Page 99 of The Dangerous Dance

And she hears it.

CHAPTER 28

Liam

The house is not the compound.

This is an important distinction and one I make deliberately, because the compound is known — to Conor, to Declan, to the loyalists who have been making their three-day decisions, to Viktor's network which has already demonstrated it can get eyes within a hundred yards of it. The compound is in files I don't control.

The house is different.

It's in Carroll Gardens, a brownstone I've owned through a shell company for six years and which appears in no Irish operational documentation because I bought it as the thing I've never fully allowed myself to have, which is somewhere that's just mine. No compound history, no family legacy, no organizational weight. Three floors, a garden in the back, and a top floor with windows that face east and get the morning light in a way that was the reason I bought it.

I've slept here maybe forty nights total. It's always clean because someone comes on Thursdays, and it's always quiet because nobody knows it exists except Conor, who knows because he's Conor, and Ailish, who knows because she drove me here once when I needed somewhere that wasn't the compound and she has never mentioned it since.

I tell Nadia about it in the car.

She listens with the focused attention she gives information. When I finish she is quiet for a moment. Then: "That's your private house."

"Yes."

"Not an operational location."

"No."

She looks at the window. "You're taking me to your private house."

"Yes."

She is quiet for a moment that has several things in it. "Liam⁠—"

"I know," I say.

"You'll die protecting me. If Viktor moves against the house⁠—"

"Viktor moving against me directly is a different calculation than Viktor sending someone for an asset he's classified as compromised. It's the difference between a cleanup operation and an act of war. He's not ready for an act of war." I hold her gaze briefly before turning back to the road. "The house is safer than the compound right now because nobody knows about it. And I plan to keep it that way."

"What does that mean."

"It means the only people who set foot in that house in the next week are people I've personally cleared who arrive through routing I've personally controlled. Same protocol we used at the laundromat. Vehicle changes, circuit routes, drop-offs at distance, on-foot final approach. Nobody walks up to that door. Nobody."

She looks at me. "And visitors."

"There won't be any. Not in the conventional sense. Conor will come because Conor is running my security and there is no version of this where he isn't on the ground. Anyone else I need to talk to, I go to them, or we talk by phone, or we use the protocol." I look at the road. "I'm not bringing the rest of my life to that house just because you're in it. The whole point is that you're somewhere they can't find."

She is quiet for a moment.

"All right," she says.

The house gets the reaction I expected from her, which is the reaction of someone who was prepared for an operational location and has received something else. She stands in the front hall and looks at it — the specific quality of a place that belongs to a person rather than to a function — and she looks at it with the expression she uses when she's received something she didn't anticipate.

"The garden," I say, because the evening light is still catching the back windows. "I keep meaning to do something with it."

"What kind of something."

"I have no idea," I say honestly. "Something that involves it being less like a rectangle of good intentions and more like a place."

She looks at the garden through the glass. "There's a tree."