Page 19 of Dominion's Guard
She'll hate me for it. She'll fight me every step.
And if hating me keeps her alive, I can live with that.
5
RENATA
The call comes while I'm restocking the well bottles behind the bar, my hands full of Aperol and my mind still tangled in the look on Andy's face when I closed my door on him last night. His name on my phone screen sends a jolt through my stomach that I refuse to examine.
I set the bottles down and step into the service corridor where the music can't reach.
"Detective."
"Susan Landry." His voice is stripped to its components, the professional calm worn like body armor with a rawer frequency pressing through the seams. "Do you know her?"
I know Susan Landry. I know her order, her seat, her tip, the way she folds her cocktail napkin into a precise square before she sets her glass on it. Bombay Sapphire martini, dry, two olives, her usual stool on Saturdays. She works in finance, portfolios and risk assessment, and she has the kind of laugh that catches you off guard because everything else about her is so buttoned up. She asks how my week has been and she actually listens to the answer. Most members treat the bar staff like furniture. Susan treats us like people.
"She's a regular," I say. "Saturdays. Why?"
The pause on the other end lasts long enough for me to hear my own pulse in my ears.
"She's dead, Renata. Found this morning in her car in a parking garage near her office. Single gunshot, nobody heard a thing." He lets the silence sit. "Another Dominion member. Another parking garage. Tell me you see where this is going."
The Aperol I just shelved is suddenly the only thing keeping me upright. My shoulder finds the corridor wall and it takes my weight because my knees have decided they're done supporting the rest of me.
"Renata."
"I'm here."
"There's a difference this time. Whoever cleaned up after Lawrence didn't get the chance with Susan. A security guard found her before the scene could be sanitized. There's a body, there's forensics, and my captain can't call this one a ghost story." He pauses again, and I can hear him choosing his next words with a precision that tells me they matter more than the ones before them. "This is a homicide investigation now. Official. My case."
Susan Landry is dead. She sat at my bar last Saturday and told me about a hiking trip she was planning for the fall. She once noticed I was having a rough shift and left an extra twenty tucked under her napkin with a note that saidhang in therein handwriting so neat it looked printed.
I served her drinks for years, watched her walk through the main floor with the composed confidence of a woman who had spent her professional life in rooms full of men who underestimated her.
Her face is in one of the photographs I found in Lawrence Blanchard's study, captured by a camera that had no business being in a room where she was at her most vulnerable.
Susan's photograph was the one that made my hands shake. Not because of what it showed, though that was explicit enough. Her expression was what gutted me. She looked peaceful. She looked safe. She looked like a woman who believed the walls around her would hold.
The walls didn't hold. She's dead, and the information I've been sitting on is burning a hole through my conscience that no amount of rationalizing is going to patch.
"I need to see you," Andy says. "Tonight."
The wordtonightdrops low in my body, somewhere that has nothing to do with the investigation and everything to do with the weight his voice takes on when professional distance thins out and a more direct frequency pushes through.
Even now, with Susan's name still between us, I feel the pull, the gravity of a man who makes commands sound like inevitabilities.
"I know." The words come out quieter than I intend, the armor I usually wear when I talk to him gone before I can catch it. "I know you do."
The call ends. My phone presses against my thigh and the corridor hums with muffled bass from the main floor.
What I left in Lawrence Blanchard's credenza plays on a loop in my memory. Photographs and blackmail emails, all of it cataloged in a brain I trained to retain floor plans and safe combinations and the exact sequence of turns in a lock.
I'd put the evidence back where I found it, because that's what training dictates. You don't take what you can memorize. Taking leaves a gap. A gap gets noticed. The information has been sitting in my head like contraband since the night I broke every promise that matters.
I told myself I was gathering intelligence. I told myself Andy's investigation was moving too slowly, that sitting behind Rapier Strategic's wall while a killer operated freely was a luxuryI couldn't afford. The break-in was necessary, justified, the only way to get answers before someone else died.
Susan Landry died anyway, and my silence might have contributed to that.
