Page 22 of Dominion's Guard
He stays where he is, standing over me, close enough that the pulse in his throat is visible and the unevenness of his breathing is apparent. The anger isn't the only thing running hot under his skin.
He's fitting pieces together: the spatial awareness, the way I slipped Rapier Strategic's detail, the evasion skills that aren't in any bartending manual. All of it clicks into place, and understanding moves across his face alongside something colder, the realization that I've been lying to him, to everyone, about who I am since the moment Margot handed me an apron.
A flash of raw, involuntary fascination crosses his expression underneath the coldness, killed before it can take hold but not before I catch it. He's furious. He's also recalculating who I am, and the new version interests him in ways that his anger can't quite overwrite.
"You broke into a crime scene." His voice drops, and the quiet is worse than volume. "You found evidence that connects a murder to a blackmail operation targeting Dominion members, and you sat on it while I was working this case with nothing."
He leans down, bracing one hand on the back of the couch beside my head, and the proximity collapses the distance between the investigation and something much less professional. His face is inches from mine. The ring of darker grey around his irises is visible, fine as a wire.
"A woman died, Renata."
"I know a woman died." My voice cracks on Susan's ghost, and I let it crack because I am done performing composure fora man who can see through it anyway. "She sat at my bar. She asked about my week. I have been carrying what I saw in that study wondering if I could have saved her by being less afraid of what telling you would cost me."
He holds the position. Heat comes off him in waves, the anger and the restraint and the effort it's taking him not to do something with the hand braced beside my hair.
Then he straightens and steps back. The distance is deliberate, and it's for his benefit, not mine.
The guilt sits where he was standing, visible and ugly. I don't dress it up. I chose self-preservation over disclosure, and whether that choice killed Susan Landry is an equation that will never balance.
"There are two more people in those photographs," I say. "Two more Dominion members whose faces I recognize from behind the bar. I can give you their names, their schedules, their habits. If the pattern holds, someone is going to kill them the same way."
"The camera angles." Andy turns back, pacing now, burning energy he can't spend on me. "You said fixed cameras in private rooms. Dominion had a security breach. Cameras were found and removed."
He knows, of course. He's a Dominion member, a detective who catalogs everything, and who was involved in the LaCroix situation. "The photographs in Lawrence's study match. Same rooms, same positions, same elevated angles. Whoever planted those cameras copied the footage before Luc swept the rooms. The hardware is gone, but the recordings survived. That's what the blackmailer is using."
"That breach involved a federal investigation."
"I know what it involved." The boundary forms between us, clear and deliberate. "The details of how Dominion handled itare Margot's to share with you, not mine. I'm a bartender, Andy, not management."
The slip, his name instead of his title, catches us both. His pacing stutters for half a step, his shoulders resetting by a fraction, a recalibration so subtle I wouldn't notice if I hadn't spent over a year memorizing the geography of his composure. I push past it.
"What I can tell you is that the blackmailer is working from footage that predates the sweep. Same rooms. Same source."
He absorbs that. The boundary I drew gets filed without challenge, and the restraint costs him. His hands tell me that much, curling and releasing at his sides.
Then he stops and stands in the middle of his own living room and turns the full force of his attention on me, the focus I've spent over a year deflecting from behind a bar. Without a mahogany barrier it presses against my sternum. It finds my pulse.
"The evidence is untouched," he says. "Susan Landry's homicide gives me probable cause to search Blanchard's residence for connections between the victims. If the folder is where you say it is, I find it through a legal search. Admissible. Untouchable."
"That's why I put it back."
Recognition moves through his expression, the play I made, the training that told me to memorize and restore rather than take and run. I was protecting the evidence before I knew I was protecting it.
His jaw tightens over what rises next: the smart play for the case was the wrong play for Susan Landry's life.
"I need the names. The other two members."
I give him the names, along with their drink orders, their usual nights, their seating preferences, the small details a bartender collects without trying and a former burglar catalogsout of reflex. I describe each photograph from memory with the specificity of someone trained to recall room layouts in the dark, and the shift happens while I talk.
The anger doesn't leave, but a focused intensity rises alongside it, a detective building a case in real time. His questions are precise, surgical, each one cutting closer to the information he needs, and despite the guilt and Susan's ghost, some part of me responds to the competence the same way I respond to the command, with an attention I can't entirely control.
When I finish, he pulls out his phone and dials. He puts it on speaker, and Remy's voice comes through on the second ring.
"Broussard."
"Renata's my witness now. Susan Landry homicide, officially linked to the Blanchard disappearance. I need her accessible, and I can't work through your checkpoint system to get there."
He says it flat and certain, leaving no room for discussion. He's not asking. He's informing.
