Page 58 of Dominion's Guard
Andy is just behind my left shoulder and has been since the tech opened his kit. He positioned himself there before the tech touched me, a placement that looked casual and wasn't. The way a man stands when he's letting another man work but making sure the geometry of the room communicates exactly whose kitchen this is and whose bartender is standing in the middle of it with her shirt off.
The tech felt it. He kept his hands clinical, his movements efficient, his eyes on the equipment. He was a smart man.
"Clear transmission," the tech says, checking his tablet. "Range is solid through the full building. You'll come through clean."
"Can he hear me if I whisper?" The question sounds operational. It isn't. Some of the things I say behind that bar aren't meant for broadcast.
"Depends on ambient noise. Club volume, you'll need to speak at conversational level for clean audio."
Andy's hand settles on my hip from behind, brief and proprietary, his thumb pressing the bone through my jeans while the tech packs his kit. The touch says nothing and communicates everything: I was here before you arrived and I'll be here after you leave and the skin under that wire is mine. The tech nods once, to Andy rather than to me, and lets himself out through the front door.
The kitchen is quiet after he goes. I pull my shirt on, a black fitted tee, dark enough that the wire doesn't print through the fabric and turn to face the man who hasn't moved from the spot where he planted himself like he was growing roots through the floorboards. His sleeves are rolled to the forearm, the way they always are when he's working through something that involves risk and restraint in equal measure, and the tendons in his wrists hold the same taut geometry they held last night when his hands were in my hair and his patience was the only thing between me and the kind of surrender I'd been performing for years without it ever actually being real.
That was last night. Tonight I walk into a building where four people earned their way onto a dead man's blackmail list and three of them are in the ground, and the fourth hasn't been found.
"Stop staring at my sternum," I say. "The wire's fine. Locke's guy was very thorough and very polite about the whole situation."
"He was polite because I was standing behind you."
"Is that what that was? I thought you were just guarding the coffee maker."
His jaw tightens, and the look he gives me holds the heat of a man who spent last night taking me apart with his hands and his voice and the kind of patience that borders on cruelty, and who is now watching me cover genuine terror with the same bratty deflection I've been throwing at him since the first night he sat at my bar.
"Come here."
Two words, and they land in the command voice, the one that bypasses every smart comment I've ever crafted and lands in the part of my spine that still feels like it belongs to him after last night. After the way he held me through the shaking and said'thank you for trusting me'like he meant it more than anything he'd ever said with his badge on.
I go. I'd like to pretend I took my time about it, but my feet cover the distance before the defiance can catch up, and when I stop in front of him he tips my chin up with two fingers and holds me there.
"You don't have to be brave right now," he says.
The gentleness in it almost cracks me open, and the almost is doing all the work, because the part of me that Margot rebuilt from a burglar into a bartender, the part that learned to carry fear in a pocket where it fuels instead of freezes, locks down hard around the fracture and holds.
"Yes I do."
He studies me for a beat. His thumb traces the edge of my jaw, a slow stroke that could be tenderness or assessment and manages to be both, and whatever he finds in my face, he acceptswithout argument. That is the grace of this man: he understands that the performance and the person underneath it aren't always separate, that sometimes the bravado is load-bearing and pulling it away does more damage than leaving it in place.
The hand drops. The operational cadence returns to his voice, but the undertone doesn't shift, and what lives in the gap between the command and the tenderness is the thing that makes me want to test every boundary he sets just to feel him hold them.
"Comms check at seven. Behind the bar by eight. You stay on the main floor, you stay visible, and you stay where I can see you on the monitors." The last part has nothing to do with tactics. "Remy's got operatives on the main floor, the hallway, and the rear exits. Margot cleared the staff rotation. Terrence is your only backup behind the bar."
"Terrence doesn't know about the wire?"
"Terrence doesn't know about any of it. Margot's call. The fewer people who know, the cleaner the operation stays."
"So I get to pour drinks all night with federal surveillance equipment taped to my chest and nobody to share the joke with. Terrific. This is exactly how I imagined spending my evening."
"You imagined spending your evening arguing with me about the plan you volunteered for."
"I can do both. I'm an excellent multitasker."
I pour myself coffee from the pot that I made an hour ago because the ritual of grinding the beans and measuring the water gave my hands something to do that wasn't shaking. The ratio is the one I fixed weeks ago, the one Andy hasn't mentioned noticing, and the familiarity of it steadies me the way rituals are supposed to.
"What's my cover if someone asks why I'm back on a regular shift after being out for days?"
"Personal time. Margot called you back because the floor's been short-staffed." He pulls his keys from the counter. "It tracks well enough that you won't have to sell it."
"I can sell anything, Detective. That's the job."
