Page 60 of Dominion's Guard
"I'll pass along the compliment to Terrence. He'll be devastated."
"I'm serious. This place isn't the same without you."
"That's very sweet, Paul. It's also exactly what you said to the bartender at Cure last month, so I'm grading the sincerity on a curve."
He laughs, and the sound travels through the wire to wherever Andy is sitting, and the knowledge that a man is flirting with me while the man who made me saypleasewith my face pressed against his pillow is hearing every word of it tightens something behind my navel that has no business showing up during an active federal operation.
I don't lean into the flirtation, because I'm working and because there are limits even my bratty streak won't cross tonight, but I let the corner of my mouth curve in a way that I know Andy can hear in my voice when I pour Paul's drink and tell him the Sazerac is on the house for his loyalty.
The hours pass. Drinks build and empty and build again. The wire hums against my ribs, constant and present, and Andy is a pressure I can feel without seeing, something atmospheric and close that shifts the weight of every room it enters.
I catch myself, somewhere in the middle of the shift, angling my chin toward the transmitter while I wipe down the bar and murmuring, "If you're bored up there, I can start narrating the garnish prep. Riveting stuff. Lemon peels, orange twists, the whole citrus saga."
Terrence looks over. "You say something?"
"Talking to myself. Occupational hazard."
By ten o'clock, the floor is full and nothing has happened. The tension I walked in with has settled into a low, persistent hum that lives beneath the professional rhythm of the shift, present and manageable and utterly exhausting. My feet ache. The adhesive has started to burn again at the edges, a slow irritation I can't scratch without drawing attention. The members are drinking and talking and scening and none of them are dead and none of them have threatened me and the whole night feels like standing in a field during a storm warning, watching the sky and waiting for a rotation that may never come.
I build a Blanton's neat for a member whose face makes me think of Lawrence, because Lawrence ordered a Blanton's neat every time he sat at my bar and the muscle memory of pouring that bourbon for a man of that age and bearing hits the same nerve it's been hitting since the night I knelt beside his credenza and read his death sentence in a folder full of photographs.
The ice in the glass catches the light. I set the drink down on a napkin and smile, and the smile is perfect, and the performance is holding, and the transmitter humming against my chest is the only honest thing in this building.
At ten-forty, my phone vibrates in my apron pocket.
The number is blocked. The message is four sentences long, and the screen goes bright in my cupped hand below the bar top where Terrence can't see it.
I know you're wired. I know the cop is upstairs. Private room 7. Come alone or more die.
My thumb is still on the screen when the first question fires: how did they get this number? This is my personal cell, not the club line, not a number on any public record. The people who have this number are people I chose to give it to, which means whoever sent this text is either someone I know or someone who accessed the records of someone I know, and both answers land the same way: the killer has been closer to me than the investigation ever accounted for.
The worse question follows right behind it. They know about the wire. The operation was planned yesterday, the wire applied today, and the number of people who know I'm transmitting is small enough to count on one hand: Andy, Locke's FBI team, Remy, Margot, and the operatives on the floor. That is a closed circle.
Someone inside it talked, or someone outside it has access I haven't identified, and either way the operation is blown in a fashion that means the tactical advantage Andy built is gone. The killer isn't reacting to the trap. The killer is ahead of it.
The bar noise dims to a frequency I can hear through but can't process, and the light on the bottles behind me goes sharp at the edges.
My hand drops below the bar. The phone is still in my palm. Terrence is at the far end, occupied with a member's order, and the brief window of privacy his absence gives me is enough to make the only decision that the situation allows.
If the killer leaves this building, the pattern continues. If the killer stays in room seven waiting for me to walk through that door, the killer stays in a fixed location inside a buildingfull of Rapier Strategic operatives with an FBI-monitored wire broadcasting every sound in real time. The operation isn't what Andy planned, but the geometry hasn't changed: the killer is upstairs, Andy is listening, and the space between me and that room is the distance that keeps the target stationary.
The burglar in me built a career on one principle: you don't run from a room until you know what's in it. Running is how you miss the exit that was right in front of you the whole time.
I tilt my chin down, just enough that the angle reaches the transmitter, and speak his name in the conversational register that the tech told me would carry through ambient noise.
"Andy. Room seven."
It is the signal we agreed on, spoken into the wire he taped to my skin while the late afternoon light caught the lines around his eyes and the look on his face said he was already calculating the cost of letting me walk into this building tonight.
I set the phone on the bar, screen down. I untie my apron and fold it with the care of a woman who has been tending this bar for years and does not intend to leave it looking unfinished. Terrence glances over.
"Cover me for a minute?" I keep my voice easy. "I need to check something upstairs."
"Sure thing. Take your time."
The staircase to the upper private rooms begins past the lounge seating, where the lighting shifts from the main floor warmth to a deeper, muted register that Margot designed for the transition between public and private space. The ground-floor rooms are closer, more accessible, the ones most members book for a standard evening. The upper rooms are quieter, more secluded, reserved for members who want distance from the main floor. The members who climb those stairs do so with the understood agreement that what happens beyond themstays beyond them, and the club's rebuilt security protocols are supposed to guarantee that promise.
The protocols didn't save Lawrence. They didn't save Susan or Thomas or Sophie. They won't save whoever comes next if the person in room seven walks out of this building tonight and disappears the way every lead in this case has disappeared, into the dark, into the city, into the gap between what the investigation can prove and what it can't.
