Page 39 of Dominion's Guard
His thumb drops. He steps back, and the air where he was standing holds the ghost of cedar and warmth for a full breath before the kitchen reclaims it.
He puts distance between us on purpose, and it takes something from him. I can see it in the set of his shoulders and in how his hands find his hips and push his t-shirt back from the waistband of the sweats he slept in. The gesture is functional and shouldn't look the way it does at this time and while people are dying.
"I've spent years proving I'm not a criminal," I say, and the words come from a place deeper than the investigation, deeper than the fear, from the foundation Margot built when she shook my hand and gave me a job and trusted me to become someone worth trusting. "Letting a cop this close makes me feel like one again."
"I'm not interested in your past." His voice is low and level and carries the weight of a man who means exactly what he says and doesn't need volume to make the point land. "I'm interested in who you are now."
It catches in my throat and stays there, lodged between the sarcastic deflection I reach for on instinct and the honest response that lives underneath it. The deflection is ready. It's always ready. I have a dozen ways to turn this moment into a joke, to push him back to the other side of the table where the distance is safer and the banter is currency and the vulnerability I just showed him can be re-covered and re-armored.
"Who I am now is a former burglar sitting in a cop's kitchen wearing his t-shirt, building a witness list from memory because her brain won't stop storing people, who just found out she might be on a killer's surveillance archive and is handling it by making herself useful instead of falling apart." I hold his gaze, and the effort of staying in the look instead of retreating fromit takes more from me than breaking into Lawrence Blanchard's study. "That's who I am now. I don't know if that's enough."
"It's enough."
He says it simply, without decoration, and the lack of elaboration is what makes it land. He doesn't qualify it. He doesn't explain why. He delivers two words and lets them carry everything he's seen me do since the night I called 911 from my car and no one believed me except the man standing over me in his kitchen with morning light turning his hair silver at the temples and his glasses folded on a table covered in my testimony.
My eyes burn. I blink it away before it becomes anything more than heat, and the fact that he sees me do it and doesn't comment on it is its own kind of mercy, a mercy with teeth, because the restraint isn't softness.
It's the same discipline he uses at the club when he waits instead of acting, when his patience saysI see everything and I'm choosing what to do with it, and the choice to give me room is more dominant than crowding me would be.
"If you tell anyone I got emotional in your kitchen, I'm telling the entire club about the reading glasses."
"What about them."
"That they make you look like a man who grades papers and drinks chamomile tea, Andy. Every sub in that building thinks you were born in leather. The hornrims would destroy you."
He goes back to his chair, picks up the pen, settles his glasses back on. The return to work is a gift, and we both know it. He's giving me the structure to pull myself together without the humiliation of being watched while I do it. But the way he leans into the chair, unhurried, grounded, his full attention turned in my direction with no intention of landing anywhere else, reminds me that the gift has terms. He gave me the room. He'll take it back whenever he decides to.
"There are more names," I say, and my voice is rough at the edges in a way I'll deny later. "I wasn't finished."
"Then finish."
I pick up where I left off. The names come steadier now, anchored by the work and the rhythm of his pen on paper and the quiet in the kitchen that feels less like silence and more like the space between two people who have stopped pretending the distance between them is professional. His handwriting is precise and unhurried, and I track the movement of his pen across the page the same way he tracks my hands behind the bar, an exchange of attention we've been running since the first night he sat at Dominion and ordered Woodford Reserve on the rocks and watched me pour it with the intensity of a man who was memorizing more than the drink.
The last name on my list is my own. I don't say it out loud. I don't need to. Andy already wrote it, in the margin of the page where the other names live, the entry that means everything about this investigation just became personal for both of us.
The coffee is cold. The morning is white and warm. Thomas Arceneaux will never order another Maker's Mark from the third stool at my bar, and the woman who served him his last one is sitting in a detective's kitchen with her past on film and her future balanced on the steady hand of a man who just put his thumb on her jaw and called her his, and meant it.
I finish my coffee anyway. Cold or not, it's easier to swallow than the want.
10
ANDY
The warrant for Blanchard's house lands on my desk mid-morning, signed and sealed and filed under the Landry case number, because Susan Landry's victimology connects to Blanchard's blackmail materials and the Landry investigation is what Hebert authorized. I call the crime scene unit and request an evidence tech to meet me on-site, because a search warrant executed without proper chain of custody is a gift to the defense, and whatever is inside Lawrence Blanchard's credenza is going to end up in front of a jury.
The house looks the same as Renata described it: green door, live oaks, the heavy respectability of Garden District money sitting quiet behind its hedges. The morning paper still isn't being collected, and the mailbox holds several days' worth of envelopes, confirming that Margaret Blanchard hasn't been back since she left to stay with her sister across the lake. I serve the warrant to an empty house, which means I document the service, note the time, photograph the exterior, and let myself in through the front door with the key the property manager provided after a phone call that required more patience than I had and less authority than I used.
The evidence tech, a woman named Guidry who I've worked with on enough cases to trust her documentation, meets me at the door with her kit and her camera and the quiet efficiency that comes from processing enough crime scenes to stop needing instructions.
The study is on the second floor. I take the stairs cataloging the layout as I go, noting the exits and the windows and the quality of the locks. Renata would have done the same thing, except faster and in the dark and with no legal document in her pocket to mark the difference between a search and a crime.
The credenza sits behind the desk, exactly where she told me it would be. The third folder from the back is labeled with a date rather than a subject. I pull it and set it on the desk, and the photographs inside hit with a specificity that Renata's verbal description prepared me for but didn't fully convey.
There are six photographs, all from Dominion's private rooms, captured from fixed elevated angles that match the camera positions Luc Pascal identified and removed during the Simone LaCroix investigation. Lawrence Blanchard appears in three of them, and other members fill the rest. The blackmail correspondence sits behind the photographs: three printed emails from disposable addresses, escalating demands, two wire transfer confirmations paper-clipped to the first two.
Guidry is right beside me, documenting. I keep my hands steady and my face neutral while the photographs register in the back of my skull where the worst evidence lives. These are Dominion members caught in their most private moments, their faces visible, their bodies exposed, the trust they placed in the club's walls captured from an angle that was never supposed to exist. The photographs show the same rooms, the same elevated camera positions, the same window of time when Julien LaSalle's hardware was recording everything it could reach.
Renata scened in rooms three and five during that window. The thought sits in my gut like a coal, slow and specific and getting hotter. Somewhere in Ridgewater's archive, if the archive is as comprehensive as the evidence suggests, there are images of her that look like these, images of the private negotiations between a woman learning what she wanted and the men she trusted enough to learn with, all of it captured by a camera she didn't know existed while a man she remembers as the contractor who watched her with predatory patience helped himself to the feed.
