Page 12 of Dominion's Guard
I hold her gaze for a beat. She holds it right back, chin set at an angle that says she's thinking hard about something she doesn't want to think about.
I turn and walk toward the exit, past the Rapier Strategic operators who track me with their eyes and do nothing else.
"This isn't over, Renata."
I say it over my shoulder without slowing down. The case, the investigation, the pull between us that I stopped pretending was professional somewhere around the second bourbon I nursed while memorizing the way she moves.
3
RENATA
The cracks in my ceiling have become my closest companions tonight. I counted them at four in the morning, an hour after I got home from Dominion with Andy's parting words still lodged between my ribs like a splinter I can't reach. I counted them again at five. By six, I have the pattern memorized well enough to draw it blindfolded, and the knowledge brings me no closer to sleep than the bourbon I poured and didn't drink, still sitting on the counter where I left it hours ago.
Every time my eyes close, the reel starts. Lawrence is on his knees. The suppressed shot punches through the garage. A body lands face-first on concrete. Then the loop picks up speed, and somewhere around the fourth rotation my brain starts filling in details I missed the first time: the exact angle of the shooter's shoulders, the positioning of Lawrence's hands behind his back, the mechanical competence of the kill done with the ease of someone who has done it before.
And then, because my subconscious has a flair for dramatic timing, the reel cuts to Andy leaning against my bar with his sleeves rolled and his bourbon untouched, watching me with that patient, dismantling focus that makes me want to throw acocktail shaker at his head.'This isn't over, Renata.'He said it while walking away, which is an impressive power move for a man who'd spent an hour pretending the Woodford Reserve was the reason he stayed. The words aren't a threat. They're a promise, made by someone who has never in his life started something he didn't finish.
I sit up and swing my feet to the floor. The warehouse conversion is cold at this hour, the exposed brick holding the night chill in a way that drywall never does. My studio is small and organized the way Margot taught me to organize everything: a place for each thing, each thing where it belongs. The bed is against the far wall, the kitchen galley runs along the left, and the bathroom hides behind a sliding barn door I installed myself. A reading chair by the window looks out over the rooftops toward the river. The space is mine and I earned it and most nights it feels like the safest place in the world.
Tonight it feels like a box with good lighting.
I cross to the window and pull the curtain back an inch. The street below is quiet. Two cars sit at the curb that I recognize, belonging to neighbors. The third is one I don't recognize: a dark SUV with tinted windows, parked with a clear sightline to my building entrance.
The detail is Rapier Strategic. They've been there since I got home from Dominion, two operatives rotating in shifts, one in the vehicle and one positioned somewhere I haven't pinpointed yet, probably the coffee shop across the street that stays open until five for the overnight hospital crowd. They're good at their jobs, professional and unobtrusive, invisible to anyone who doesn't know what a surveillance car looks like.
I know what a surveillance car looks like. I spent years learning the difference between a car that belongs on a street and one that's watching it.
The protection detail was Margot's call. She told me Remy would handle it, and he has, with the quiet efficiency that runs in the Pascal family the way blue eyes or left-handedness runs in others. Remy called me earlier to confirm the rotation schedule and give me a number to reach the operatives directly. He was polite, thorough, and entirely clear that this was nonnegotiable.
The problem is that I'm a woman who spent years slipping past security systems, and being on the inside of one makes my skin crawl in ways that have nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with the animal instinct that says watched means trapped.
Andy would probably have something insightful to say about that particular irony, about a woman who spent her career making sure nobody could keep track of her and is now bristling because people are trying to keep her alive. He'd say it in that low, unhurried voice, too, the one that makes observations hit like open palms, and I'd want to slap him for being right.
I let the curtain fall and go back to bed. I stare at the ceiling and count the cracks again.
Eventually I give up on sleep entirely and make coffee. The French press gurgles and the smell fills the apartment, rich and dark, the one luxury I allow myself that Margot would call an actual investment rather than an indulgence. I drink it standing at the counter, watching the morning light sharpen along the rooftops through the kitchen window, and I think about what Andy told me.
The parking garage cameras were remotely wiped, a professional-grade hack requiring resources and planning, the sort that says whoever killed Lawrence knew the cameras were there and had already arranged to eliminate them before pulling the trigger. The premeditation runs deeper than anything patrol officers encounter in their average Friday night.
Lawrence's family filed a missing persons report. His wife filed it, presumably, the one he never talked about at the bar. Lawrence was the man who ordered Blanton's neat and tipped like it was a sacrament and sat at the end of the bar with the posture of someone who had spent his whole life being careful about everything except the one thing that got him killed.
What was that thing? What did Lawrence Blanchard do, or know, or have, that earned him a bullet in a parking garage? Andy thinks I'm holding back information that could answer that question, and he's right. I noticed things a bartender shouldn't have noticed, processed them faster than a civilian would, and I kept those observations to myself because sharing them opens a door I locked three years ago on a Garden District porch with Margot's handshake still warm in my palm.
I should tell Margot. I should sit down with her and lay out every detail, the operational precision of the cleanup, the lighting change, the way the shooter moved with the economy of someone trained in close-quarters work. Margot would listen. She would believe me. She would add those details to whatever file Rapier Strategic is building and let Remy and Andy work the case with the full picture.
Telling Margot means explaining how I still notice those things. It means admitting that the bartender she invested in still reads a building the way I used to, cataloging entry points and alarm panels and blind spots the way other people catalog weather. That admission drags Dominion closer to the center of a murder investigation that already has NOPD circling its edges.
Andy has a deadline from his captain. He said it himself: produce something solid or the case gets buried. If he comes back to Margot asking harder questions, the ones that start withhow does your bartender know what a professional cleanup looks like, the answer takes him straight to my record. Sealedjuvenile files don't stay sealed when a homicide detective decides they're relevant.
Dominion has survived one scandal. The Simone LaCroix situation almost tore the club apart from the inside, cameras in the private rooms, a stalker with access to member data, federal law enforcement poking through the wreckage. Margot rebuilt the trust. She redesigned the security protocols with Luc. She put the club back together brick by brick, and the mortar is the promise that what happens inside those walls stays inside those walls.
I am not going to be the reason that promise breaks again.
The coffee goes cold while I stare at the counter. The untouched bourbon stares back. My phone sits between them, silent, holding Remy's number and Margot's number and nothing from Andy, because Andy doesn't need a text thread to stay in my head.
He delivered his information at the bar, face to face, where he could watch me process it. That's how he operates. No distance. No buffer. Just those blue-grey eyes taking me apart one tell at a time while I pretend the proximity isn't doing exactly what he intends it to do.
He reads me too well. The thought coils at the base of my skull, heavy and oddly welcome.
