Liam #2
"I tell him I was running a counter-intelligence check on a competing asset in the Antwerp network.
That I suspected someone else was working the same territory and wanted to confirm before I reported to him.
" She says it with the ease of someone who built the cover at the same time she ran the operation.
"It's believable. It's the kind of thing he'd expect from someone with my background. "
"Will he accept it."
"For a while." She pauses. "Not indefinitely."
"How long."
"Two weeks. Three if I manage him carefully."
"Then we have two weeks," I say. "After the Declan situation is resolved, I'll bring you into a conversation about what comes next. How we use what you've given me without burning you to Viktor before we're ready."
She nods.
I look at the file. I think about four days and Marco's timeline and the fight at the end of the week and all the things that need to happen in sequence before any of this becomes something I can actually use. "Go back to the apartment tonight. I'll call you tomorrow."
She stands. "Liam."
I look up.
"When you fight Declan," she says. "Tell him about Connolly first."
"I'm planning to tell him after."
"Tell him before." She holds my gaze. "If he knows Connolly betrayed him before you fight, he's fighting the right thing. If he knows after, he'll think you told him to soften the loss." She pauses. "He needs to go in knowing."
I look at her.
She's right. She is, with the specific clarity of someone who has no personal history with Declan and can therefore see the geometry of it without the distortion of two decades of brotherhood, completely right.
"All right," I say.
She goes.
I sit in the study with the Connolly file and the Maspeth reports and the cold coffee and think about what she said about my sister calling her. About Mackenzie saying I'm proud of you and asking if she was all right.
About what it says that the two people who are apparently checking on each other are my twenty-two-year-old sister and a twenty-one-year-old Russian operative, and that the thing they seem to have found between them is something that resembles, without either of them having stated it directly, a provisional and careful form of solidarity.
I call Finn at seven.
He picks up from what sounds like the kitchen of the hotel on the Amalfi coast, which means dishes and Gianna's voice somewhere behind him and the particular warmth of a life that is genuinely other than mine.
"Liam," he says. His voice has the quality it gets when he hears from me now — not unwilling, just braced. The quality of someone who loves you and has also learned that loving you comes with specific weather.
"I need you to come back," I say. "Not for long. A few days."
A pause. "What happened."
I tell him about Maspeth. About Connolly. About the fight at the end of the week. I tell him what I need him there for and why — the specific reason I need him rather than anyone else — and I tell him he can say no.
He is quiet for a long moment.
"Am I doing the right thing," I say. "With Declan. With the fight."
Another pause. "You know I'm not objective about this."
"I know. Tell me anyway."
He is quiet in the specific way of someone choosing their words rather than organizing them.
Finn has always been more deliberate than me in that way.
"Declan needs to understand something that arguments don't produce," he says eventually.
"He needs to understand it physically. In his body.
The same way he understood everything when he was younger.
" A pause. "Our families aren't so different in that way. "
"No."
"If you tell him about Connolly first," he says — and I'm slightly startled, because it's what Nadia said, the same instinct from two completely different angles — "he goes in with the right enemy in his head. He goes in fighting for himself rather than against you."
"That's what she said."
A pause. A different kind. "Who."
"Someone I've been—" I stop. Find the right shape. "Someone who's been helping me."
Finn is quiet for a moment that has several things in it that he's decided not to say. "All right," he says finally.
"Will you come."
"Yes," he says. "Obviously yes." A pause. "Gianna's not going to be happy."
"I know."
"She'll come anyway."
"I know that too."
A sound from the kitchen behind him — Gianna's voice, asking something. He says something to her that I can't make out, and there's a brief exchange, and then he comes back. "She says to tell you that you owe her three weeks of uninterrupted Amalfi after this."
I look at the ceiling. "Done."
"She's already started a list of what uninterrupted means."
"Of course she has."
He almost laughs. Then, quieter: "Liam. Are you all right."
I think about Ailish this morning and Nadia this afternoon and the Connolly file on my desk and three men down in Maspeth and the end of the week and what I'm going to say to my brother before I fight him.
"I'm getting there," I say.
"That's what you always say."
"It's always what's true."
He is quiet for a moment. Then: "I'll be there Friday."
"Thank you, Finn."
"Don't thank me," he says. "Just finish this so we can both do something else."
He hangs up.
I sit in the study in the quiet of a house that is about to get significantly less quiet, and I look at the Connolly file, and I think about what it means to tell your brother that the man he trusted most has been selling him to his enemies for eight months.
I think about the right words for it.
I don't find them.
But I'll find them by Friday. I'll find them because I have to, and because Declan deserves the true version delivered with the care that the true version requires.
That's the only kind of leader I know how to try to be anymore.
Whether it's enough is what the rest of the week will tell me.