Page 31 of Dominion's Guard
Heat climbs up the back of my neck. I reach for the sarcasm the way I reach for a bottle when a customer gets too close.
"Are you critiquing my wardrobe or my decision-making? Because I can only handle one character flaw at a time."
"Both. The decision-making is worse." He reaches for the coffee pot. "More coffee?"
"Is there anything else in this house?"
"There's bourbon."
"I'll take the coffee. The last thing I need is impaired judgment around you at this hour of the morning."
The words land between us with more honesty than I intended. His hand pauses on the pot, and the look he gives me is brief and heated and entirely controlled, a door opened a crack and held there.
He pours. He sets the mug in front of me. He sits back down and doesn't touch me, and the not-touching is louder than contact would have been.
The kitchen has gone from dark to grey while we've been talking, the window over the sink catching the earliest shift in the sky, not sunrise yet but the promise of it, the deep blue that means the city is about to remember it's morning. Neither of us has slept. The case files sit between us alongside the notebook and the cold remains of coffee, and whatever we've been pretending this is all night stopped being that at least two pots ago.
"I should try to sleep," I say, though we both know I won't.
"You should." He doesn't move to stand. He stays in his chair with the coffee and the case files, and his eyes track me when I stand in a way that is not professional and not casual and not anything he's trying to hide. "Renata."
My name in his voice at this hour, in this kitchen, with the grey light and the cold coffee and the confession still raw between us, stops me in the doorway.
"What?"
"The woman in the gloves isn't the problem. The woman who told me about her is." He picks up his pen. "Get some sleep."
I take my mug to the sink and rinse it. From behind me I hear him open the notebook and the soft scratch of his pen on paper, already back to the case, already building. When I reach the kitchen doorway I glance back. He's put the reading glasses on again, and the sight of him in the grey pre-dawn light with his worn t-shirt and his pen moving across a page stops me for a second I don't intend to give.
He doesn't look up. I think he knows I'm looking. The not-looking feels deliberate, a choice to give me the space to want without being caught wanting.
I walk down the hallway to the guest room that smells like cedar and detergent and close the door.
I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and try to identify the feeling settling into my body. It takes a while. The feeling is unfamiliar, coated in years of rust, buried under sarcasm and distance and the careful management of how much of myself I let anyone see.
I told Andy Broussard more in one night than I've told anyone in years. Not just the facts of Margot and the B&E, which are dangerous enough, but the truth underneath the facts: that I liked it, that I miss it, that the woman I promised to leave behind is still alive in my hands and my instincts and the part of me that reads a room for entry points before I notice the furniture.
He didn't flinch. He didn't moralize. He told me I was reckless and told me my shorts barely qualified as clothing, and he said all of it with a gaze that tracked my legs when I stood up and didn't apologize for it.
The front door opens and closes. His car starts in the driveway. He's leaving for the precinct with the case files and the notebook and the list of names I gave him and whatever else he carries out of this house when he puts the badge back on and becomes the version of himself the world gets to see.
I close my eyes. The cedar is still there. The feeling is still there, settling deeper, and I let it stay because fighting it would take more energy than I have and because the alternative is admitting that the safest I've felt in years is in a house that belongs to a man who used to be just another bourbon order at the end of my bar, who wears reading glasses in his kitchen and listens to me like the things I say have weight.
Then the thought I've been keeping at arm's length all night finally lands.
Andy is driving to the precinct with a notebook full of names I gave him. Names of Dominion members whose patterns shifted, whose habits changed, who disappeared. I handed him the map I've been building behind the bar for years, and somewhere in that map is the name of a person who is killing people and cleaning it up like a professional.
Which means somewhere in that map is the reason they might come for me next.
Sleep doesn't come. It doesn't even circle this time.
8
ANDY
The precinct smells like burnt coffee and floor wax at this hour, the combination that means the cleaning crew mopped and the cops on the day shift haven't figured out how to make a pot that doesn't taste like penance. I'm at my desk before most of the squad, my laptop open and the Landry file spread across the surface in a pattern that looks like authorized casework if you don't look too closely.
The victimology is building itself in my notebook, a second set of notes that lives inside the leather cover alongside the official ones. The official set tracks Susan Landry's murder with the methodical care that Hebert expects: forensic reports, timeline reconstruction, witness canvassing from the parking garage where her body was found. The unofficial set tracks the pattern I'm not supposed to be looking for, the connections between Susan Landry and a missing man named Lawrence Blanchard whose case my captain tried to bury.
