Page 36 of Dominion's Guard
"That's bossy."
"That's observant. There's a difference." She drops back into her chair and pulls her laptop closer, and the smile she gives me is the real one, quick and sharp and gone before she can be held accountable for it. "You're welcome, again."
I eat because she's right and because arguing with her about it will take longer than the food, and because being fed by a woman who reorganized my cabinets and fixed my coffee and is currently running Ridgewater's likely operational requirements on her laptop while I eat the meal she made is pressing against the walls I built between the detective and the man. The walls are holding, but just barely. And the woman on the other side of them knows it, because she told me the hardest part of stealing isn't getting in, and the look she gives me over her laptop says she's already past the first tumbler and working on the second.
9
RENATA
Andy's phone rings before dawn, and the sound reaches me through the guest room wall with the clarity of a gunshot in a parking garage, which is a comparison my subconscious apparently keeps loaded and ready.
I'm already awake. I've been awake since the light started changing outside the window, watching the ceiling shift from grey to pale gold while the live oak in the yard ran its morning silhouette across the plaster. Sleep came in fragments, punctuated by the sounds of a house that still surprises me with its creaks and its breathing, the particular way Andy's floorboards settle when the temperature changes and the low rhythm of the air conditioning cycling on. My own apartment is a place where I know every noise by name and can sleep through all of them.
This house is different. This house belongs to a man who cleared a shelf in the guest bathroom to make room for my face wash and my toothbrush, and that detail kept me staring at the ceiling longer than any creak.
His voice carries through the wall. I can't make out the words, but I know the tone. It's the professional register, the one that strips everything warm out of his voice and leaves thesteel underneath, the cop voice he uses when the badge is doing the talking. The call lasts less than a minute. Then his footsteps move down the hallway toward the kitchen, heavy in a way that means he's not being careful about noise. He wants me to hear him. He wants me up.
I pull on the leggings I left folded on the chair and one of his liberated t-shirts, and by the time I reach the kitchen he's standing at the counter with his phone in his hand and his jaw set in a way that makes the muscle at the hinge visible. I've memorized every version of this man's face over the past year, from behind the mahogany at Dominion and now from across his own kitchen, and this particular arrangement of bone and tension is the one that means someone is dead. I know that face.
"Who?" I ask, because I've learned that getting there first saves time.
"Thomas Arceneaux."
Thomas Arceneaux orders Maker's Mark, neat, and he tips well and he calls medarlin'in a Cajun accent so thick it sounds like music. He works in real estate, commercial properties mostly, and he talks about his listings the way other men talk about their golf handicaps, with a pride that borders on insufferable but lands just short because his smile takes the edge off. He's a Dom who scenes with confidence and generosity, and more than one submissive at Dominion has told me across the bar, after their second drink, that Thomas is the kind of Dom who makes you feel like the only person in the room.
He comes in most weeks. He sits at the third stool from the end because it gives him a view of the main floor and the hallway to the private rooms, and he always asks how my night is going before he orders, and he always listens to the answer.
"Where?" My voice comes out flat, and the flatness is real.
"In his car, in a parking garage attached to a commercial property he manages near the business district." Andy sets hisphone on the counter. "A single gunshot, and a security guard found him almost immediately while he was on routine rounds."
Lawrence was killed in a parking garage, and the body was gone before patrol arrived, the scene scrubbed to nothing. Susan was killed in a parking garage, found before the cleanup could happen, the first one that gave Andy real evidence to work with. Thomas was killed in a parking garage and found before cleanup. All shot, the same cold patience behind the trigger. The location changed. The result never did.
"That's three," I say.
Andy's jaw works once, the only confirmation I need.
I lean against the counter because my legs are doing the thing they did when Andy told me about Susan, the thing where they decide without consulting me that standing upright is optional. The countertop takes my weight. The coffee maker sits to my left, cold and unprepared, and I focus on it because focusing on the coffee maker is easier than focusing on Thomas Arceneaux behind my eyelids, where he is currently sitting at the third stool from the end and asking me how my night is going.
"You're going to stand there without making coffee?" I hear myself say. "Three people are dead and nobody in this kitchen has caffeine. That feels like a tactical failure, Detective."
Andy's mouth tightens at one corner. He reaches past me for the coffee maker, and the motion brings his forearm across my sight line, close enough that the heat of his skin registers against mine without actual contact. He smells like sleep and cedar and the soap he keeps in the shower that I have been pretending I haven't noticed for days. He could have reached from the other side. He didn't.
"He was in the photographs," I say while he fills the reservoir. "In Lawrence's study, in room five, I think, the one with the leather wingback and the suspension rig with the copper fixtures. I recognized the room before I recognized his face."
"You're sure?"
"Thomas has a tattoo on his left forearm, a fleur-de-lis, old school, the kind that fades green over time. It was visible in the photograph, and I've seen it every time he reaches for his drink at the bar." I press my palms flat against the counter and hold them there. "He was in the photographs, Andy. They're all from the photographs, every single one of them."
Andy hits the brew button and turns to face me, leaning his hip against the counter on the opposite side of the coffee maker so we're mirrored, both braced, both watching each other across the smallest stretch of kitchen. He waits with the controlled patience of a man who knows when to push and when to let the silence do the work, and the restraint is itself a kind of pressure, the Dom's trick of making the space around you feel tighter without moving an inch.
What comes next is the math.
Lawrence was in the photographs, and Lawrence is dead. Susan was in the photographs, and Susan is dead. Thomas was in the photographs, and Thomas is dead. There is one name left on the list I gave Andy, one more face I recognized from behind the bar in a dead man's blackmail folder, and if the pattern holds, that person is already being watched.
There is one name left, and then what?
The thought arrives with a cold specificity that bypasses fear and lands directly in the part of my brain that Margot spent years trying to rewire, the part that sees patterns, systems, vulnerabilities, the part that got me into Picard's house and Lawrence Blanchard's study and every locked room I ever entered before Margot's handshake and her offer and the promise I made to myself the night she let me walk away clean.
