Liam
The safehouse is a two-bedroom flat above a laundromat in Sunnyside that smells permanently of warm fabric and has a view of a car park that I find, in a specific and difficult-to-articulate way, restful.
It is not on any of the registered property lists.
It is not known to Declan or to Roise or to anyone beyond me and Conor, and I told Conor last night only that I was using the Sunnyside location for a few days and not to flag it unless something critical emerged.
Conor's response was: Understood. And then, after a pause that carried a specific weight: Anything you need sent over?
I told him food and to charge it to the discretionary account. He asked no further questions, which is either professional discretion or the specific tact of a man who has been working alongside me long enough to recognize the particular situation without being told what it is.
I'm not entirely sure what it is myself. That's part of the problem.
She slept, the first night, in the way of someone who hasn't been sleeping enough and whose body has decided that the argument is over regardless of what the mind wants.
She was on the couch at half past eleven with her coat still on and her shoes still on and the conversation we'd started about Viktor's timeline unfinished between us, and I looked at her for a moment and then I got a blanket from the bedroom cupboard and put it over her and went to the kitchen and made coffee and sat at the table with Viktor's name in my head and the receiver she'd given me on the table in front of me.
She handed me the receiver. Which means the device in the warehouse is inert.
Which means she burned her own operation — not entirely, not permanently, the device can be reactivated with a secondary receiver that Viktor presumably has, but she handed me the control of it as a gesture and gestures in this life are not small things.
I sat with the coffee and the receiver and the sound of the city outside and the specific quiet of a woman sleeping in the next room, and I thought about what I was going to tell Conor tomorrow and what I was going to tell the Italians at the meeting that Marco was expecting and what I was going to tell myself about why I'd driven her here rather than making the call that every clear operational instinct I have was suggesting I make.
I didn't arrive at clean answers to any of those questions.
I made more coffee.
By the second day I've constructed something that resembles a reason to be here rather than at the compound.
It is a working reason — there are things I can do from the safehouse that I cannot do as efficiently from anywhere more visible, primarily the secondary analysis of the Bayonne yard records and a set of correspondence with a contact in Cork who has information about Russian financing routes that he'll only transmit through channels that require my personal encryption key.
These are real tasks. They take real time.
They also take approximately four hours, which leaves the remainder of the day less accounted for.
I work at the kitchen table. She works at the other end of it, which is an arrangement that happened without discussion on the second morning when she got up and made coffee — she makes better coffee than I do, which I've decided not to mention — and sat down at the far end with her phone and the particular focused stillness of someone running their own internal calculations.
We work in parallel. We speak when something requires speaking and otherwise we don't, and I find, with the kind of surprise that tells you something about what you've gotten used to, that the silence is not uncomfortable.
My phone rings at intervals. Mackenzie is the most persistent.
She calls at nine, which I let go to voicemail. At eleven, which I answer briefly and tell her I'm working from an alternate location and everything is fine. At two, which I answer and which produces the following exchange:
"Where are you."
"Working."
"You said that at eleven."
"It's still true."
"Liam." Her voice has the specific quality it gets when she's decided that being patient has served its purpose and she's ready to be direct.
"Declan's been talking to Connolly again.
I saw them together this morning at the east building and Connolly had that face he gets when he thinks he's winning something. "
I set down my pen. Across the table, Nadia does not look up from her phone, but I see the slight shift in her posture that means she's listening. "What time."
"Half nine. I was on my way in and they were coming out. Declan saw me and said something to Connolly and Connolly left. But Liam — he looked—" She stops. "He didn't look like himself."
"How did he look."
A pause. "Like he was trying to decide something."
I sit with that. Declan deciding something with Connolly in proximity is either Declan doing what I asked — keeping his own counsel, working the south distribution plan, maintaining his relationships — or it's Declan doing what Connolly wants, which is the version I've been trying to prevent by giving Declan the specific purpose of keeping Mackenzie safe and occupied.
The irony of Mackenzie reporting on Declan while I'm supposed to be keeping her out of it is not lost on me.
"Go home," I tell her.
"I'm not—"
"Kenzie." I use the same tone I used when she was sixteen and about to do something inadvisable, which is a tone I hoped I'd retired by now. "Go home. I'll deal with Connolly."
"You're not here to deal with anything."
"I'll be back tomorrow."
"You said that yesterday."
"Tomorrow," I say with more certainty than I have, and she makes a sound that means she knows I don't have it but is going to let me keep it for now, and hangs up.
I set the phone on the table.
Nadia says, without looking up: "Your sister."
"Yes."
"She sounds competent."
"She's twenty-two."
"I'm twenty-one," she says. "Competence isn't a function of age."
I look at her. She continues looking at her phone. I pick up my pen.
"What's Connolly," she says, still not looking up.
"Declan's problem. My problem through Declan."
"A loyalist?"
"Yes."
She nods. Not pushing further, which I've noticed she does — she takes what she's offered and she doesn't press for the remainder, which is either trained restraint or genuine respect for the boundary. I'm not sure which and I'm not sure it matters.
"The meeting with the Italians," I say. "I postponed it."
Now she looks up. "By how long."
"Three days." I meet her eyes. "I told Marco there was a development I needed to assess before we sat down. He accepted it." I pause. "I'm going to need to tell them something. When we do meet."
"I know."
"What I tell them depends on what you tell me."
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she looks back at her phone. "Give me tonight," she says. "I need to think through what I can say and what I can't say and where the line is."
"All right."
"You're going to disagree with where I put the line."
"Probably," I say. "Tell me anyway."
She almost does something with her mouth that isn't quite a smile. It's the closest she's come to one in two days and I note it with the same involuntary attention I've been noting everything about her and go back to the Bayonne records.
The third morning is when she tries to leave.
I hear her at half past six, which is earlier than she's been moving, which is the first signal.
I'm already at the kitchen table — I don't sleep past five-thirty as a rule, one of the many ways this life has reorganized my biology — and I hear her in the bedroom and then I hear the sound of the window being evaluated.
I set down my coffee.
The bedroom window looks out on the car park.
It's a twelve-foot drop to a surface that is partially concrete and partially the metal roof of the laundromat's exterior unit.
It's survivable, particularly for someone with the physical capability I've observed, but it's not clean, and she's smart enough to know that I've already mapped the external exits from this location.
I hear her try the window. I hear it open — I left it unlatched because locking windows feels like a statement I wasn't ready to make — and then I hear her stop.
She comes out of the bedroom two minutes later, dressed and carrying her coat, and she stops when she sees me at the table.
"Good morning," I say.
She looks at me. Then at the window she came from. Then back at me. "You left it unlatched."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because I wanted to see what you'd do when you found it." I pick up my coffee. "And because locking windows is a thing I'm trying not to do anymore."
Something moves through her expression. She sets the coat on the back of the chair and sits down and the attempt to leave is concluded without either of us needing to name what it was.
For about four hours.
The seduction attempt begins at two in the afternoon, which I respect on a technical level because the afternoon is the correct time for it — I've been working for six hours, my attention is on the Cork correspondence, I'm tired in the specific way of sustained concentration, and she's had the morning to observe the pattern and identify the window.
She comes to stand beside me at the table, close enough that I'm aware of her in the way I'm always aware of her in any room and more so now.
She leans down to look at the screen, which brings her closer, which is the first movement.
Her hand comes to rest on the table near mine, which is the second.
"What's this," she says, looking at the screen.
"Financing routes." My voice comes out even, which costs me something.
"It's encrypted."
"Yes."
"Can I look." She reaches across me, which requires her to lean across me, which is the third movement, and she is warm and she smells like the laundromat and something else underneath it, and I am forty-one years old and not a fool but I am also, in this specific moment, a man who has been sitting two feet away from her for three days and who has a file on a private server and who stood in a dry cleaner on a Tuesday morning to avoid seeing her because he wasn't ready.
I catch her wrist.
Not the grip from the warehouse — not restraint, just a stop.
She goes still. We are very close. I can see her calculating, which is the thing about her that I find simultaneously maddening and more interesting than most things — the calculation is always visible if you know what to look for, the tiny adjustments as she assesses what's working and what isn't.
"Nadia," I say.
She looks at me. The calculation is still there but something else has joined it — something that was there in the warehouse when I let her go and in the studio when she asked about Rina and at the market when she told me to come on Saturdays, something that isn't performance and which she hasn't fully accounted for herself.
"Don't," I say. It comes out quieter than I intended and carrying more than the word strictly contains.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she straightens.
"I need to get out of here," she says. The performance is gone. It's just the true version, plain and tired. "Not forever. Not to run. I just — I can't be in this flat for another full day without—" She stops. "I'm not built for staying still."
"I know."
"Then you know this isn't going to work indefinitely."
"I know that too."
I stand. I go to the drawer beside the sink and I take out the zip ties I put there on the first day, because I've been doing this long enough to prepare for contingencies I hoped wouldn't become necessary, and I look at them and I look at her and I think about windows and what I'm trying not to be.
"The wrist," I say. "Just one. To the chair rail." I hold her eyes. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to go make some calls and come back, and then we're going to have the conversation we've been not having, and then I'm going to figure out what comes after that." I pause. "I know this isn't—"
"Just do it," she says. Flat, resigned, but not frightened. She holds her wrist out.
I secure the zip tie with enough room that it won't bite and check the circulation twice, which she notices and which produces an expression I can't entirely read — something between frustration and the specific softness of someone receiving unexpected care and not knowing what to do with it.
"I'll be twenty minutes," I say.
"Liam." She says my name the way I said hers, the first time, with the weight of something that's been said privately before it's said out loud.
I stop.
"Don't take longer than twenty minutes," she says.
I don't.