Nadia
Gianna opens the door.
This is unexpected, because it's not her house, but she has the quality of someone who makes wherever she is her house within approximately four minutes of arriving, which I've gathered from Mackenzie and which is confirmed by the fact that she's wearing an apron and holding a wooden spoon and looking at me with the expression of someone who has been briefed and is deciding in real time how much of the briefing to act on.
She is beautiful in the specific way of people who don't require the information and have therefore stopped tracking it.
Dark hair, bright eyes, the particular ease of someone who has been through enough that easy things are actually easy now.
She looks at my face and then past me briefly and then back at me.
"Yes."
"I'm Gianna." She steps back from the door. "Come in. It smells better than it did an hour ago, which means it's almost ready."
I come in.
The compound in the evening has a different quality than the compound in the working day — warmer, less structured, the specific texture of a building that's been asked to be a home for a few hours.
The smell from the kitchen is garlic and something slow-cooked and the particular warmth of a meal that someone started in the morning and has been tending since, which is a specific kind of care that I haven't been on the receiving end of in a long time.
"He's in the study," Gianna says, going back to the kitchen. "He was going to come out to meet you but Mackenzie made him sit down because apparently he keeps trying to do things and his face looks like—" She pauses. "Well. You'll see."
I see.
He's at the desk when I come to the study door, which means he was working rather than sitting down the way Mackenzie told him to, which is exactly what I would have expected. He looks up when I come in.
I stop in the doorway.
His face is the specific topography of a fight conducted without restraint between two men who know exactly where to apply pressure.
The left side is worse — a cut above the cheekbone that's been closed but not cleanly, and the particular coloring that develops when something has been hit hard enough to leave evidence of how hard. His lip. His jaw.
He looks, overall, like someone ran an argument with their fists and the argument won.
"Hello," he says.
I look at him.
"It looks worse than it—"
"Don't," I say. "Don't tell me it looks worse than it is."
He closes his mouth.
I cross the room. I stop in front of the desk and I look at his face with the focused attention of someone conducting an inventory, which I am.
I reach out and I take his jaw in my hand — carefully, because the jaw is also involved in the topography — and I turn his face slightly to see the left side in the lamp light.
"Mackenzie was right," I say. "The Italian meeting is going to be a problem."
"Marco's seen worse."
"On other people," I say. "Not on the man who called the meeting."
He looks at me with the expression that is not quite amusement and is adjacent to it. "It's fine, Nadia."
"It's not fine, it's—" I stop. I look at his face.
At the specific evidence of what this morning cost him.
I think about a courtyard and two brothers and thirty years of shared history being put through something that hurt both of them on purpose because it was the only thing that would work, and something about the deliberateness of it — the willingness to take the damage because the outcome required it — does something to me that I'm not going to examine in this doorway.
"Are you crazy," I say.
"Probably," he says.
"You fought your brother. Your actual brother. For—" I stop. "What exactly. What was worth this."
"The family," he says. "The operation. The alliance." He holds my gaze. "The thing I'm trying to build."
I look at him.
"And other things," he says. Quietly. In the register that isn't for the room.
"What other things."
He looks at me steadily. "Someone once told me that doing things for someone he's in love with changes the math on what's worth it." He holds my gaze. "I've been thinking about that."
The room is very quiet.
My hand is still at his jaw.
I take it away.
And then I bring it back and I use it, open-palmed, against the undamaged side of his face, which produces a sound that is not hard — I calibrate it specifically, not hard — but which is real and which says the thing I need it to say.
He goes still.
He looks at me.
"You're so stupid," I say. My voice comes out differently than I planned, which is to say it comes out like it means something.
"You're so — what were you thinking, saying that here, like that, after everything, when your face looks like—" I stop.
I take his face in both hands and I kiss him, which is the thing that was always going to happen after the slap, which is why the slap happened first, because some things need the space created for them before they can occur.
He kisses me back with the careful quality of a man being mindful of his own damage, which would be funny under other circumstances and which is, under these circumstances, something I find I can't think about too directly.
When we separate I stay close. His hands are at my waist.
"You're in love with me," I say. It comes out flat. Not a question. Not an accusation. Just the specific weight of a fact being placed between two people.
"Yes," he says. The same flatness. The same specific weight.
"You said it like it was a thing that had been true for a while."
"It has been," he says. "I've been calling it something else."
"What have you been calling it."
"A security concern," he says. And the thing at the corner of his mouth is fully an almost-smile now.
I look at him. At the damaged face and the tired eyes and the man who fought his brother this morning and called it doing things for someone he's in love with and said it like it was the most ordinary fact in the world.
"You're so stupid," I say again, but the words have changed quality between the first time and this time, which he hears, and which produces the full version of the almost-smile.
"You slapped me," he says.
"You deserved it."
"Probably." He looks at me. "Are you going to tell me what you're calling it."
I hold his gaze. "I've been calling it a security concern too," I say.
"And now."
"And now I think we've both been using the wrong classification."
He looks at me for a moment. Then: "Stay tonight."
Not the safehouse. The compound. The distinction is not small.
"Declan's here," I say.
"Declan knows. He told me to handle it carefully."
"And this is carefully."
"This," he says, "is the only way I know how to do it, which is honestly and in front of the people who need to know." He holds my gaze. "Stay."
I look at him.
I think about Viktor and burner phones and the Antwerp shell and everything that is still unresolved and approaching on a timeline I can't fully see, and I think about all the reasons that staying in the compound of the head of the Irish family is an operational complication I don't need.
"All right," I say.
Dinner is loud in the specific way of a table that hasn't had all its people at it in too long.
Gianna cooks with the authority of someone who has decided that feeding people is a form of argument she intends to win, and she wins it — the food is extraordinary, which I say and which produces a look of satisfaction from her that is entirely earned.
Finn sits beside her with the ease of a man who has accepted that his wife will always be the most capable person in any room and has made his peace with it.
Mackenzie is across from me and talks about the Brennan secondary contacts with the focused energy of someone who has been doing operational work all day and hasn't fully shifted out of it.
Conor sits at the end and says little and notices everything.
Ailish is beside Declan, which I observe without commenting on.
Declan.
He looks at me twice during dinner. The first time is the assessment look, the one that everyone in Liam's orbit has given me at some point, but briefer than most and followed by something else — not warmth exactly, but the beginning of the calculation that precedes warmth, the moment when you decide someone is worth the investment of attention.
The second time is at the end of the meal, when Liam says something to Finn across the table and laughs at something Finn says back, and Declan looks at me in the specific way of someone checking to see if the person beside him is seeing what he's seeing.
I am.
I look back at Declan.
He nods, once, and looks back at his food.
It is not absolution. It is not welcome exactly. But it is the beginning of something, which is more than I came in with.
The compound settles gradually. Finn and Gianna go first, Gianna hugging Mackenzie for longer than a goodbye strictly requires.
Conor goes. Ailish, who says something to Declan in the hallway that I don't hear, and then comes to say good night to me with the specific expression of a woman who has decided something and is comfortable with the decision.
Mackenzie last, who looks at me in the doorway of the study with the expression she has when she's pleased about something and is allowing herself to be pleased about it.
"Sunday," she says. "West corridor briefing."
"I'll be there," I say.
She goes.
Declan is the last to leave. He comes to the study door and he looks at his brother and he says: "The men. Tomorrow. Two of them came back already."
"Good," Liam says.
"Two others won't." He says it without inflection. "I'll handle it."
"I know you will."
A pause. Declan looks at me briefly. Then back at Liam. "Handle it carefully," he says, meaning me. Meaning us. Meaning all of it.
"I know," Liam says.
Declan goes.
The compound is quiet.