Page 21 of Dominion's Guard
The efficiency of the draw sends heat through my chest that I can't blame on adrenaline. I've seen men handle weapons before. I've never wanted to watch one do it again.
"It's me." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Don't shoot. The cleanup would ruin your floors."
A dense silence follows. His breathing changes, threat recalibrating to recognition, and then the weapon lowers. Hedoesn't holster it. He holds it at his side like a period at the end of a sentence he hasn't finished.
The light comes on.
Andy stands in the hallway entrance with his gun at his side, his shirt untucked on one side where his arm cleared the holster, and his expression is past anger, past surprise, somewhere in the territory of a man holding himself very still because the alternative is too much for this room to contain. The hallway light catches the line of his jaw, the cords of his neck where a tendon flexes once and doesn't release.
My eyes move over him the way they move over rooms, measuring sight lines, identifying points of entry, finding the places where the structure is strongest and where it might give.
"You broke into my house."
"I did."
"You bypassed my alarm, picked my lock, and sat in the dark waiting for me to come home." He takes a step into the living room. The space he occupies shifts the balance, the same gravity that reshapes any room he enters. He is a large man who moves quietly, and the combination is more unnerving here than it's ever been behind the bar.
"Your badge number is a terrible alarm code. You should change it."
He doesn't take the bait. The levity bounces off him and dies on the floor, and whatever currency my sharp tongue usually buys, it's worthless in this room tonight.
"Start talking." He closes another step. "Now."
The command lands because the voice he uses, the one that drops below his usual register and comes out shaped like a thing you don't argue with, presses against the base of my ribs and stays.
I don't have a folder to hold up, no physical evidence to put between us like a shield. All I have is what I memorized,the confession that comes with it, and him, close enough now that I'm breathing cedar and leather and the warmth of a man who has just come home and found a woman on his couch who shouldn't be there.
"I broke into Lawrence Blanchard's house." My gaze doesn't waver, because looking away would give him a concession I won't make. "That's where I was the night I slipped the Rapier detail. In his study I found photographs taken by surveillance cameras inside Dominion's private rooms. Lawrence in several, other members in the rest. Blackmail emails demanding payment. Escalating amounts. A deadline that lined up with the week he was killed."
Andy doesn't move. His focus tracks from my face to my hands and back, and behind the blue-grey, cold machinery is working. The full weight of this man's attention, without a mahogany bar between us, is a physical thing. At the club, it feels like being studied. Here, in his house, with his gun still warm at his side, it feels like being opened.
"Lawrence wrote'going to police'in the margin of the last demand," I continue, keeping my voice level because the alternative is letting it shake and I will not do that while he's standing over me. "He never made it. One of the other members in those photographs was Susan Landry."
The gun goes into the holster. His hands find his hips, pushing his shirt back from the leather in a gesture that is entirely functional and shouldn't look the way it does. The armed response gives way to controlled, methodical anger, a detective processing information he should have had days ago.
"Where is this evidence now?"
"In his study. The folder is near the back of the credenza behind his desk, labeled with a date. I put everything back exactly where I found it."
"You put it back." His chin drops, and the look he delivers from under his brow holds no warmth, no patience, nothing but a man confirming facts before he decides what to do with the woman giving them to him.
"Nitrile gloves. I touched the back door, the credenza, and the folders. Nothing else. The scene is intact." My chin lifts to match the angle of his. "I'm good at what I do, Detective. The evidence is clean."
His breathing changes atDetective. He hears the wall I build with that word, the one that keeps the badge between us and the man behind it at a manageable distance. He always hears it. His hands flex at his sides, fingers opening and closing once, because he knows exactly what I'm doing and he doesn't have the patience for it tonight.
"Who taught you to pick locks?" He closes the remaining distance until he's standing directly in front of the couch, looking down at me with his full height and his anger, and I have to tilt my head back to hold the line between us.
The position puts me below him, face angled up, throat bared, and the awareness of the dynamic arrives between my hips with a specificity I resent.
"Who taught you to bypass alarm systems?" he asks. "Because this isn't the first time, and we both know it."
The question hits the exact nerve I've been protecting since the night Margot caught me knuckle-deep in a safe that belonged to one of her associates. I could deflect, could mouth off, could throw an edge sharp enough to redirect his attention and use the angle of my body and my tongue to push him back to a distance where I can breathe without inhaling heat and barely leashed fury. Susan Landry is dead, though, and I am tired of hiding.
"I used to break into houses." I say it without standing up, without flinching, without giving him the satisfaction of retreat. Andy doesn't want a story. He wants the truth. "It's what I didbefore Dominion. Before Margot." I swallow. "She caught me robbing a friend of hers and gave me a choice: a job behind the bar or a ride in the back of a police car. I took the job. I promised her I was done."
"And two nights ago you broke that promise."
"Yes."
