Page 43 of Dominion's Guard
I adjust my position so that I'm between her and the darker section of the lot where the lighting thins toward the maintenance corridor. The motion is small and deliberate, a half step that closes the angle between her body and the shadows. She notices, because Renata notices everything, and the look she gives me is complicated: gratitude buried under the stubborn refusal to admit she needs the protection and something warmer underneath both that she tucks away before I can read it fully.
We walk to her car together. The lot is quiet, the post-closing stillness broken only by the hum of the ventilation system and our footsteps on the poured concrete. She unlocks the MINI, tosses her bag in the passenger seat, and stands with the driver's door open and one hand on the roof, looking at me with the expression that means she's deciding how much of the truth to spend.
"The woman at the bar. The one with the Negroni."
"I saw her."
"She asked about the private rooms. She asked about vetting. She dropped names I didn't recognize."
"Could be a prospective member."
"Could be." Renata's fingers tap the roof of the MINI once, a drummer's beat, restless and precise. "The questions weren't wrong. They were just a little too organized. Most people whoare curious about membership ask scattered questions. What's the dress code? What kind of music? Is it intimidating the first time? She skipped all of that and went straight to structure. How does vetting work? What are the private rooms like? Who has access?”
"You think she was scouting."
"I think her questions had a pattern, and I notice patterns."
I hold the observation alongside my own assessment. Renata's instincts are calibrated by years of reading people across a bar, sorting the nervous from the curious from the predatory, and her radar for incongruity is one of the sharpest tools this investigation has access to. The woman may be a genuine prospect. She may be something else entirely. The overlap between the two is where the danger lives.
"I'll run the names she dropped."
"They won't match." Renata is quiet for a beat, her eyes on the far wall of the garage where a security camera I know she clocked the moment we stepped off the elevator sits mounted above the stairwell door. "People who use real referrals don't need to drop them. The referral does the work before they ever walk in."
She's right. And her being right, again, doing the analytical work that most witnesses can't touch and most informants won't bother with, pulls the thread tighter between the detective who needs her brain and the man who wants to put his hands on the hip she just cocked against the car door while she dissects his case for him.
"Follow me back," I tell her.
"You say that every night."
"And you argue about it every night, and then you follow me back, and we do this whole thing again tomorrow."
"It's called maintaining the illusion of autonomy."
"It's called being stubborn."
"Tomato, tomahto." She drops into the driver's seat and pulls the door shut, and the smile she gives me through the window is the real one, the one that cracks through the armor and disappears before she can be accountable for it. The engine catches, the headlights flare, and she pulls out of the spot and heads for the exit ramp with the ease of a woman who knows every turn by muscle memory, the steady mastery that comes from doing one thing long enough to stop thinking about it.
I take the stairs back to the member level, unlock my sedan, and then follow her into the New Orleans night. The city is soft at this hour, the heat releasing its hold on the pavement and the streetlights pooling amber on wet streets where the humidity has condensed into a thin gloss. Her taillights stay steady close ahead, and the drive back to Mid-City carries the rhythm of two people who have stopped pretending that following each other home is about the route.
The house is dark when we pull in. She parks beside me in the driveway, a habit that started as logistics and has become territorial, her car claiming the space beside mine the way she's claimed the kitchen counter and the guest bathroom shelf and the hook by the front door where her jacket hangs next to mine.
Inside, the kitchen light goes on and the routine engages. She drops her bag on the counter. I lock the door and check the windows. She fills the kettle because she has decided, at some point that I wasn't consulted about, that we drink tea after late shifts instead of bourbon, and the presumption would irritate me from anyone else.
"The brokerage firm," she says, her back to me while she pulls mugs from the cabinet she reorganized. "If they're distributing the footage, there are copies on their servers. Even if the FBI shuts them down, the material has already been distributed. You can't un-sell something."
"I know."
"So the arrest solves the murder case and stops the blackmail, but the footage is already out there. The members who were filmed don't get that back."
"No. They don't."
She turns around with two mugs in her hands and the expression of a woman who has been running this calculation since I told her about the brokerage and has arrived at the number she feared. My mug goes on the counter within reach. Hers stays in both hands, the ceramic between her palms like an anchor.
"And if there's footage of me?"
The question fills the kitchen and stays there. She asks it with her eyes steady on mine, and the vulnerability underneath is the kind she guards with every sarcastic deflection and every bratty comment and every careful inch of space she keeps between who she shows the world and who is standing in my kitchen right now asking me what happens to the most private moments of her life.
"I'll find it." The words come out before the detective can leash them, before the careful procedural language I'm supposed to be using can shape them into something defensible. "Every copy. Every server. Every file with your face on it."
