Page 42 of Dominion's Guard
"As a member who happens to be spending his evening at the bar."
"You hate sitting at the bar when you could be working on this."
"I don't hate it. I find it professionally challenging to drink bourbon while a woman I'm supposed to be protecting deliberately ignores me to flirt with other members."
The smile she gives me is quick and genuine, the one that slips through before she can stop it. "I don't flirt. I provide excellent customer service."
"Your excellent customer service has a body count on my blood pressure."
"Then maybe you should order something lighter."
We go. She takes the MINI, I take the sedan, and the drive to Dominion cuts through the city while the evening light turns New Orleans amber and soft. Her taillights hold steady in my lane, close enough that I can see her elbow resting on the window frame and her hair catching the air.
My phone buzzes on the console. I glance down long enough to read the text from Remy:
Margot's been updated. Dominion and Rapier Strategic will cooperate fully with whatever you need.
I pocket the phone. The Pascals move fast when their club is on the line.
The rest of the drive passes in the strange intimacy of following a woman through a city I know as well as she does, two cars moving in tandem through streets that neither of us needs to think about, the route so familiar it leaves too much room for the thinking I'm supposed to be keeping under control.
The transition into the club carries its own rhythm. She goes through the staff entrance. I leave the badge in the glovebox, go through the member entrance, change in the locker room, trade the suit for leather and linen, and settle into my seat at the farend of the bar with sight lines on both exits and the hallway to the private rooms. The holster sits concealed against my hip.
Renata opens the bar with her usual precision, and the evening develops the layered pulse of Dominion on a busy night: music underneath everything, conversation flowing between the tables and the bar, the controlled energy of people negotiating scenes and testing limits and finding the versions of themselves that only exist inside these walls.
She moves behind the mahogany with the economy I've memorized, every reach and pour calibrated, her ponytail swinging with each turn. When she stretches for a top-shelf bottle, the fitted black top rides up and shows the strip of skin above her waistband that I have been watching from this stool for over a year and still can't look at with my fingers staying loose on the glass.
Tonight the watching carries additional purpose. Faces get assessed. Interactions get cataloged.
The evening is halfway through when a woman settles onto the stool two down from mine and orders a Negroni.
I notice her because she's new. I've been a member long enough to recognize the regulars by their drinks and their habits, and this woman doesn't fit any existing pattern. She's well dressed, somewhere in her mid-thirties, with dark hair pulled back in a way that suggests effort but doesn't advertise it. Her clothes are expensive in the understated way that people with money wear money, quality fabric and clean lines, nothing that calls attention. She holds herself with composure, comfortable in her own skin and accustomed to environments where confidence is the price of admission.
Renata pours the Negroni with her standard precision and slides it across the mahogany. The woman picks it up, sips, and nods. She knows the drink and can tell when it's made properly. The first exchange is professional and standard.
The second exchange is where my attention sharpens.
The woman waits until Renata returns from serving another member and leans forward with casual ease, making conversation. Her body language is open, friendly, pitched at the frequency of a woman who is genuinely curious about her surroundings and wants to connect. The questions come naturally, folded into the small talk like afterthoughts.
"This is beautiful. How long has the club been operating?"
Renata gives her the answer Margot trains all staff to give: the public version, polished and warm, enough information to satisfy curiosity, nothing that belongs behind the membership wall.
The woman asks about the vetting process. How does one become a member? Is there a waiting list? She's heard about Dominion through friends, she says, and drops names that float through the conversation and don't land on anything solid. From my seat at the end of the bar I can't catch every nuance of Renata's expression at this distance, but I know her body language well enough to see that the names don't produce the subtle shift she gives when she recognizes someone being discussed. The names are probably either members she hasn't crossed paths with or they're fabricated, and the distinction matters in a club where every referral is tracked and every introduction carries Margot's fingerprints.
Renata answers with the warmth and deflection she's perfected over years behind this bar, offering enough to maintain the conversation, never giving the woman anything she couldn't find on the club's website. The private rooms come up with a casualness that reads as genuine interest rather than pointed inquiry. She wants to know about the spaces, the booking process, what the experience is like. They're standard prospective-member questions from someone testing the water.
I log the interaction and keep watching. The woman could be exactly what she appears: a well-connected newcomer exploring membership at a club she's heard about through social circles. New Orleans is a city where word of mouth opens doors that advertising never could, and Dominion's reputation attracts people accustomed to getting what they want through the right connections.
She finishes her Negroni, leaves a generous tip, and makes her way toward the exit, unhurried, the walk of a woman who came, observed, and gathered what she needed. I watch her leave and hold the details: the questions she asked, the names she dropped, the way she steered the conversation toward private rooms and vetting but never pressed hard enough to trigger alarm.
The rest of the shift passes clean. Renata closes the bar with Terrence, running through the inventory and the register with the thoroughness that Margot's operation demands. I nurse my bourbon and keep my eyes on the room and wait, because waiting is what I do and because the woman closing out her station is about to walk through a parking garage, and the last time she walked through a parking garage alone, she watched a man die.
I take the stairs from the member level down to the underground lot and wait near the elevator bank. When the service elevator doors open, the fluorescent lights wash everything in the blue-white pallor that turns concrete floors clinical and shadows sharp. Renata steps out and finds me there, and her expression shifts through surprise and recognition and something warmer before she rearranges it into the look she gives me when I've done something protective that she plans to pretend she didn't need.
Her MINI Cooper sits in the employee section where it always does, and my sedan is on the level above us.
Her stride breaks for a fraction of a second as we cross into the lot, a hesitation where her weight shifts backward before she catches herself and pushes through it. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. I watched her describe Lawrence Blanchard's murder in a parking garage with the precision of a woman who has replayed the scene so many times the details are worn smooth, and the underground lot at Dominion shares enough of the same architecture, the fluorescents and the concrete and the acoustics that turn every footstep into an echo, to pull the memory forward unasked.
