Nadia #2
Liam is on the couch in the study with his head tipped back and his eyes closed and the particular quality of a man who has done everything the day required of him and has arrived at the part where the body claims what the day cost it.
I'm at the desk with the burner, composing the message to Viktor that I've been constructing all evening — the managed version, the one that buys another week of patience without confirming anything he's trying to confirm.
I send it.
I close the burner.
I look at him on the couch.
"Come here," he says, without opening his eyes.
I cross the room. I sit beside him on the couch, and he shifts without looking, the automatic adjustment of someone making room, and his arm comes around my shoulders and I settle against him with the specific ease of someone who has been fighting their own body's preferences about this for long enough that finally following them is a relief.
His heartbeat is slow and even. He's been running on controlled adrenaline since before dawn and it's all coming down now.
"Declan said it twice," I say. "Handle it carefully."
"I'm handling it carefully," he says. His voice is lower than usual, the tiredness in it.
"By telling him you're in love with me in a study while your face looks like that."
"The face is incidental." A pause. "He needed to know. People who need to know things should know them."
I look at the ceiling. "That's a very specific philosophy."
"It's the only one I've found that doesn't produce regret." He is quiet for a moment. "I spent a long time not telling people things that needed to be said. It never ended the way I wanted it to."
I think about his history. About Rina, and the specific weight of that, and the version of himself he was then and the version sitting beside me now. "The girl," I say. "Rina. What was it. When you were — when you had her."
He is quiet.
"You don't have to—"
"I thought if I controlled the situation completely I could control the outcome," he says.
"That if she had no other options she'd eventually — choose it.
Choose me." He pauses. "What I didn't understand was that the absence of other options isn't a choice.
It's just imprisonment. And what you get from someone who's imprisoned isn't love. It's survival."
I sit with that.
"When I understood that," he says, "I couldn't — I couldn't keep it. I let her go and I've been trying to understand the difference, since. Between taking and being chosen." He pauses. "Between holding someone so they can't leave and being someone they want to stay for."
I look at the window. At the dark of the courtyard that we can see from here, the same courtyard where this morning happened. "And now," I say. "You think you understand the difference."
"I think I'm trying to practice it," he says. "Which is not the same as understanding it but is the only way to get there."
I'm quiet for a moment. "You left the window unlatched," I say. "In the safehouse."
"Yes."
"The first time. Before you even—" I pause. "You left it unlatched."
"Yes."
"Why."
He is quiet for a moment. "Because I wanted you to stay because you chose to," he says. "Not because you couldn't leave." A pause. "And because I wasn't ready to be the other kind of person again."
I sit with this for a long time.
The room is quiet. The compound is quiet.
Outside the window the courtyard is dark and the city is doing its city thing beyond the walls and he is warm and his heartbeat is even and I am sitting in the home of the head of the Irish family with a burner phone in my pocket and a Russian handler I'm managing from a distance and approximately forty percent of my operational situation unresolved.
"Liam," I say.
"Mm."
"I'm not going to tell you I love you tonight."
A pause. "All right."
"Not because it isn't—" I stop. "Not because I don't know what I'm — I just need it to be said when it doesn't feel like a response to something. When it's just — its own thing."
"I understand that," he says.
"Do you."
"Yes." His arm tightens fractionally around my shoulders. "I can wait."
"It might not be long," I say.
"I know," he says, and there's something in his voice that is not amusement and is thoroughly warm. "I know it might not be long."
I look at the ceiling.
"I slapped you," I say.
"You did."
"You deserved it."
"The jury's out."
"You said you were in love with me with your whole family in the house."
"In a house full of family," he says. "Which was the point."
I think about what that distinction means. About being in a house full of family. About Gianna with her wooden spoon and Mackenzie's look at the door and Declan's twice in one evening and Ailish's specific expression and Finn watching across the table.
"It's different," I agree.
He doesn't respond. His breathing has changed — slower, more even, the specific rhythm of someone going under.
He has been awake since before dawn and he fought his brother this morning and ran an evening of complicated family dinner and is now, at the end of all of it, doing what bodies do when they've been kept at altitude all day and are finally allowed to descend.
I sit very still so I don't wake him.
The room is quiet. The burner phone is silent. Viktor has his message and will sit with it until morning.
I have tonight.
I think about a safehouse and an unlatched window and a circulation check done twice, and about a man who said I'm in love with you like it was a fact he'd been sitting with for a while and had finally found the right moment to put down somewhere it would be heard.
I think about what it means to be the thing someone stays for rather than the thing that holds them.
I look at the ceiling for a long time.
Then I close my eyes.
And I stay.