Page 49 of The Dangerous Dance

"It means either he's with me or he isn't. And if he isn't, he goes." I say it quietly, which is the only way I can say it. "Not the way our father would have handled it. But he goes."

She is quiet for a moment. "And if he's with you."

"Then we stop being at war inside our own house and we deal with what's actually trying to break it down from the outside."

She nods. Not encouraging, not discouraging. Just receiving the information and taking it seriously.

"The ambush tonight," she says. "Was it Connolly or was it Viktor."

I look at her.

"I'm asking because they're different problems," she says. "Connolly leaking the route to Viktor's people means Connolly is a Russian asset, which means the fracture in your organization goes deeper than a loyalist dispute. It means Viktor's been running someone inside your circle for longer than the current operation." She meets my eyes. "I can find out."

"How."

"My father kept contacts in Moscow finance — people who track Bratva payouts because that's how the money moves before the operations do. They're not on the operations side. They wouldn't tell Viktor I was asking, because they don't talk to Viktor. I have three of those contacts I haven't burned. If Connolly's been getting Russian money, the trail will be in one of their ledgers." She holds my gaze. "It'll take me a day. Maybe two."

I look at her. At the woman who spent five days in my safehouse and handed me the receiver and said please and means it and is now standing at a window at three in the morning offering to use her father's last private network to trace whether my brother's closest ally is a foreign intelligence asset.

"If it's there, I'll find it," she says. "And if it is, it changes your conversation with Declan."

"How."

"Because it means he's not the betrayer. He's the betrayed." She holds my gaze. "Which is different. And which might be the thing that brings him back."

I look at her for a long moment.

"All right," I say.

"All right you'll let me look."

"All right I'll let you look." I pause. "And Nadia."

She waits.

"Whatever you find," I say. "You bring it to me before you do anything with it. You don't contact Viktor about it, you don't adjust your position with him based on it, you bring it here."

"I know."

"I need to hear you say it."

She meets my eyes. "I bring it to you," she says. "Before anything else."

I nod.

"Go home," she says. Not unkindly. "Sleep if you can. Come back when you're ready to talk about Declan."

I get my jacket from the chair. The sleeve is ruined. I put it on anyway because it's three in the morning and I walked in with it and I'll walk out with it.

"Your sister called me," Nadia says, as I reach the door.

I stop. "When."

"This afternoon. She got the number from somewhere I didn't ask about." She crosses her arms. "She asked if I was all right. I told her I was." A pause. "She said to tell you she's proud of you."

I look at the door.

I think about Declan saying you look like a man who's lost his judgment and Mackenzie saying he's been trying to be better and both of those things being simultaneously and completely true.