Page 5 of The Dangerous Dance

"Let's get coffee first."

"I have coffee."

"Proper coffee. Not whatever that is."

She looks at her cup with mild offense. We find a place near the terminal, the three of us at a corner table with our coats piled on the empty chair, and for twenty minutes it is almost ordinary. Mackenzie talks about her program, about a professor who has apparently been making her life difficult in ways she finds both irritating and privately entertaining. Ailish asks the right questions. I drink my coffee and let the normalcy of it settle somewhere it can do some good.

Then Mackenzie looks at me over the rim of her cup. "Declan's not going to come around on his own."

"We're not talking about that today."

"We don't have to talk about it. I'm just telling you. He needs someone to get through the wall before it gets any thicker, and right now you and he are too much alike to do it for each other." She sets down her cup. "I can talk to him."

"Absolutely not."

"Liam—"

"You've been home for forty minutes. You are not walking into the middle of this."

"I'm already in the middle of it. I've been in the middle of it from four thousand miles away." She says it without drama, which is somehow more affecting than if she'd made it one. "I'm not fragile. And I'm not going anywhere."

I look at her. She looks back, and there is something in her face that I recognize — the particular set of someone who has already made the decision and is merely informing you of it as a courtesy.

I think about what I said to Ailish in the car. About Declan and the wall getting thicker.

"Stay out of it for now," I say. "Give it a week. Let things settle after yesterday."

She opens her mouth.

"A week, Kenzie."

She closes it. Picks up her coffee. "Fine. A week." A beat. "Can I at least see Gianna? Ailish said she's back."

"That," I say, "I'll allow."

My phone rings before I can reach for my jacket.

It's Conor. I step away from the table, and he gives me the report in four sentences, which is his preferred number. A shot fired near Declan's secondary meeting location. One of our men clipped but not critical. The shooter was gone by the time anyone got eyes on the area, but the description — build, coat, movement pattern — matches known Russian contract work.

I stand with my phone at my ear and the airport moving around me and think about the seam I told Vito Rosso doesn't exist.

It's fraying faster than I told him.

"I'll be there in an hour," I tell Conor. "Don't tell Declan yet."

I hang up and turn back to the table. Ailish is already watching me. She reads it in my face before I say a word, and the look she gives me is the one that means I told you this wouldn't be a quiet week.

She's right. She usually is.

"Kenzie," I say, picking up my jacket. "Welcome home."

CHAPTER 3

Nadia

The thing about New York is that it doesn't care that you've arrived.

Every city has a quality to its arrival. Moscow greets you with weight. London with grey indifference that somehow still feels curated. Dublin with a smell like rain that got there before you did. New York doesn't greet you at all. It simply continues, massive and indifferent, and you insert yourself into it or you don't.