly. Then back at Liam. "Handle it carefully," he says, meaning me. Meaning us. Meaning all of it.

"I know," Liam says.

Declan goes.

The compound is quiet.

Liam is on the couch in the study with his head tipped back and his eyes closed and the particular quality of a man who has done everything the day required of him and has arrived at the part where the body claims what the day cost it. I'm at the desk with the burner, composing the message to Viktor that I've been constructing all evening — the managed version, the one that buys another week of patience without confirming anything he's trying to confirm.

I send it.

I close the burner.

I look at him on the couch.

"Come here," he says, without opening his eyes.

I cross the room. I sit beside him on the couch, and he shifts without looking, the automatic adjustment of someone making room, and his arm comes around my shoulders and I settle against him with the specific ease of someone who has been fighting their own body's preferences about this for long enough that finally following them is a relief.

His heartbeat is slow and even. He's been running on controlled adrenaline since before dawn and it's all coming down now.

"Declan said it twice," I say. "Handle it carefully."

"I'm handling it carefully," he says. His voice is lower than usual, the tiredness in it.

"By telling him you're in love with me in a study while your face looks like that."

"The face is incidental." A pause. "He needed to know. People who need to know things should know them."

I look at the ceiling. "That's a very specific philosophy."

"It's the only one I've found that doesn't produce regret." He is quiet for a moment. "I spent a long time not telling people things that needed to be said. It never ended the way I wanted it to."

I think about his history. About Rina, and the specific weight of that, and the version of himself he was then and the version sitting beside me now. "The girl," I say. "Rina. What was it. When you were — when you had her."

He is quiet.

"You don't have to⁠—"

"I thought if I controlled the situation completely I could control the outcome," he says. "That if she had no other options she'd eventually — choose it. Choose me." He pauses. "What I didn't understand was that the absence of other options isn't a choice. It's just imprisonment. And what you get from someone who's imprisoned isn't love. It's survival."

I sit with that.

"When I understood that," he says, "I couldn't — I couldn't keep it. I let her go and I've been trying to understand the difference, since. Between taking and being chosen." He pauses. "Between holding someone so they can't leave and being someone they want to stay for."