Nadia
Liam leaves at eight-fifteen with the specific quality of someone who has checked three things twice and is still not entirely comfortable leaving.
He tells Roise what he needs from the Cork contact by end of day.
He tells Mackenzie — and this is delivered with the weighted directness of a man who knows he's not going to be fully obeyed and is issuing the instruction anyway — not to do anything he'd need to be informed of.
He looks at me last, and what's in his expression is a thing I'm getting better at reading.
The version of trust that comes with conditions attached.
I'm extending this because I've decided to, not because I don't see the risk.
"I'll be back by four," he says.
"We'll be fine," Mackenzie says, in the tone of someone who has already planned her afternoon.
He looks at her. He looks at me. He leaves.
The door closes.
The three of us exist in the flat together for a moment of mutual assessment that is almost formal in its structure, and then Mackenzie puts the kettle on and Roise opens her tablet and I go to the window and look at the car park because I need something to do with my eyes that isn't the room.
I've been at this safehouse five days.
I came here with Liam after I walked into his warehouse, handed him the receiver Viktor gave me, and told him I was finished running the operation I'd been sent to run.
I gave him the timeline. I gave him the device locations.
I gave him the next three phases of what I'd been asked to do and which contacts I'd been asked to make.
I did all of this without asking him for anything in return except — and I was specific about this — that he not call it in until I'd had a night to think about whether I could stand what I'd just done.
That was four days ago. I haven't been able to leave since, partly because Liam is not yet sure I'm what I appear to be, partly because Viktor will know I've gone dark within forty-eight hours of my next missed check-in and the safehouse is the only place I have where the answer to that doesn't matter yet, and partly because I haven't been able to fully answer the question I told Liam I needed the night to think about, which was whether I have the texture to be a person who walked away rather than a person who fell.
So the position I'm in, which is the position that depends on whether the woman across the kitchen with the tablet is in love with the man whose decisions are currently keeping me alive, is precarious in a way I am still calibrating against. Roise is the closest thing this organization has to a director of operations.
If she decides I'm a threat to him, she has the leverage to make that decision into a logistical fact. Liam has held it back. So far.
The problem with Roise is that she is very good at her job.
I identified this within the first hour of her being here yesterday.
Someone who is bad at their job presents exploitable gaps.
Someone who is good at it presents a surface.
Roise is all surface. Her responses to Liam are efficient and competent and give me nothing to work with in terms of understanding the interior of the situation, which I need to understand because the interior of the situation directly affects whether I'm safe under this roof.
She is also, very clearly, in love with him.
This I identified within approximately four minutes of her arrival yesterday, and I have since confirmed it through seventeen separate data points that I have not shared with anyone because doing so would serve no operational purpose and would also reveal that I've been counting.
She knows that I know. I can see it in the way she looks at me when she thinks I'm not looking, which is the specific look of someone who has accurately assessed a threat and has decided to treat it as professionally as possible.
She is treating me as professionally as possible.
It is impressively done. It is also making me want to do something petty, which is not a quality I'm proud of and which I'm blaming on five days in a safehouse above a laundromat.
Mackenzie sets a mug of tea down beside Roise and another beside my elbow at the window and stays in the kitchen, which I note.
Liam asked her to bring me in. Mackenzie has interpreted bring me in as stay in the room while she is in the room with anyone whose loyalty isn't already accounted for.
This is correct of her. It is also the reason I'm about to say what I'm going to say in front of both of them rather than just to Roise.
I turn from the window.
"The Galway-7 file," I say. "Is that the Cork financing route, or the supplemental Bayonne analysis?"
Roise looks up. Her expression is neutral. "I'm not going to discuss the contents of the Cork correspondence with you."
"I'm not asking you to." I cross to the table and sit. "I'm telling you what's in it, and then you can decide whether what I have to add is worth your time."
Mackenzie, at the counter, has stopped pretending to be busy.
Roise sets her tablet down. "Go on."
"The Cork contact has flagged a series of payment fragmentations he can't account for.
He thinks it's a laundering operation. He's wrong.
It's a financing structure being used to move operational funds through what looks like commercial activity.
The fragmentation is the point — not concealment, signaling.
Each fragment is a confirmation message to a counterparty that the next phase is funded.
" I keep my voice flat. "And the methodology is structurally identical to the cash flow we used to fund the Bayonne hit. "
Silence.
Then Mackenzie says, mildly: "We."
"The Russian operation," I say. "The one I was attached to.
Which is the same answer to the question Roise is about to ask, which is how I know any of this.
" I look at Roise. "It's a financing pattern designed by people I came up around.
The two-day lag in the clearing sequence is a tell.
If your Cork contact knows his business, that one detail will mean something to him. "
Roise looks at me for a long moment. I can see the calculation happening — the professional version of it, separate from the personal version that I can also see running underneath.
She is deciding whether the information I'm offering is useful enough to accept from a source she has extensive personal reasons not to trust.
She looks at Mackenzie.
Mackenzie says, "I think we hear her out and verify it."
Roise looks back at her screen. Her fingers move. "I'll verify every detail independently before any of it touches the response."
"I'd do the same," I say.
"And Mackenzie sits with us."
"Yes," Mackenzie says, without being asked twice. "I do."
We work.
It takes forty minutes and produces a response that is, I can see from Roise's expression when she reads it back, considerably more useful than what she'd been drafting.
She sends it without commenting on this.
I don't comment on it either. Mackenzie watches the whole thing from the other chair with the focused attention of someone who is taking mental notes she will deliver to her brother in their entirety later.
We are not friends. We are three people who have found the specific angle at which cooperation is more useful than the alternative, which is a different thing and which suits us.
"She likes you," Mackenzie says.
We are in the sitting room while Roise takes a call from the Cork contact, who has responded faster than expected, which Roise seems to consider a personal victory and which I think is because the response we drafted was specific enough to signal knowledge that demanded attention.
"She doesn't like me," I say.
"Not the way she likes—" Mackenzie stops herself with the specific self-editing of someone who has decided that particular sentence doesn't need to be finished. "She respects you. Which from Roise is something. She respects competence above everything."
"She loves him," I say.
Mackenzie is quiet for a moment. She is sitting on the arm of the couch in the way that people who grew up without being told not to sit on furniture arms sit on furniture arms, and she is looking at me with the direct assessment I've been on the receiving end of since she arrived and which I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I don't mind.
Mackenzie's attention doesn't have the quality of being evaluated for threat potential.
It has the quality of being actually seen.
"Yes," she says. "She does."
"And he's not—"
"No," she says. "He isn't." She tilts her head. "Does that matter to you."
I look at the window. The car park. The yellow security light that is on even in the daytime because someone didn't wire it to a sensor. "I'm asking for operational reasons," I say.
Mackenzie looks at the ceiling briefly.
"You keep doing that," I say.
"You keep saying that," she says.
We sit for a moment.
"You're very observant," I tell her.
"I'm a Costello," she says. "It's a survival skill." She drops her eyes from the ceiling back to me. "You're also observant. But you already know that." She considers me. "What you're less practiced at is what to do with what you observe when it's about yourself."
I look at her. "That's very specific."
"You made a face when I mentioned that Roise loves him. You controlled it immediately but you made it first." She says this without cruelty, just with the precision of someone reporting what they saw. "You've been doing that since yesterday. The face, and then the control."
"Occupational reflex," I say.
"Yes," she agrees. "But the thing before the reflex is real too.
" She stands from the arm of the couch. "I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable.
I'm just telling you that you don't have to manage everything you feel in this room.
Roise is on a call. It's just me." She heads toward the kitchen.
"Do you want tea or would you prefer something that's not a comfort beverage because you've decided you don't need comfort. "
I look at her.
"Tea," I say.
"Good." She fills the kettle. "My brother is a complicated man.
I say that as someone who loves him and is also under no illusions about him.
" She speaks with her back to me, the practical tone of someone who's decided the conversation can happen without direct eye contact and is therefore more likely to happen honestly.
"He's been trying to be better. He's been trying for a while, and it's not performance.
I know the difference." She turns to get the mugs.
"But he carries a lot. The things he did, the things he didn't do, the things that happened on his watch. He doesn't let go of any of it."
"I know about Rina," I say.
"Then you know it's not just guilt about the act.
It's guilt about the person he was who was capable of it.
" She sets two mugs on the counter. "He's been very careful since.
About not doing things he can't take back.
About being someone who chooses rather than someone who just acts.
" She looks at me over her shoulder. "He brought you here rather than handling it. That's not nothing."
I think about the night I walked into the warehouse with the receiver in my hand and put it on the table between us.
About the way he didn't move. About how he said all right and then we'll need somewhere quieter than this, and the somewhere quieter has been five days above a laundromat with a circulation check on the zip tie the first night that he undid himself before morning.
"I know," I say.
She makes the tea. She brings it over. We sit at the kitchen table in the particular quiet of two people who have just said several true things and are letting them settle.
"You could stay," she says. "If things go the way they might go.
There'd be a place for you." She says it carefully, without pressure, the way you say something that is an offer and not a condition.
"Not because of him. Because you're useful and because you're clearly capable of being—" She searches for the right word.
"Honest. When you decide to be. Which is rarer than people think. "
I wrap both hands around my mug. Outside, Roise's voice from the other room, professional and precise, wrapping up the Cork call.
"I'm not—" I start.
"I'm not asking you to decide anything," Mackenzie says. "I'm just saying it exists."
I nod.
We drink the tea.
He comes back at five, which is an hour later than he said, and the explanation he doesn't give but which is visible in the set of his shoulders is that whatever he went to handle required more than he budgeted for it.
He looks tired in the familiar way and he looks at the three of us in the kitchen — me and Mackenzie at the table, Roise closing her tablet — with a cautious expression, the kind men have when they've left women in a room together and are not certain what they're walking back into.
"How was it," Mackenzie says.
"Fine."
"You're an hour late."
"It ran long."
She looks at him with the specific expression of a sister cataloguing a non-answer. "Roise and Nadia helped on your Cork correspondence." She says it with the precise neutrality of someone dropping information and watching what it produces. "With me sitting in. Roise verified everything."
He looks at Roise.
Roise looks at her tablet. "The contact responded within the hour. It went well."
He looks at me.
I drink my tea.
Something moves through his expression that he doesn't quite manage to contain, which I file in the growing collection of things I notice about him that are not operational and which I have stopped pretending are operational.
"Right," he says.
"Also," Mackenzie continues, with the air of someone who has been waiting to say this, "you have a lot of women around you. Roise, me, Ailish, and now—" She gestures at me. "You're building quite the collection."
Roise makes a small, dry sound that is almost a laugh.
Liam looks at his sister with the expression of a man who has returned from a long day to find his kitchen has reorganized itself without him.
"There's nothing with Ailish," he says.
"I know," Mackenzie says. "I'm just saying." She stands and takes her mug to the sink. "You said nothing about the other two."
He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He looks at me.
I look at him over the rim of my mug with the most neutral expression I have available, which is fairly neutral, but which has — I am aware, because Mackenzie has made me aware — something in it that the neutral doesn't entirely cover.
He goes to make coffee.
Mackenzie, behind him, looks at me and raises her eyebrows once.
I look at the table.
But I'm almost smiling, and she sees it, and she looks extremely pleased with herself about it, and I find that I don't entirely mind.