Page 4 of Dominion's Guard
My feet stop. My hand tightens around my keys. Every nerve ending that spent over a decade mapping entry points and escape routes fires at once.
Through the narrow window in the stairwell door I can see two figures. One standing, one on his knees. The fluorescent lights on the ground level are mostly dead, only two still working, casting long stripes of white across the pavement and leaving deep pockets of shadow between the support columns. The man on his knees shifts, and one of the working fluorescents catches his profile. The jaw, the silver hair, the posture even on his knees: straight-backed, composed. Years of serving a man twice a week and you learn his silhouette the way you learn the shape of a bottle you reach for without looking.
Lawrence Blanchard. Blanton's Single Barrel, neat. Quiet voice, excellent manners, old-money restraint that makes tipping more than the cost of the drink look effortless. He never talks about himself. Never asks personal questions. Just sits at the end of the bar, drinks his bourbon, watches the room with the careful attention of a man who learned long ago that listening is worth more than speaking.
He's on his knees now, and his hands are behind his back, and the figure standing over him holds a gun with the muzzle pressed to the back of Lawrence's skull.
The shot is suppressed. A mechanical punch that moves through the garage like a fist wrapped in cloth. Lawrence's body pitches forward and hits the ground face-first, and the sound of that impact is worse than the gunshot because it carries finality, the heavy certainty of a body that will never move under its own power again.
The keys in my hand dig into my palm so hard the metal bites skin. The scream locks somewhere behind my sternum, trapped in the same muscle memory that kept me silent through years of moving through places I had no right to be. Silence is survival.Silence is the only thing between me and the man with the gun who is now reaching down to check what used to be Lawrence for a pulse.
I take one step backward. One step. That's all. The sole of my shoe catches the edge of the stair and the sound, a whisper of rubber on stone, carries in the dead air of the garage like a shout.
The man straightens and turns.
I don't see a face—just a basic shape, tallish in dark clothing that is meant to disguise the identity with a gun rotating toward the stairwell door where I am standing in the window like a target on a range.
My body takes over. Years of bartending have not erased the older reflexes. I take the stairs two at a time, legs driving hard, the burn in my thighs familiar and welcome because it means I am moving, I am fast, I am doing the one thing I have always been better at than anything else: getting out.
The stairwell door below me opens. The sound of it punches up the shaft and my lungs seize. He is coming. He saw my face. He is coming.
Second level. My hands hit the door bar and the door flies open and my feet find the pavement and my car is right there, the little blue MINI Cooper that has never been a more welcome sight. My thumb finds the fob button between my clenched fingers. The locks chirp. I'm inside.
The engine catches. The tires bark as I reverse out. Headlights find the exit ramp and I take it too fast, the suspension bouncing hard over the transition, and I am past the barrier and into the street with my foot on the accelerator before the stairwell door on the ground level opens again.
Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe he didn't follow. Maybe I imagined the door.
Except I didn't imagine Lawrence's body hitting the ground. I will hear that sound for the rest of my life.
I drive several blocks before my hands shake enough to make steering unsafe. I pull to the curb, kill the lights, and call 911 with fingers that take three attempts to find the right icon on my phone.
The dispatcher is professional. Takes my location, takes my description, asks me to stay on the line. I give her everything I can: the parking garage address, the ground level, one victim, one shooter, suppressed weapon, dark clothing. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else, someone who watches her words the way I used to watch alarm panels, checking each one for flaws before letting it through.
Two patrol cars arrive within minutes. I lead them to the garage. Ground level, past the stairwell exit, between the support columns.
There is nothing there.
No body. No blood. No shell casing. The floor is clean in a way that garage floors are never clean, scrubbed with effort and chemicals that leave a faint bite in the air beneath the usual oil and exhaust. The ground level is fully lit now, every fluorescent humming, flooding the space with bright, even light. When I came through minutes ago, this level was mostly dark. Two tubes working, the rest dead. Now it looks like a showroom, and the chemical smell confirms what the lighting suggests: someone cleaned this space with speed and precision while I was calling 911.
The officers look at me. I know that look. I've been on the receiving end of it from cops my entire life, the one that says they've already decided what kind of person I am and what kind of story I'm telling.
"Ma'am, are you sure this is where you saw it?"
I am sure. I am standing on the exact spot where Lawrence Blanchard died, and there is nothing here, and the nothing is so complete it feels like the ground is sliding under my feet.
They take my statement. They are polite about it in the way that means they won't do anything with it. One of them asks if I've been drinking. I tell him I'm a bartender, not a customer. He writes something in his notebook that I know is a waste of ink.
They leave. I stand in the garage that smells like chemicals and listen to their engine fade and I pull out my phone and call Margot.
She answers on the second ring. Her voice carries the calm that tells me she was still awake, still working, already ahead of whatever crisis is about to land on her desk.
"Renata. What happened?"
I tell her. All of it. The words come out steadier than I expect, organized the way she taught me to organize information behind the bar: relevant details first, context second, personal feelings never. Lawrence Blanchard. The parking garage. The gun. The body. The sound. The nothing that replaced it all.
The silence on her end lasts a few seconds. I count every one.
"Come back to the club. Now. Don't stop, don't go to your apartment, don't talk to anyone. Come straight to me."
