Page 44 of Dominion's Guard
"Andy." Her voice drops the bravado and hits something quieter, something that reaches across the counter and presses against my chest. "You can't promise that."
"I know what I can promise."
"Tell me what's real, then. Not what you want to be true. What's actually real."
She holds my gaze while she says it, and the challenge in her expression is the same one she gives every Dom who tries to offer her something easier than the truth. She won't take the grand gesture. She won't let me wrap the answer in false certainty because the alternative is admitting there are thingsI can't control. She is standing in my kitchen demanding I be honest with her, and her trust in me to deliver that honesty is worth more than anything I could offer wrapped in a promise I can't keep.
"Locke's team can seize the brokerage's servers under a federal warrant. Every file, every transaction record, every download log. If your footage is in that system, it gets pulled as evidence and locked down. The FBI's digital forensics unit traces distribution chains, tracks where files went, who accessed them, and they issue takedown orders." I hold her eyes because she deserves to see that the man giving her the procedural answer is the same man who wanted to give her the other one. "It's not instant. It's not perfect. It is thorough, and I will be in their ear every day until it's done."
"That last part isn't procedure."
"No. It isn't."
The kitchen holds that admission. She reads through the professional language to the personal commitment underneath, and what she finds there changes the angle of her chin and loosens her grip on the mug by a fraction. She looks like a woman deciding whether the ground she's standing on will hold.
"Thank you," she says, and the simplicity of it lands harder than any of her barbed comebacks. "For calling Locke. For going to the club tonight. For the parking garage."
"You don't have to thank me for the parking garage."
"I'm not thanking you for the protection. I'm thanking you for not making it obvious." She sets the mug down on the counter, and her fingertips brush the edge of the surface near mine. The contact is incidental. Neither of us moves away from it. Her eyes hold mine for a beat longer than the conversation requires, and the warmth in them is unguarded, the look I've only seen when she's too tired or too honest to remember to hide it. "Goodnight, Andy."
"Goodnight."
She walks toward the guest room, and I watch her go the way I've watched her go every night she's slept in this house, tracking the line of her shoulders and her bare feet on my hardwood floors. At the doorway she pushes her hair behind her ear, a gesture that looks habitual and unperformed, aimed at no one, and it pulls harder than anything she's aimed at me on purpose.
I rinse the mugs. I check the locks. I sit at the kitchen table with my notebook open and the financial records spread out and the taste of the words I wanted to say still sitting in my mouth like bourbon I didn't swallow.
The case keeps getting bigger. The house keeps getting smaller. She is in my guest room trusting me with her safety and her secrets and the fear she carries with the same fierce competence she brings to everything else, and I am sitting at this table because the line between the detective and the man is the only wall still standing and she is on both sides of it.
The notes blur. The distance between the kitchen table and the guest room door is twelve steps, and I know the number because I counted them the first night she slept here and have been counting them every night since. Twelve steps, and every one of them belongs to her.
11
RENATA
The house is too quiet without him in it, and too full of him at the same time.
I've been awake since Andy left before dawn, moving through the kitchen in the dark with his holster already on and his phone pressed to his ear, speaking in the low, clipped shorthand that usually means Remy is on the other end. He paused in the doorway long enough to tell me he'd be gone most of the day, that the Rapier Strategic detail was positioned outside, and that I should stay in the house. The last part landed like a door closing, and the look he gave me when he said it told me he expected an argument.
I gave him a small one, since at five in the morning even my defiance needs coffee before it hits full stride, and the gravity in his voice held the weight of something that had been building for days. He heard me out, said "noted" in the tone that means he heard and is proceeding anyway, and pulled the front door shut behind him.
That was hours ago.
The coffee I made with the ratio I fixed weeks ago has gone cold and been replaced twice. The live oak outside the kitchen window throws its shadows across the yard in a patternI've memorized, because memorizing the geometry of enclosed spaces is a reflex I can't turn off, and this house has become the most luxurious cage I've ever occupied. The morning light has shifted from pale grey through gold into the flat white of a Louisiana afternoon, and everything in this kitchen holds the specific residue of a man I am not supposed to be thinking about the way I am thinking about him.
His coffee mug sits in the dish rack, the one I rinsed after he left while the ceramic was still warm from his hands and picking it up felt like holding something that belonged to him. His reading glasses are on the counter by the toaster where he set them down before dawn, and the impulse to pick those up too, to fold them and tuck them into his case, is domestic in a way that should alarm me more than it does.
The NOPD shirt I slept in smells like his detergent and my skin, and the combination has been doing something to my concentration since I pulled it on last night and felt the worn cotton settle against my collarbones like a hand I didn't ask for.
Andy is running an operation on Jerry Ridgewater, and I am sitting at his table with a laptop and nothing to do but wait. Last night he sat across from me with his sleeves rolled and the lamplight finding the tendons in his wrists, writing in his notebook while I pretended to work on inventory, and I watched his pen move across the page for the better part of an hour before I trusted myself to speak. That man is executing a federal warrant right now, and I am here.
The operational details came together over the past few days, and I watched them take shape from the civilian side of the glass. Andy told me he called Locke at the FBI and laid out the federal angle, and from the conversations I've overheard since then, the Bureau found enough overlap with the Deveraux case to justify pulling resources. Remy filled the gaps that NOPD couldn't.
I don't know the specifics of what Andy asked for, but I know the calls happened because I've been sitting at this table while he made them, close enough to hear his voice shift between Locke and Remy, the careful measured version for the Bureau, the direct one for the Pascals. Whatever arrangement they built runs outside NOPD's official channels, because from what I've gathered, Andy is working a case he was never fully authorized to pursue and the resources backing him up answer to Margot rather than the City of New Orleans.
None of that knowledge helps me now. The bartender reads people and the burglar reads rooms, and both skills are useless when the operation goes live and the civilian who provided the intelligence gets left behind with a laptop and an overactive imagination.
My phone sits on the table. It hasn't buzzed in over an hour. The last text from Andy was two words:Moving forward.The one before that was from Remy, a check-in disguised as a logistics question, which was his way of confirming the detail was in place without making me feel surveilled.
