Page 29 of Dominion's Guard
Sleep doesn't come. It circles at a distance, close enough to taunt and too far to catch. My body is tired from the shift but my brain is running the reel from the platform, the paddle and Arnold's grip and the sound I made when he finally hit hard enough to get past the act. It was one genuine reaction in the entire scene. Andy heard it from across the bar with a bourbon inhis hand and a look on his face that told me he caught the exact second it happened.
He caught it. Arnold didn't.
The thought loops until the clock on the nightstand reads well past closing time, and I give up on sleep the way I give up on most things that require stillness and surrender, which is to say, completely and with prejudice.
The hallway is dark. My bare feet are silent on the hardwood because quiet movement through other people's spaces is a skill that lives in my body whether I want it there or not. The kitchen light is on, a warm yellow glow spilling across the floor, and when I round the corner I find Andy sitting at the kitchen table with case files spread in front of him and a mug of coffee going cold at his elbow.
He's wearing sweatpants and a faded t-shirt. His feet are bare. His hair is loose from whatever product he uses to keep it civilized, falling over his forehead in a way that makes him look younger and less armored. And he's wearing reading glasses, black-framed, sitting low on the bridge of his nose while he scans a document.
I have never seen this man without the badge or the leather or the deliberate composure he wears like a second skin. The reading glasses undo something low in my stomach that I didn't give permission to be undone. He looks human, and the humanness of it is more dangerous than the authority because the authority I know how to fight. A man in reading glasses with bare feet and loose hair, sitting in his kitchen in the small hours like a person instead of a force of nature, is a problem I have no smart-ass answer for.
He glances up. He doesn't take the glasses off, doesn't straighten, doesn't reassemble the composure he puts on for the rest of the world. His gaze drops to my bare legs below the sleepshorts, holds for a beat longer than professional, and comes back to my face without apology.
"Coffee's still hot."
"You just happened to make a full pot at his hour of the morning?"
"I made a full pot at midnight. It's been a long night." He nods at the chair across from him. "Sit down. I want to show you something."
He doesn't saywould you like to seeorif you're interested.The command sits so naturally in his voice that my legs are moving before my brain has time to object.
I pour a mug and take the chair across from him. The kitchen table isn't large, and his files have colonized most of it, which means my mug lands close enough to his that our hands would touch if either of us reached at the wrong moment. The proximity is obvious. So is the fact that neither of us is pretending it isn't.
The case files are spread in a pattern that looks like chaos but isn't. I've watched Andy work all afternoon and I've learned that his mess has an architecture, documents grouped by connection rather than chronology, each cluster a thread he's pulling from a different direction.
"Susan Landry's social circle," he says, turning a page toward me. "Her employer gave me a list of close contacts. Three of them are Dominion members."
I scan the names. Two I recognize. The third I don't.
"Genevieve Marchand," I say, tapping the name. "She comes in most Thursdays. Gin martini, dirty, extra olives. She scened with a regular for months and then stopped. I haven't seen her scene partner since late summer."
Andy pulls the reading glasses down his nose and looks at me over the rims. "Do you have this for every member?"
"I have it for the regulars. The ones I see enough to track."
"How many is that?"
I think about it. "A few dozen, give or take. The ones who come in on a pattern. I know their drinks, their habits, who they scene with, when they changed something. Bartenders notice things. It's the job."
"Bartenders notice drink orders. You notice operational patterns."
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"I say that like it's an asset." He takes the reading glasses off and sets them on the table. "I want everything you've got. Members whose behavior has shifted, regulars who disappeared, scene partnerships that ended abruptly. Anything that doesn't fit the baseline."
"That's a lot of members, Detective. You might want to clear your schedule."
"Then it's going to be a long session." His mouth doesn't quite smile, but something shifts in the set of it that tells me the response landed where he wanted it to. "Start talking."
I start talking. He starts writing. The kitchen fills with names and drink orders and behavioral patterns that spill out of me with the ease of a system being read aloud, because that's what Dominion's membership looks like from behind the bar. It's a living map of habits and preferences and quiet tells that I've been building for years without ever thinking of it as intelligence.
Andy treats every piece of it with the same weight. He asks follow-up questions that show he's listening, not just recording, questions that take what I give him and push it one step further.When did that change? Was it gradual or sudden? Did anyone else notice?He doesn't tell me what's useful and what isn't. He takes it all and lets the pattern emerge.
The way he does it, the focus, the stillness, his pen moving across the notebook without his eyes ever leaving my face forlonger than it takes to write a line, is a kind of attention I have no defense against. The Doms at Dominion listen to negotiate and then stop listening when the scene starts. Margot listens with purpose and efficiency and files what she needs. Andy listens the way he watches, with a thoroughness that covers everything and judges nothing, and his bare forearm is resting close enough to mine on the table that I can feel the warmth off his skin without touching it, and neither of us has moved to close or widen that gap for the better part of an hour.
He gets up to refill the coffee. He refills both mugs without asking and sets mine down in front of me with a fresh napkin, and when he does his fingers brush the back of my hand. It's a graze, possibly accidental. His eyes meet mine over the table when he sits back down, and the look in them tells me nothing was accidental. He picks up his pen and says, "Keep going," and the two words land with the same quiet authority as every other command he's given me tonight. And I keep obeying them.
The kitchen clock pushes past two, then past three.
