Page 48 of Dominion's Guard
"I've been paying attention. The difference is that profiling assumes I've reached a conclusion. What I've reached is a hypothesis, and I'd rather test it with your input than assume I'm right."
The honesty of that lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays. The Doms I've scened with at Dominion treated thenegotiation as a formality, a checklist to clear before the main event. Andy is treating it as the foundation, the load-bearing wall that everything else gets built on, and the patience with which he's laying it tells me he has no intention of rushing the construction.
"Not tonight," I say, and the words cost me because the want pressing against my ribs would very much like tonight to be the night. "The conversation, yes. Not the rest. Not yet."
He nods again, and the acceptance is immediate and clean, a man who heard the answer and has no interest in negotiating around it. He stands, collects his notebook from the table, and stacks it with the pen in the neat arrangement that is the only organizational system in this house I haven't rearranged.
"When you're ready," he says. "You set the pace."
"That doesn't sound very dominant of you."
"Consent is the foundation. The dominance comes after." He picks up his mug, rinses it in the sink, and sets it on the rack I installed because his dish-drying system was an affront to anyone with spatial awareness. "Goodnight, Renata."
My name lands in his mouth in that low register that bypasses every wall I've built and finds the woman behind them.
"Goodnight, Andy."
He walks down the hall toward his bedroom, and I sit at the table with the taste of him still on my lips and the phantom pressure of his hand on my neck and the understanding that the composure I've been maintaining just collapsed like a lock I picked on purpose and pretended was an accident.
I know the steps between his door and the guest room because I counted them the first night, too. Every one of them is smaller than it was yesterday, and the woman staring down the hallway he just disappeared into knows exactly what she wants and is terrified of the wanting and is going to walk toward himeventually, because he is the first person who ever caught the sound she buried and refused to let her pretend it didn't happen.
I press my fingers to my mouth. The taste of him is bourbon and patience and the slow, certain heat of a man who kissed me like a verdict.
The hallway is dark, and I walk it toward the guest room instead of his door, because the pace is mine to set and I intend to make him wait the way he made me wait, the way he's been waiting at my bar for over a year, patient and relentless and watching.
He can handle it. He's the only one who ever could.
12
ANDY
The call from Locke comes at six in the morning, and the news it carries lands in two pieces that don't fit together the way I need them to.
Ridgewater is talking. The footage theft, the shell company, the brokerage firm in Florida, the financial pipeline that turned Dominion's private rooms into a distribution network: he's given it all up in exchange for whatever deal his lawyer negotiated overnight. He sold the footage, he built the archive, he ran the operation from his rental in Metairie with equipment he'd been accumulating since Margot fired him. The confession is detailed and verifiable and it closes the federal case with the kind of clean resolution that makes prosecutors smile.
He didn't kill anyone.
Locke lays out the alibis with the dispassionate efficiency of a man delivering bad news he's already processed. Ridgewater was in Biloxi the night Lawrence disappeared, attending a tech conference with timestamped check-ins, hotel records, and security footage from the convention center. For Susan Landry's murder, his cell tower data puts him in Houston. For Thomas, he was in a holding cell in Kenner on a DUI that his lawyer got dismissed the following morning. The alibis are airtight, cross-verified, and each one drives another nail into the theory I've been building for weeks.
"There's another piece," Locke says, and the pause before he continues tells me this one will cost more than the rest. "Ridgewater may not have planted the cameras, but he acquired the footage from a source he communicated with through encrypted channels. He says he never met the source in person. The account traces back to a server that Armand Deveraux's operation used during the Simone LaCroix case."
I sit with that. Armand is in federal custody, awaiting trial on the conspiracy charges. The cameras were Julien LaSalle's work. Luc Pascal found and destroyed them during a security sweep. The footage survived because someone copied it before the hardware was pulled, and that someone funneled it to Ridgewater for distribution.
"Armand had a partner," I say.
"That's what the digital trail suggests. Someone with access to the original footage, someone who maintained a copy after the cameras were destroyed. Ridgewater dealt with a middleman. The middleman dealt with someone who had direct access to the source material." Locke's voice carries the measured care of a man building a case he can't yet close. "We're tracing the server architecture, but whoever set it up knew what they were doing. The identity behind the original account is still unresolved."
I hang up and stand at the kitchen window while the coffee maker runs its cycle. My hands press flat against the counter, and the pressure is the only thing keeping them from doing something less productive, like putting a fist through the cabinet.
I've spent weeks building toward Ridgewater, threading the investigation through legal loopholes and unauthorized channels at a professional cost that ends careers, and the manwho was supposed to be at the center of it all is a middleman with airtight alibis and a lawyer who got him a deal.
Renata's door is still closed. She went to bed after the kiss, after the conversation about birth control and testing that she tried to deflect with humor and I refused to let her, and the hallway between my door and hers held the particular quiet of two people who chose distance over the alternative. I can still feel the shape of her mouth against mine and the grip of her fist in my shirt and the sound she made when I took the kiss from her and made it mine.
The memory sits alongside the wreckage of my case with the particular cruelty of a man whose best night and worst morning arrived in the same twelve-hour window. The killer is someone else entirely, someone using the same membership information through a channel that Ridgewater didn't control and can't identify.
The body count is three—if you include Lawrence Blanchard—and the suspect list is empty.
My phone rings before the coffee finishes. Hebert. The captain's voice carries the measured calm of a man who has reached the end of his patience and is delivering the consequences without raising his voice.
