Page 61 of Dominion's Guard
My lock picks are in my pocket, tucked into the lining of my jeans since this morning, carried the same way I've carried them every day since Margot gave me a reason to stop using them for the wrong reasons. The weight of them against my thigh is the oldest comfort I know. They won't help me tonight. There are no locks to pick and no doors to slip through and no escape routes that lead anywhere except forward, toward a room at the top of a staircase where someone who knows my name and my wire and my cop is waiting to find out whether I'm willing to keep the killer talking long enough for the people listening to close the distance.
The stairs are narrow and carpeted, and my footsteps make almost no sound on the treads. The upper hallway stretches ahead of me, warm and quiet with sconces that cast their light on the walls. The private room doors are spaced evenly along both sides, numbered in brass, and the sound from the main floor fades with each step until the only thing I can hear is my own breathing and the low, distant pulse of the music and the steady, unshakeable knowledge that Andy heard me say his name and is already moving.
Room seven is at the far end of the hallway, the last door on the left.
I stop in front of it. The brass number gleams under the sconce light. The door is closed. The handle is the same brushed nickel as every other door in this hallway, and the simplicity ofit, the absolute ordinariness of a door handle on a door in a building I know better than my own apartment, is the cruelest thing about this moment.
The familiar should be safe. The familiar stopped being safe the night a man died in a parking garage and the world rearranged itself around the sound of his body hitting concrete.
My hand is on the handle. Andy is moving through the building toward me with the operatives at his back and the badge he's been risking since the night he refused to let this case die clipped to his belt, and every second I stand in this hallway is a second the killer might decide the wait isn't worth it and find another way out.
I turn the handle and step inside, and the door falls shut behind me.
15
ANDY
The staircase is narrow, and I take it two treads at a time with my weapon drawn and Locke's voice in my earpiece telling me the FBI team is thirty seconds behind me.
Thirty seconds is too long.
Renata said my name into the wire moments ago, the two syllables coming through the feed with the forced calm of a woman who has trained herself to perform under pressure and is now performing for an audience that includes the man she slept with last night and a roomful of federal agents she's never met. I heard her tell Terrence she needed a minute, heard the shift in the ambient noise as she left the main floor, heard her footsteps on the carpet in the upper hallway, and I was out of the chair and moving before Locke finished telling me to hold position.
I didn't hold. The instruction registered and my legs kept moving, because the distance between the monitoring station and the second floor is a gap that procedures can't close fast enough when the woman on the other end of the wire just walked into something that made her reach out for me first.
The upper hallway seems too long and room seven, the last door on the left, is closed.
Renata's voice through the wire is controlled and level, carrying the rhythm she uses behind the bar when a patron crosses a line and she's managing the situation before it requires intervention. The other voice, muffled through the door, is female, and I can't make out the words, but the cadence is wrong, too fast, too pressured, the pattern of someone whose composure is unraveling at the seams.
Locke's voice crackles in my ear. "Broussard, hold at the door. Team's on the stairs."
I hold. My back stays against the wall beside the doorframe, my weapon up, my breathing controlled, while Renata is on the other side of a door with someone who has killed four people and left a note calling them whores.
The discipline required to wait is the worst kind, the kind that demands I trust the woman inside to stay alive for the handful of seconds it takes for backup to clear the stairwell.
The female voice rises. The words sharpen into fragments I can catch through the door:sinandpunishmentandfilth, and the conviction in the delivery carries a zealotry that rewrites the profile. This isn’t someone with a financial grudge. The killer is a woman on a crusade.
The gunshot splits the air.
The sound punches through the door and the wall and every protocol I've ever followed. I don't wait for Locke. I don't wait for the team on the stairs. My hand drops to the handle. It turns. The door swings inward and I clear the threshold with my weapon up and my sight line sweeping the room.
The gun is on the floor. Renata is on her feet with her hands up, palms open, and the dark-haired woman facing her is reaching into the pocket of her coat. The bullet went into the ceiling. The plaster dust is still settling.
What comes out of the pocket is a folding knife. The blade locks open with a click that carries across the room, andshe lunges before I can close the distance. The blade catches Renata's left forearm in a slash that opens the skin from elbow to wrist, and Renata's reaction is sharp and involuntary, bitten off before it can become a scream. The clipped control of it hits me in a place the gunshot didn't reach. I bring my weapon up and the sight finds the woman's center mass, and then Renata is moving into her instead of away, closing the distance the way someone does when they understand that proximity is the only defense against a blade, and my sight line disappears.
They're too close. The knife arm is trapped between their bodies and Renata has her attacker by the wrist with her injured hand, blood running down her forearm and onto both of them, and the angle gives me nothing clean.. Each fraction of movement shifts the geometry, and the training that tells me to fire when the target is clear is fighting the reality that clear won't exist while Renata is tangled with her.
The woman twists. She's strong, stronger than her frame suggests, and the knife rotates in her grip as she tries to free the blade. Renata's hold on the woman’s wrist slips in the blood, and for a beat that lasts longer than physics should allow, the point of the knife turns toward Renata's ribs.
Renata doesn't execute a technique. She fights the way someone fights who learned early that losing means worse than bruises: ugly, close, using her weight and her hips and the momentum of the lunge to drive the woman off-balance. She hooks a leg behind the knee and shoves, and they go down together, Renata landing on top with one forearm jammed against the collarbone and the other hand still gripping the knife wrist, grinding it against the floor until the fingers open and the blade skitters free. The hold is raw and graceless and it works because Renata is younger and more desperate and has spent her life reading the geometry of enclosed spaces with the instinct of a woman who knows what it means to be trapped.
The woman bucks underneath Renata, her nails clawing at the bleeding arm and leaving white tracks across the red, and what comes out of her is half scream and half sob.
I'm on them in two strides. My weapon goes into the holster and the cuffs come out, and the transition between armed response and arrest is muscle memory that doesn't require thought. I take the wrists from Renata's grip, one at a time, pulling the arms behind her back while Renata holds the pin until the cuffs click and I tell her she can let go.
Renata releases. She rolls off and sits on the floor with her back against the leather chair, her injured arm cradled against her stomach. The blood has soaked through her sleeve and is dripping from her fingertips. She doesn't make a sound. The restraint in that silence is louder than the gunshot.
The face that turns toward me as the woman writhes against the cuffs is one I recognize. It belongs to Patricia Moreau.
