Nadia
Ailish arrives on a Sunday morning in a car she parks with the efficiency of someone who parks in places she's not supposed to and has stopped apologizing for it.
She comes upstairs and fills the doorway the way competent women fill doorways — without drama, without announcement, just with the quality of someone who belongs wherever they decide to stand.
She looks at me the way everyone in Liam's orbit looks at me the first time, which is the look of someone running a rapid threat assessment while performing something that reads as neutral.
She does it faster than most. Ten seconds, maybe, and then she moves past it into a functional register that I find, unexpectedly, easier to deal with than the assessments that run longer.
"Ailish," Liam says, from the kitchen.
"You look terrible," she tells him. "How long have you been in this flat."
"Five days."
"You look like seven." She sets her bag on the table with the ease of someone who has been in this space before, which she has — I can see it in the familiarity of her movements. She already knows where things are. She turns to me. "Nadia."
"Ailish," I say.
"I've heard about you."
"I assumed."
"Not all of it's bad," she says, which is the most honest possible version of that sentence and which she delivers with a directness I find I like.
Not warmth, not hostility. Just the flat factual version of a situation assessed and reported.
"Mackenzie says you helped with the Cork correspondence. "
"Roise did most of it."
"Roise is good at most things." She goes to the kettle without asking if she can. "She's less good at some others." She says this without looking at either of us, which is deliberate. This is skill. I catalogue it.
Mackenzie appears from the bedroom with her bag over one shoulder and the specific energy of someone about to be extracted from a situation they're not fully ready to leave.
She hugs me before she goes, which I did not anticipate and which I handle by standing still and then, after a half-second that I hope reads as composure rather than surprise, returning it.
"Sunday next," she says into my shoulder. "Come to the compound. Or don't. But you'd be welcome."
"I'll think about it."
"That means yes in her language," she tells Liam, who is leaning against the kitchen counter watching this with an expression I can't fully read from this angle but which contains something quiet and careful.
"It means I'll think about it," I say.
She grins and goes.
Ailish finishes her tea in approximately four minutes, asks Liam two questions about the Italian meeting that has been postponed again and which she clearly has opinions about, receives two answers that she also clearly has opinions about, and then stands and buttons her coat and looks at me once more.
"He's not easy," she says. Not an apology. Not a warning. Just a fact.
"I know," I say.
"I know you know." She picks up her bag. "That's not the part I was worried about."
She leaves.
The door closes.
The flat is quiet in the way it hasn't been for five days, which is the quiet of two people rather than four, and the way it contracts back down — just this, just us, the laundromat and the car park and the yellow light — does something to the atmosphere that I feel before I think about it.
I am irritated, and I am irritated specifically, and I let myself be irritated for approximately twenty minutes before I do anything with it.
What I'm irritated about is this: Ailish knows where this flat is.
Mackenzie knows where this flat is. Roise knows where this flat is.
Conor presumably knows in the general sense of having been told not to flag it without knowing why.
The Irish operative watching the tracker signal in Astoria knows that signal hasn't moved in five days and is presumably wondering about it.
And Viktor, who I have been managing through brief and carefully calibrated contact that reveals nothing, is going to notice the management eventually and when he does he is going to begin looking for what it's managing around.
Which means this flat, which was private, is progressively less private.
Which means the thing that has been happening in it, which was contained, is progressively less contained.
Which means the thing I've been doing — which is existing in a particular quality of proximity to a particular person without fully accounting for what I'm going to do about it — has an external clock on it that I've been ignoring.
I am irritated because ignoring clocks is not something I do. I am my father's daughter. I know what happens to people who stop paying attention to the time.
I go to the window.
Liam is at the kitchen table with the Cork supplementals, which he's been working through since Ailish left, and the flat has settled into the working quiet I've become familiar with — the silence of two people occupying the same space without needing to fill it.
He hasn't spoken since the door closed. He has the focused stillness of someone who is working and also thinking about something else.
He is thinking about sending me back.
I know this the way I know most things — not because he's said it, but because the room has a specific quality today that it didn't have yesterday.
Something about Ailish's visit shifted it.
Something about the two questions about the Italian meeting and the two answers she had opinions about.
He is reassessing the operational wisdom of what he's been doing, which is what I would do in his position and which is correct and which I understand intellectually.
I still don't like it.
I turn from the window.
He looks up from the supplementals.
We look at each other across the flat, which is not a large flat, and the quiet does the thing it's been doing with increasing frequency where it becomes a presence in the room rather than the absence of sound.
"You're thinking about sending me back," I say.
He sets down his pen. "I'm thinking about what comes next."
"Those are the same thing."
"Not necessarily." He leans back. "There are options between keeping you here indefinitely and sending you back to a handler who is going to ask questions you're not going to want to answer."
"Such as."
"Such as you going back to the apartment in Astoria under the understanding that you continue providing me with what you know about Viktor's timeline, and in exchange I provide you with protection that doesn't require you to be in this flat.
" He says it evenly, practically, the operational version of a negotiation that is also several other things.
"You maintain your cover. You keep Viktor at a distance. We work out a communication protocol."
I look at him. "That's the version where you've decided the risk of keeping me close outweighs the benefit."
"It's the version where I'm trying to find something sustainable."
"It's the version where you've decided to be sensible about this."
He holds my gaze. "Nadia—"
"I don't want to go back to the apartment," I say.
The words come out before I've fully decided to say them, which is the thing that has been happening with him since the warehouse, the failure of the usual gap between deciding and saying. He looks at me and I look at him and the flat is very quiet.
"What do you want," he says. Not challenging. Actually asking.
I look at him in the kitchen of this flat above a laundromat on a Sunday morning in a city that didn't care that I arrived in it, and I think about what I want with the specific honesty that his actual question seems to require.
"I want to be useful," I say. "Not to Viktor.
To — something that isn't Viktor." I move away from the window, toward the table, toward him, not with the choreography of the attempt three days ago but with something more direct and therefore more difficult.
"I have things Viktor doesn't know I have.
Contacts my father left me. Names and routes and financing details that aren't in any operational file because my father kept them separate, and when he died he left them in a form only I can access.
" I stop at the edge of the table. "I can give you those.
I can be an asset. A real one, not a managed one. "
He is very still. "You'd burn your father's network."
"I'd use it. For something he'd have wanted it used for." I hold his gaze. "My father didn't die because he was loyal to the wrong people. He died because he eventually wasn't, and they found out before he had somewhere else to be." I pause. "I want somewhere else to be."
"With the Irish."
"With you," I say. And then, because I've apparently abandoned the pretense entirely this evening: "Under your protection. Working for your operation. Earning it." I hold his eyes. "Please."
The please lands the way it lands when it's real rather than strategic, which he can hear because he's been listening for the difference for five days.
He stands.
He moves around the table and stops in front of me.
We are standing approximately where we've been standing in the warehouse and the studio and the market — the specific geography of two people who keep arriving at the same proximity — and this time neither of us is pretending to be there for a different reason.
"If I give you protection," he says, "it means you're under my authority. Which means when I tell you something, you take it seriously. When I tell you something is dangerous, you don't decide you know better."
"I often do know better."
"I know you do." Something at the corner of his mouth. "I'm asking you to tell me when you think that and let me decide, rather than just acting on it."
"That's a significant constraint."
"Yes."
"For someone with my skill set."
"Especially for someone with your skill set." He holds my gaze. "Do you understand what I'm actually asking."
I look at him. "You're asking me to trust you."
"Yes."
"That's very direct."