Page 28 of Dominion's Guard
"Good scene?" I ask.
Her hand stills on the bar top for a fraction of a second before the composure clicks back into place.
"Is that professional curiosity or personal?" she asks.
"Does it matter?"
"It does if you're going to sit at my bar all night asking questions you already know the answer to." She picks up a rag and starts wiping down a section that's already clean. "The scene was fine. The scene is always fine."
Fine.She uses the word to cover the gap between what she performs and what she wants. I let it sit unanswered, because pressing her here, in public, behind her bar where she holds the power, would be the wrong move at the wrong time.
Instead I drink my bourbon and watch her work. I catalog her hands and the armor in her smile and the flush still visible on her lower back when she reaches for a top-shelf bottle and her top shifts, marks left by a man who had her on her knees and still couldn't reach her. The jealousy hasn't faded. It has settled alongside a patience that is more dangerous to both of us than I'm prepared to calculate.
Renata has been testing every Dom who walks into her orbit, daring them to outlast her, punishing them for failing a test she designed to be failed. She wants someone whose patience outlasts her defiance, whose composure doesn't crack when she pushes, who reads the language buried in the brattiness and understands thattry hardermeansdon't leave.
Arnold couldn't do it. The others couldn't do it. They responded to the surface and gave up when the surface wouldn't yield.
I don't give up. I've never given up on a case, a collar, or a woman worth the wait. And Renata, with her burglar's hands and her bartender's armor and the hunger she hides behind every sarcastic deflection, is worth whatever this costs me: my captain, my badge, the lines I've already crossed and the ones I can see coming. She's worth all of it, and the certainty has weight in my gut like ballast, steady and heavy and not up for negotiation.
I finish the bourbon. She pours another without being asked. Her fingers brush the base of the glass as she slides it across, close enough to mine that I feel the warmth off her skin.
Neither of us pulls away fast. Neither of us says a word about it. The warrant is still waiting for a judge's signature. Thecase file is growing on my kitchen table. Two names are still breathing because Rapier Strategic is watching them while I wait for the law to catch up with what I already know. All of it presses against the back of my skull with the same steady weight as the woman standing on the other side of this bar, who just showed me exactly what she needs without saying a word and has no idea what it's going to cost me to give it to her.
7
RENATA
The drive back from Dominion is quiet in the way that silence gets when two people are choosing not to talk about the same thing.
Andy keeps his eyes on the road and his hands steady on the wheel, and I watch the city slide past through the passenger window and pretend I can't still feel the heat of his gaze from the barstool while Arnold Voss had me on my knees. He saw the scene. He saw the aftermath. He'd asked,'good scene?'in a voice that didn't sound professional, and I'd deflected because that's what I do, and neither of us has mentioned it since.
The marks Arnold had left behind ache dully against the seat, a reminder of a man who tried and failed and walked away without understanding why. The man driving me home understood exactly why and hasn't said a word about it, which is worse.
His Craftsman sits dark and quiet on the Mid-City street. He pulls into the driveway, kills the engine, and we sit for a beat in the cooling car while he scans the block, checking sight lines and parked vehicles and anything that doesn't belong. The Rapier Strategic detail is somewhere out there, invisible and present, and the layered protection should make me feel safe. What itmakes me feel is watched, which is a sensation I've spent my whole adult life avoiding.
"I'll grab my bag from the trunk," I say.
"I'll get it."
He gives me three words and no room for negotiation. He's out of the car before I can argue, and arguing with Andy Broussard about carrying things is like arguing with weather. You can object all you want, but you're still getting wet.
He carries the duffel and the garment bag to the guest room and sets them on the bed, and the small act of a man carrying my things into his house settles over me like a weather change I'm not dressed for.
"This is temporary," I tell his back as he reaches the doorway.
He turns. The leather and linen he wore at Dominion give him a different shape than the suit and badge, broader through the shoulders, looser through the frame. The linen shirt is untucked from where the holster sat against his hip, and the leather pants fit in a way I'm not going to think about right now, or ever, and definitely not while he's standing in a doorway looking at me like he's already decided how longtemporaryis going to last.
"Temporary," he says, and the word holds no argument and no agreement, just an acknowledgment that he heard me and filed it somewhere he doesn't plan to revisit. He pulls the door closed behind him and his footsteps move down the hallway toward the back of the house.
I sit on the bed in the quiet and I do what I always do in a new space. I catalog.
I slept here last night, but that was crashing in a stranger's guest room after a confession that left me too wrung out to drive home. This is different. This is unpacking. The guest room is small and bare, the kind of space that exists because the house came with the square footage rather than because AndyBroussard has any interest in hosting. The room holds a bed with a dark quilt, a nightstand with a lamp, and an empty dresser. The closet door is open and holds nothing. The walls are blank. The sheets smell like detergent and the cedar sachets he must keep somewhere I haven't found yet.
I unzip the duffel. My clothes go into the dresser, folded the way I fold everything, edges aligned and stacked by function. Toiletries line up in the bathroom across the hall. My garment bag with the Dominion work clothes hangs in the empty closet and looks lonely against the bare rod. The whole process takes less than ten minutes, and when I'm done the room looks marginally less like a holding cell and marginally more like a place where someone is staying who doesn't intend to be staying long.
I change out of my bar clothes and into sleep shorts and a tank top, and I brush my teeth with the door open because the silence in Andy's house is the kind you can hear through walls, the heavy, insulated quiet of a man who lives alone and likes it that way. From the bathroom I can hear him moving in the kitchen, the clink of a glass, the hiss of a tap. Then his footsteps pass the hallway, and a door closes at the other end of the house.
I get into bed. The ceiling has fewer cracks than the one in my apartment, and the mattress is better, and the pillow smells like cedar and laundry detergent, and I lie in the dark and listen to the unfamiliar rhythms of someone else's house settling around me.
