CHAPTER 23 Liam #2
I pull back. Withdraw carefully. She makes a small sound at the loss that makes me want to start this whole thing over again. I deal with the practical mechanics, and then I turn back to her.
She has not moved. She is still bent over the desk, her cheek resting on the wood, her hair a mess, her eyes half-closed. She looks wrung out. She looks beautiful. She looks like someone who has stopped performing.
I help her stand. She is unsteady and I steady her, my hands at her waist, and then I pull her toward me. I need the contact that is not about urgency.
She comes willingly. She wraps her arms around my bare back and presses her face into my neck and we stand there in the grey light, naked, the desk a disaster behind us, and I hold her and she holds me and nothing about this is clean or managed or operational.
"I am going to need a minute," she says against my neck.
"Take as many as you need."
She pulls back slightly. Looks at me. "That was."
"Yeah."
"Is it always going to be like this."
I think about weeks of wanting more of this. I think about the way she looked putting the case on the desk and choosing me over Viktor. I think about how always is a word I do not use, have not used in years, and how I want to use it now.
"I do not know," I say honestly. "I hope so."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Then she leans up and kisses me, soft this time, unhurried, and I feel the kiss all the way through me.
I gather her clothes from the floor. She gathers mine. We dress in the quiet of a room that has not quite returned to being a room. The Brennan file is on the floor. The case is in the drawer. The grey light has gone the colour of late afternoon turning into evening.
She crosses to the couch. She does not ask. She lowers herself onto it the way someone does when they have decided to be there for a while.
I follow her.
I sit. She turns into me. My arm goes around her and her head finds the place on my shoulder where it apparently fits, and we sit like that, dressed but not really, the office around us settling into the specific quiet of a room that has been used for something other than its usual purpose.
I look at the ceiling.
I file the way she fits against me under the growing collection of things Nadia does to me that I will never be able to explain in a debrief.
"You're thinking very loudly," she says, without looking at me.
"Occupational habit."
"What are you thinking about."
I look at the ceiling. "Friday," I say. "And all the things between now and Friday."
She turns her head. "Declan."
"Yes."
"Are you ready."
I consider the question with the honesty it deserves. "I don't know if ready is the right measure for it." I look at the ceiling. "I know what I'm going to do. I know why I'm going to do it. Whether I'm ready for the version of it that actually happens — that's a different question."
She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Tell him about Connolly before."
"I know."
"I mean it. The order matters."
"I know it does." I turn my head to look at her. "You told me. Finn told me. Apparently it's obvious to everyone except the person who has to do it."
"It's obvious because we're not you," she says. "We don't have twenty years of brother in the room." She holds my gaze. "That's the thing you'll be fighting in there as much as Declan. Your own history with him."
I look at her.
"I know," I say.
She looks back at the ceiling. We are quiet for a while.
"I need to go," she says. Not moving yet. Saying it to the ceiling.
"I know."
"Viktor will expect contact."
"I know."
"Liam." She turns her head again. "Whatever happens Friday — with Declan, with the Italians, with all of it — you come back from it."
I look at her. "That's usually my line."
"I'm borrowing it."
"All right." I hold her gaze. "I'll come back from it."
She nods once. Then she sits up and begins the practical business of reassembling herself.
I sit up too. We don't speak while we're dressing.
When she's at the door she stops. The familiar pause.
"Roise will be here tomorrow morning," she says.
"Yes."
"I won't." She meets my eyes. "Not tomorrow. I need to give Viktor enough to keep him patient for the next week. Which means being available and visible and not here."
"I understand."
"I'm not—" She stops. Starts again. "I'm telling you so you know it's not—"
"Nadia." I hold her gaze. "I know."
She looks at me for a moment longer. Then she nods. And goes.
I sit in the study with the evening around me and the file on the desk and the drawer with the case in it and I think about Friday with the specific clarity of someone who has been thinking about Friday for two weeks and has finally arrived close enough to it that thinking has to become something else.
Action, probably.
That's always been the part I'm better at.
Ailish comes to the compound at half past eight the following morning, which is the time I asked her to come, and she sits across the desk where Nadia sat last night and looks at me with the expression that means she already knows most of it and is waiting for the version I'm going to say out loud.
I don't make her wait. "I need you to take over Nadia's management for the next forty-eight hours."
She is quiet for a moment. "Management."
"Her cover with Viktor requires her to be away from here. But I don't want her moving without someone she can reach." I meet Ailish's eyes. "Not surveillance. Just — available. If she needs to move quickly or needs a contact who isn't me."
"And why can't she reach you."
"Because I'm going to be dealing with Declan, and then I'm going to be dealing with everything that comes after Declan, and I need to know she has someone while I'm doing that."
Ailish looks at me with the expression she's had since I was twenty-two and she was twenty and she first understood that the decisions I make have a specific quality of consequence.
It's not judgment. It's the particular attention of someone who loves you and is clear-eyed about what that means in this specific life.
"You've slept with her," she says.
I hold her gaze. "Yes."
She nods. Once. And then she does something I didn't entirely expect, which is that she doesn't say anything else about it. She picks up her phone and sends a message and sets the phone on the desk and says: "I've sent her my number. If she needs to move, she calls me."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." She meets my eyes. "Friday. The fight. You're going to tell him about Connolly first."
"Everyone keeps telling me that."
"Everyone is correct." She holds my gaze. "And Liam. After the fight — whatever the outcome — don't let it sit. Talk to him the same night."
"I know."
"You'll both need to."
I look at her. "I know."
She stands. At the door she pauses. "She's good for you," Ailish says. Not warmly. Just the flat factual version of an observation made and delivered. "Whatever the complications. She's good for you."
She goes before I can respond.
Roise comes at nine.
She works for two hours at the kitchen table while I work in the study, and we interact twice — once when she has a question about the Galway-7 follow-up, and once when she brings me coffee without being asked, which she sets on the corner of the desk and then stands for a moment in the way of someone who has decided to say something and is deciding whether to say it.
"Roise," I say.
"I know," she says. "I'm not—" She stops. "I put in my notice with the agency. The placement agency." She meets my eyes steadily. "I'll finish the current work, the Galway correspondence and the Bayonne supplementals. I'll make sure the handover is clean. But after that — I think it's better."
I look at her. "You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." She says it without bitterness. "I'm choosing to. Because it's better for the work and it's better for me. To not be in a situation where professional and personal are arranged the way they've been arranged." She holds my gaze. "That's not your fault. It's just true."
"Roise." I look at her. "You're exceptional at this work."
"I know," she says, with a slight quality that is almost wry. "I'll be fine." She picks up her tablet. "I'll have the Galway response finished by noon."
She goes back to the kitchen.
I sit in the study and I think about what it costs when the things you don't choose correctly hurt people who don't deserve it, which is a thought I've been having in various forms for several years and which has not become easier with repetition.
I add it to the weight of what I'm carrying into Friday.
I find Declan at the east building at six in the evening.
He is where I expected him — in the room off the main hall that he's claimed as a workspace, the one with the bad lighting and the view of the internal courtyard that he's preferred since he was eighteen and first started spending time at the east building because our father worked from here on Thursdays and Declan wanted to be near him.
He looks up when I come in.
He reads my face the way brothers read each other — fast, involuntary. He sets down his pen.
"Liam," he says.
"I need to tell you something," I say. "Before anything else.
Before what I came here to say." I come into the room and I sit in the chair across from him, which is not how I planned this — I planned to stand, to keep the authority of posture — but something about the room and the bad lighting and the specific geography of my brother's face makes sitting the right choice.
He waits.
"Connolly," I say.
His expression doesn't change. But the stillness that comes over him is the stillness of someone who has been handed something they need a moment to hold before they can look at it.
"What about Connolly," he says.