Page 18 of Dominion's Guard
"Where I go on my own time isn't your business, Detective."
Detective.That's all she ever gives me. The title is the wall she keeps between us, and every time I step past it and use her name instead, I can watch it land. I've seen the effect at the club, at Rapier Strategic, at the bar: the slight catch in her breath, the reset behind her eyes, the effort it takes her to pretend the sound of her own name in my voice doesn't settle somewhere below her collarbone and stay there.
"It is when you're a witness in a murder investigation under active protection from a private security firm, and you disappear without telling anyone where you're going."
"I wasn't aware I was under house arrest. Has the law changed since the last time a cop told me how to live my life?"
"Nobody's telling you how to live your life. I'm asking where you were."
"And I'm telling you none of your business. Now, if you want to come in, get a warrant. Want to haul me in for questioning? Arrest me but be advised there are lots of lawyers at Dominion and not all of them are fans of yours or NOPD's."
The words come out sharp and fast, automatic defiance layered with calculation. The lawyer card is smart, specific, and tells me she's been thinking about her legal position long before I showed up at her door. The flicker that crosses her face afterward tells me she also knows exactly how it sounds coming from a woman who just evaded a security detail through a route she clearly prepared in advance.
"I'm not here with a badge, Renata. I'm here because someone killed a man in your parking garage, scrubbed every physical trace of it off the concrete, and wiped every camera system within two blocks to make sure nobody could prove it. It was an organized operation, and the person who ran it chose that location for a reason, one that might include knowing who else uses that garage every night at three in the morning."
Her breathing changes. The bravado holds, but her body registers the implication.
"I'm trying to help you," I say. "That's the truth, and you can take it or leave it. But whoever killed Lawrence is still out there, and you just demonstrated that you can disappear on the people who are trying to keep you alive. That tells me two things: you've got skills nobody's accounted for, and you used them last night, which means you did something you don't want anyone to know about."
Her spine straightens. Her eyes hold mine. I can feel the push and pull between us in my own chest, my own hands, the same current that's run through every interaction we've had from the very first one: two people too smart and too stubborn to stop orbiting each other, and too honest to pretend it doesn't mean anything.
"I went for a walk," she says. "I needed air. The detail doesn't own my schedule."
"That walk required avoiding the front door and the entire perimeter surveillance."
"I'm a private person."
"You're a person of interest in a homicide investigation who just ghosted a protection detail using evasion techniques that aren't in any bartending manual I've seen. That's not privacy. That's operational security, and I want to know where you learned it."
The silence that follows can go either way. She can shut down, retreat behind the front, and give me nothing. Or she can give me one inch, one honest answer, one piece of the truth she's been hoarding since the night she called 911.
She gives me neither. Her hand tightens on the door frame and she steps back.
"Goodnight, Detective."
"This doesn't end because you close a door."
She pauses with the door half shut. She doesn't look away, but something shifts in her face, a fraction of the armor loosening or cracking. When she speaks, the bravado is thinner, and what bleeds through is the same voice I heard at four in the morning at Rapier Strategic, the real one, the one that costs her something to use.
"I know," she says. "That's what scares me."
The door closes. The lock turns. I stand in the hallway and let her go, because pressing harder tonight will break something I need intact, and because the small fracture in her voice when she said'that's what scares me'was the first honest thing she's given me since this started.
I take the stairs back down and cross the street to my car. The Rapier Strategic operative in the SUV watches me go. I pull out my phone and text Remy:
She slipped your detail. I need to know how. And I need to know what she's hiding, because whatever it is, it's going to get her killed if she keeps trying to handle it alone.
His response takes a full minute:
Agreed. Come to Rapier Strategic tomorrow. We'll talk.
I start the engine and sit with the air running while the Irish Channel settles into its evening routine around me: brass music carrying from a few blocks over, the distant rattle of a streetcar on the main line, the smell of someone grilling on a balcony above the street.
Renata said'that's what scares me,'and she meant more than the case, more than the murder, more than the killer who might have her face in his memory.
She meant me. She meant me standing in her hallway refusing to leave, refusing to be deflected, refusing to accept the curated version of who she is.
She's right to be scared. I don't stop. I don't let go. And whatever she's built between the woman she shows the world and the woman she actually is, I'm going to dismantle it piece by careful piece until she runs out of hiding places.
