Page 9 of The Dangerous Dance

It is always interesting, the moment men realize I am a woman. Some of them recalibrate their threat assessment downward, which is useful and also tedious. Some of them recalibrate it in a different direction entirely, which is useful in different ways and considerably more tedious. This man does something I don't expect, which is that his expression doesn't change at all. His eyes do — something moves in them, brief and unreadable — but the rest of him stays exactly as it was.

That is more interesting than either of the alternatives.

"You're going to tell me what you put in my warehouse," he says.

"I don't know what you mean," I say. My English carries an accent I've spent three years reducing and can't fully eliminate.

Something at the corner of his mouth moves. Not quite amusement. Recognition, maybe. "You're Russian."

"I'm a tourist," I say, "who got very lost."

"In a warehouse. Past midnight." He takes one measured step to his left, adjusting his angle. "Through the south wall vent, from the look of it." His eyes move over me — not the way men's eyes usually move over me, which is something I deal with by being faster and more prepared than they expect. This is more like the way I look at a building I'm planning to enter. Structural. "Who sent you?"

I don't answer.

What I do instead is move.

I go for the gap on his right — he's weighted slightly left, which means his right is the slower response side — and I'm fast, I've always been fast, the kind of fast that ballet and my father's training produces in combination. I get two full strides before his hand closes on my arm and the world rotates.

He's faster.

Not by much. But enough.

I hit the ground on my back with him above me, one hand around my wrist, his weight distributed so that I can feel the precise calculation of it — enough to keep me down, nothing more. I try twice to break the grip and both times find it has anticipated me. He fights like someone who has been doing this long enough that the technique has stopped being technique and started being instinct, which is the only kind of opponent I actually respect and the only kind I find genuinely difficult.

I go still.

He looks down at me.

Up close I can see that his eyes are a dark shade I can't name in this light, and there is a tiredness in them that doesn't match the sharpness of everything else. He is not the kind of tired that comes from one bad night. He is the kind of tired that comes from something longer and more complicated than that.

"Liam Costello," I say, because knowing his name and saying it are two different kinds of information and I want him to know that I have both.

Something moves across his face. "You know who I am."

"I know a lot of things."

"What did you put in my warehouse."

"Nothing that will hurt anyone," I say. It comes out more honest than I planned for it to, and I watch him notice that. "A demonstration. Smoke and noise. Your people are lazy. Someone should tell them."

A long pause. He is still looking at me with that structural quality, and I am aware, from my position on the cold floor of his warehouse, that this is not going the way my superiors envisioned it and is also not going as badly as it could. He hasn't called anyone. His phone has not come out. He is making a decision about me and he is making it privately, which means it is not an organizational decision.

That is the first interesting thing.

"How old are you," he says.

I lift my chin. "Old enough."

"That's not an answer."

"Twenty-one," I say, because lying about it would be pointless and because something in the way he asked makes me think the answer matters to him in a way that is not about threat assessment.

He releases my wrist. He stands, and after a moment he extends one hand — not to pull me up, just to offer the option. I ignore it and get up on my own, which earns me nothing from his expression either way.

We stand two feet apart in the dark of his warehouse and look at each other.

"Go," he says.