Page 98 of The Dangerous Dance

"You're under my protection," I say. "Not as an asset. Not as an operative. As—" I find the word. "As mine. Which in this world means something specific and I need you to understand what it means."

She looks at me.

"It means Viktor doesn't get to make decisions about your life anymore," I say. "It means any move he makes against you is a move against this family and against the Italian alliance, and I will make sure he understands that cost before he calculates whether to pay it." I hold her gaze. "It means you're not alone in this."

She looks at me for a long time.

"He killed my father," she says.

"I know."

"And he recruited me. And he sent me here to be useful and then to disappear."

"Yes."

Her jaw tightens. Not with the fear — through it, past it, into the thing that lives on the other side of fear when someone has been trained since childhood to find the thing on the other side of fear. "Then I want to be the one who ends it," she says. "Not you. Not the Italians. Me."

I look at her.

"That's my condition," she says. "For whatever comes next. I'm in the room when it ends."

I hold her gaze for a long moment.

"All right," I say.

She nods.

She looks back at the screen.

"Liam," she says.

"Yes."

"He never planned to let me live." She says it not as devastation — as the flat factual version, the way she says things when she's decided to look directly at them rather than around them. "My father died because they decided he was done being useful, and they sent me because they thought they could use me the same way, and they were going to kill me the same way." She pauses. "That's what I've been working for. That's what my father's network has been serving." She looks up. "I need you to know that I know that."

"I know you know," I say.

"And I need you to know that it changes things."

"I know that too."

She nods again. She closes the laptop. She puts her hands flat on the table and she looks at them for a moment, and what's in her face is not one thing but several things at once — anger and grief and the specific clarity of someone who has just seen the full shape of something they've been seeing only in pieces.

And underneath all of it, moving through it like a current under still water — something else.

Something that looks, in the specific and difficult-to-name way of things that don't have clean labels, like the beginning of done.

Done being someone else's operation.

Done being the weapon pointed at a target.

Done.

"Okay," she says, to her hands on the table.

"Okay," I say.

And I mean: I've got you.