Liam
The call comes on a Saturday morning at half past eight.
Conor. Which means it's already past the point where someone else could have handled it.
"Mackenzie and Ailish," he says. "They were together at the farmers market in Carroll Gardens. A team came for Nadia — she wasn't there, she'd gone to the early studio session, they must have missed the schedule change." A pause. "Mackenzie and Ailish were in the way."
The room goes cold.
"How bad," I say.
"Ailish has a concussion and a broken arm. She's conscious, stable, furious." He pauses. "Mackenzie has a significant shoulder laceration. She fought back. One of Viktor's men is going to be feeling that for a while."
My twenty-two-year-old sister fought back against Viktor's men.
"Nadia," I say.
"They went to the studio when they realized she wasn't at the market. Petya locked herself in the back. By the time we got there—"
"Gone," I say.
"Yes."
I am already moving.
Declan is in the hospital corridor when I arrive. He has been there long enough to have developed a relationship with the standing. He looks at me and puts his hand on my shoulder and says, "They're both going to be fine." Not reassurance. A fact he has confirmed personally.
I go in.
Mackenzie is sitting up on the treatment bed under protest, shoulder bandaged, a closed cut above her eyebrow. She looks like someone who got in a fight and didn't entirely lose. When she sees me her face does the sequencing it always does — relief, then bright eyes, then set jaw.
I sit on the edge of the bed and take her face in my hands and look at her.
"I'm fine," she says.
"I know," I say. "Give me a minute to see it."
She closes her mouth.
I look at her. At the cut and the bandage and the evidence of a Saturday morning gone wrong in the specific way things go wrong for people connected to me — suddenly, violently, because someone is trying to reach something through them.
"Three of them," she says, when I've had the minute. "They didn't expect us to fight back. Ailish saw them first. She's why I'm sitting here with a laceration instead of something worse." Her jaw tightens. "The one who grabbed me is walking wrong for a week."
"Good," I say.
"Liam." She looks at me directly. "You'll get her back."
Not comfort. A fact, delivered with the same certainty Declan uses. My sister, who has been at kitchen tables and briefing rooms and girl's days for two months, who has made her own assessment.
"Yes," I say.
Ailish's bay is next. She's lying down because they've made her lie down. Cast from wrist to elbow, the expression of someone in moderate pain refusing to perform it at full volume.
"Don't," she says, when she sees me.
"Don't what."
"Look at me like it's your fault."
I sit beside the bed. "Conor said you went down pulling Mackenzie clear."
"I pulled her clear," she says. Specific correction. "The broken arm is inconvenient. I'll manage."
I look at her. "Declan's in the corridor," I say. "He's been there since before I arrived."
Something moves in her face. The smallest possible adjustment. "I know," she says. To the ceiling.
"He's not—"
"Liam." Her voice draws the line clearly. "Not today."
I nod. I stand. At the entrance I stop. "Ailish. Thank you. For Mackenzie."
"Go find Nadia," she says.
Back in the corridor, Declan is where I left him. His jaw is tight in the way it gets when he's containing something he won't name in a hospital hallway. He looks at the bay door. "Has she asked—" He stops.
"She knows you're here," I say.
He nods. Looks at the floor.
I look at my brother and I recognize what I'm seeing because I've been wearing my version of it since November. I don't say anything about it. This is not the moment. This is my brother learning something about himself in a corridor, and the correct response is to let it be.
"The compound," I say. "We're pulling everything on Viktor's locations."
He straightens. Rolls his shoulders. Becomes the version of himself that has decided what it's doing. "Let's go," he says.
Conor has the room organized by the time we arrive.
Everything Nadia built — the Vore files, the methodology analysis, the three Brooklyn location descriptions from the gala night, the financing chain, the command structure. Maps. Personnel files. And a secondary file with the Rosso watermark on it that wasn't there this morning.
"Marco called before I did," Conor says. "They'd already heard."
I open the file. Three pages. Rosso intelligence on Russian operational properties in Brooklyn matching two of Nadia's location descriptions. Specific addresses. Security notes. One flagged as a known holding location from a previous operation.
I look at Conor.
"They're good," he says, with the tone of someone who finds this both useful and faintly irritating.
We work for four hours. Cross-referencing her interior intelligence against the Rosso data against our own records, and what emerges is a picture with two viable locations and one that is more viable than the other based on Viktor's methodology — which Nadia documented, which tells us he interrogates before he eliminates, which means she's alive, which means we have time.
Not infinite time. She told us Viktor gives an asset forty-eight hours.
Saturday morning to Monday morning.
It's Saturday afternoon.
"This one," I say, pointing at the second location. The Italians flagged it. "The first is too accessible. He'd know we'd map his Brooklyn properties after the gala intelligence. He wants somewhere we have to work to find."
Declan studies the map. "Single access point. He'd feel most comfortable."
"And it's most dangerous for us," I say. "Which is why we're not going in the way he expects."
Conor is already on his phone, which is his version of approval.
"The Italians want in," he says, when he hangs up. "Marco called again. Personnel, experienced. His word: we finish this together."
I look at the map.
The alliance Connolly spent six months calling an invasion. The partnership that sent intelligence and offered personnel on a Saturday afternoon before I asked.
"Tell him yes," I say.
Declan looks at the map. "Sunday night," he says. "We go Sunday night. Give us time to position. Give her time to hold."
"She'll hold," I say.
He meets my eyes. "I know," he says. "I've met her."
I drive Mackenzie home at eight.
She lets me without argument, which tells me the shoulder has started speaking more loudly than her preference for independence. She sits in the passenger seat quiet for most of it, and then: "Declan was still in the corridor when I left. Six hours, Liam."
I look at the road.
"And Conor," she says, in a different register. "He came with the first car. He sat with me the whole time they were working on the shoulder. Didn't say anything. Just—" She stops. "Sat with me."
I file this alongside Declan in the corridor and Ailish at the ceiling, and I decide that these are not files mine to open and that the correct approach is to let the things that are happening happen at the speed they happen.
"Good," I say.
She looks at me with the expression she has when she knows I've clocked something and am choosing not to pursue it.
"Sunday night," I say.
"I know," she says. "I know I'm not coming." She looks at the window. "Just bring her back."
"Yes," I say.
I go back to the house in Carroll Gardens.
It is empty in the specific way of somewhere that has a person-shaped absence in it. The kitchen where we made breakfast. The garden where the fig tree stands bare. The top floor with the east-facing windows she said yes to without finishing the sentence.
I sit at the kitchen table with the map from the compound.
I look at it for a long time.
I think about forty-eight hours and a service corridor and fifteen minutes and a car ride home through the city at night and I love you said in the specific register of someone who had decided to say it and was done waiting.
She said it.
I think about that. About the fact that she said it before this happened, which means she said it because she wanted to say it and not because she was afraid she wouldn't get another chance, which is the difference between something said from fullness and something said from fear.
She said it from fullness.
I look at the map.
Sunday night. Thirty-four hours.
I think about what she said about her father — about the distance between a man who had nowhere else to be and a woman who does.
She has somewhere to be.
I start planning.