Page 45 of Dominion's Guard
I don't need anything from outside. I need to be inside whatever building Andy is standing in right now, watching the arrest, seeing Ridgewater's face when the warrant lands. I need to be there when they seize the archive, when they pull the servers and hard drives and the footage that includes my face and my body and the private negotiations I had with men I trusted in rooms I believed were safe.
Instead I'm in a Craftsman in Mid-City, pacing his kitchen and trying to work on the seasonal drink menus that Terrence has been covering in my absence, and the concentration required to care about shrub ratios while someone is executing a federal warrant on the man who sold my privacy to strangers is so far beyond what I can manage today that the laptop screen might as well be blank.
I close the computer. I stand at the kitchen window. I sit back down. I pick up my phone, check for messages, find none, set it down. The waiting is a physical thing, a crawling restlessness that lives in my hands and the back of my neck and the space between my shoulder blades where the tension has been settling for weeks.
The house holds still around me, and the stillness is the worst part, because in the stillness I can hear every creak of a floor I've memorized by accident and every shift of the air conditioning that I learned to distinguish from footsteps during the early, sleepless nights when the guest room walls felt too thin and the steps between his door and mine felt too short.
My phone buzzes in the late afternoon. Andy's name on the screen sends a kick through my ribs that I don't bother pretending is anything other than relief.
On my way back. We got him.
It’s one of the shortest messages he's ever sent me, but the weight it lifts is physical, a pressure releasing from across my shoulders and down through my spine that I didn't realize I'd been holding because I'd been holding it so long it started to feel like posture.
I read the text twice. I set the phone down. I pick it up and read it again.
We got him.
The front door opens less than an hour later, and the man who walks through it looks like he's been running on adrenaline and bad coffee for most of the day. Andy's sleeves are rolled to the elbow, his tie is gone, and the leather of his holster sits visible against his rumpled shirt in a way that tells me hestopped caring about concealment long before he got in the car to come home.
He drops his keys on the counter and stands in the kitchen doorway, and the exhaustion in his face is real, but underneath it, running through the fatigue like a current through deep water, is the controlled energy of someone who spent the day hunting and caught what he was after.
His gaze finds me at the table, and it stays a beat longer than the doorway requires. The look doesn't move across my face. It moves down, tracking the borrowed shirt and my bare legs and the bare feet I've been padding through his house in all day, and the inventory is slow and thorough and entirely deliberate. The detective walked through that door. The man is looking at me now.
"You're staring, Broussard."
"You're wearing my shirt."
"Your shirt is the only clean option in this house, because your laundry system is as incompetent as your pantry." I push the chair across from me out with my foot. "Sit down before you fall down. You look like you fought the federal government and the federal government won."
"The federal government and I came to an arrangement." He takes the chair, forearms on the table, hands loose. The proximity is immediate. The table is small, and it gets smaller every day, and he's close enough that I can see the shadow of stubble along his jaw and smell cedar and gun leather and the particular scent of a man who has been working hard in the Louisiana heat.
"Ridgewater is in federal custody. Locke's team executed the warrant on his Metairie rental and seized his equipment, servers and hard drives and external storage. The Bureau's forensics unit has it now."
"What about the footage?"
"The initial assessment found a large archive. The files are organized by date and location, and it's going to take time to catalogue the full scope, but what they've seen so far is consistent with footage from Dominion's private rooms."
The nausea that rises is sharp and specific. I swallow it down because vomiting on Andy's table won't change what Ridgewater built, and the information matters more than the feeling. "What about the blackmail operation?"
"Financial records link him to the shell company that received Lawrence's payments. The brokerage firm in Florida was receiving content from the same accounts. Locke thinks the distribution side will net additional charges once they trace the buyer network." He rubs a hand across the back of his neck. "There's enough to hold him on the footage theft and distribution. The connection to the murders is circumstantial right now. The forensics team is pulling location data from his devices. If his phone puts him at any of the parking garages on the nights of the killings, the circumstantial becomes prosecutable."
"So it's not over."
"The immediate threat is contained. Ridgewater is in a cell and his equipment is in federal evidence. The distribution network is shut down." He meets my eyes, and the professional assessment gives way to something less guarded, closer to the look he gives me across the table late at night when the case files blur and the distance between us stops pretending to be professional. "The rest takes time."
"Tell me the part where someone might be selling photographs of me to strangers is over."
"That part is over."
The relief hits like a wave breaking over a seawall, full and physical and immediate. My shoulders drop. My jaw unclenches. The knot at the base of my skull loosens all at once, and for afew seconds the only thing I feel is the raw, flooding gratitude of a woman who has been holding her breath for weeks and just heard the lock turn.
Then the breath settles, and the completeness fades. The part of me that spent years reading rooms and calculating exits knows that an arrest is a beginning rather than an ending. The trial will come. The footage will be reviewed by strangers who will see what Ridgewater saw, and no federal warrant can un-see what has already been seen.
"Thank you," I say, and the simplicity costs more than I want it to. Gratitude requires acknowledging that I needed help, and I have spent my entire adult life building a woman who does not need help from anyone.
Andy watches me say it. He reads what it costs, because he reads everything, and he doesn't make me pay more than the words themselves.
"You gave me the case," he says. "The break-in and the evidence and the names and the financial trail. I followed the road. You built it."
