Page 30 of Dominion's Guard
"The reading glasses are new," I say during a lull, because apparently my mouth has decided that deflection and curiosity are the same thing at three in the morning.
"They're not new. I just don't wear them at the club."
"Why not?"
"Because a Dom in reading glasses undermines a certain aesthetic."
I laugh before I can stop it, a real one, startled out of me by the dry delivery and the honesty underneath it. He watches me laugh, and his face opens by a degree. The warmth is real, but it's rationed. It lasts exactly long enough for me to feel it before the control slides back into place.
"You should undermine the aesthetic more often," I say, and the words come out softer than I intended, which means it's time to change the subject before I say something I can't take back.
He does it for me.
"What happened when Margot found you?" The question is quiet, asked into the lull rather than pushed into it. "You gave me the outline. Caught you at an associate's house, offered you a job. What's the rest of it?"
I wrap both hands around my mug. The warmth of the ceramic grounds me the way a glass behind the bar grounds me, something solid between my hands and the world.
"Margot's associate had a safe in his study. A Hartwell 3200. Good safe, decent lock, terrible combination. His wife's birthday." I manage a thin smile. "Rich people always make it easy. I had the combination in under a minute." The memory plays back in a sequence I haven't shared with anyone, the study and the necklace and the light coming on. "I was holding a sapphire necklace in a velvet box when Margot walked in. She was sitting in a friend's house in the dark because his alarm system sends alerts to her phone. She watched me work the safe before she said a word."
Andy is still. The notebook sits closed on the table, and the stillness in him has a quality I've learned to recognize. It's the same stillness he holds at the bar when a scene gets interesting. He is all focus and no movement, like anything he does might break whatever is happening in front of him.
"She didn't call the cops. She sat down in the armchair and told me I was twenty-five years old with a skill set that was going to land me in prison before thirty, and then she asked me how much I owed."
"How much did you owe?"
"Enough. My mother's medical bills. Years of them." The coffee is cooling in my hands but I don't drink. "Margot offered me a job. Bartender at a club I'd never heard of. She said I wouldn't steal from her, and she said it the way she sayseverything, like the outcome was already decided and she was just waiting for me to catch up."
"Sounds like Margot."
"That's dangerously close to admiration, Detective."
"That's recognizing someone who doesn't waste time pretending outcomes are negotiable." He holds my gaze, and his hair is in his face and the t-shirt pulls across his shoulders when he shifts, and I take in every detail because I can't stop and I don't want to and both of those facts are getting harder to pretend away. "What happened next?"
"I took it. I shook her hand in that study and walked out onto the porch and promised myself I was done. Not to Margot. To myself. The woman who broke into houses was dead, and I was going to be someone who deserved what Margot was offering."
The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the sky hasn't started to lighten yet, but the quality of the darkness has shifted, the deep black loosening by degrees.
"And then you broke into Lawrence Blanchard's house," Andy says.
"And then I broke into Lawrence Blanchard's house." I set the mug down because my hands want to shake and I won't let them. "I told you the facts. I didn't tell you how it felt."
He waits. He doesn't prompt and he doesn't prod, and the patience is the thing that undoes me, because if he pushed I could push back, and pushing back is how I keep people out. Andy Broussard's silence is more dangerous than most men's demands.
"It felt good." The words cost me more than the confession about the B&E itself. "The entry was clean. The exit was clean. My hands remembered everything, the picks, the sweep pattern, the way you read a room by its sounds. I sat in my car afterward and my hands were shaking, and the shaking wasn't fear. It wasthe high, the warm, rushing satisfaction of a job done well, and it felt better than anything since Margot shook my hand."
I watch his face and I wait for the judgment. His jaw is tight, but the eyes behind the tightness are steady, tracking me with the same focus he's given every piece of intelligence tonight. He doesn't interrupt.
"Better than the first clean shift at Dominion. Better than Margot's approval. Better than paying off the last of my mother's debt. I picked a lock and walked through a stranger's house and I washome, Andy. Years of earning Margot's trust, years of being the person she believed I could be, and I threw all of it away for an adrenaline fix I didn't even want to admit I missed." I look at him. "And that terrifies me more than any of the rest of it because it means the woman in the gloves isn't dead. She was just waiting."
The silence that follows is long enough that I start to regret saying it. Then Andy folds the reading glasses and sets them on the closed notebook with the same precision he gives everything that matters.
"The B&E was reckless," he says. "You could have contaminated evidence, gotten yourself arrested, or walked into an occupied house with a killer who'd already demonstrated he cleans up loose ends. Being good at something doesn't make it right, and the fact that it felt good should worry you more than the fact that you did it."
The words land without heat and without mercy and without the judgment I was bracing for. He's not telling me I'm a bad person. He's telling me I made a dangerous choice for the wrong reasons, and he's saying it the way he says everything that cuts deepest, low and level and without raising his voice.
"It does worry me," I say. "That's why I told you."
"You told me because it's three in the morning and you're sitting in my kitchen in shorts that barely qualify as clothing andthe dark makes confessions feel cheaper." He holds my gaze, and the directness in it has an edge that the bare feet and the loose hair don't soften at all. "But I'll take it however it comes."
