Page 51 of Dominion's Guard
"He's not covering tracks," she says. "He believes he's cleaning house."
"A crusader. Someone who sees Dominion as corruption and the members as complicit."
"And he's escalating. Four kills and now a manifesto." She pushes back from the table and stands, and the motion carries the coiled energy of a woman who has been sitting in this kitchen for weeks watching other people die. She crosses to the counter, pours coffee she won't drink, and turns to face me with her arms folded and her chin set at the angle that precedes the arguments I've learned to brace for. "Put me on the floor, Andy. Club night. Let him see me."
"No."
"I'm already on his list. Every day I spend in this kitchen is a day he picks the terms instead of us." She holds my gaze with the steady, unflinching directness that makes her impossible to dismiss and dangerous to underestimate. "You've got four bodies and a manifesto and a killer who's getting comfortable. I can give you a target he can't resist walking toward."
"I said no." My voice drops into a register that would end the conversation with anyone else. The refusal is professional on the surface and personal underneath, and the personal part is louder than I want it to be, hearing her offer herself as a lure for a killer who operates in parking garages.
"It's not your choice."
"The hell it isn't."
"My body. My risk. My decision." She tips her chin up, and the defiance in it is beautiful and infuriating and aimed directly at the part of me that wants to lock her in this house and stand between her and every threat that exists outside it. "I'm tired of sitting at this table waiting for you to come home with another name. Sophie's was one too many. Put me to work or I'll put myself to work, and we both know which version is safer."
The threat isn't empty. She's already proven she'll move without permission, already slipped a Rapier Strategic detailand broken into my house and driven across the city with evidence in her head and no backup at her back. If I don't give her a role in this operation, she'll carve one out herself, and the improvised version will be the one that gets her killed.
My jaw works over what I want to say. What comes out instead is the hard truth I've been circling since the night she sat on my couch and told me about the locks.
"You've been carrying this alone from the beginning, and you're good at it, and it's going to get you killed." I hold her gaze. "Let me carry it with you. Not for you. With you."
The defiance doesn't leave her face, but the hard edge of it shifts. She searches my expression for the catch, the condition, the part where the partnership becomes a leash. She doesn't find it, because it isn't there.
"Then stop trying to bench me and let me help."
The compromise takes shape over the next hour. A controlled operation. Renata on the main floor during a regular club night, visible, wired, with Rapier Strategic operatives positioned throughout the building and covering the perimeter. I'm the law enforcement component, singular, because this operation runs outside NOPD channels and the professional cost of that choice is a calculation I've already made. If the killer is watching Dominion's membership, a highly-valued staff member on the floor during a night when the club is full gives us a controlled environment with maximum coverage. She stays in public spaces. She stays on comms. She stays where I can see her.
The planning session runs late into the afternoon, the two of us at the kitchen table with the floor plan between us and her knee pressed against mine under the table in a contact neither of us acknowledges and neither of us breaks. Remy calls in to coordinate positioning and confirms that tomorrow is a scheduled club night with enough regular attendance to provide cover, and that his team can have operatives staged by opening.I map the floor layout from memory, marking sight lines and blind spots and the specific angles where an operative with a concealed weapon could cover Renata's position without being visible from the main entrance.
I tell her to stay at the table while I step onto the porch to take Remy's follow-up call. When I come back inside, the table is empty, her laptop is closed, and her jacket is gone from the hook by the door.
She isn't in the house.
My phone buzzes. Remy's detail, not Renata:
Your witness just left in the MINI Cooper. We're following. Headed toward the club.
A second buzz. This one from Renata:
Went to check something at the club. Back in an hour.
She sent her text after the detail reported in. She knew they'd follow her and she knew they'd call me, and she went anyway, timing her exit for the window when my attention was on Remy's call.
I set the phone down and grip the edge of the table and wait, and the anger that builds in the waiting is clean and focused and entirely separate from the fear that runs beneath it like a wire pulled taut.
She comes through the door less than an hour later with her keys in her hand and the expression of someone who knows she walked into a fight and decided to have it anyway. She took the MINI Cooper that Remy's detail brought over from her building days ago, and the flush on her throat tells me she drove fast getting here, aware that the clock on my patience started the moment she sent that text.
"Before you start," she says, "I had a reason. I talked to Terrence about the booking system, asked him who's been logging in to manage the schedule. He said there have been changes to the reservations this month that nobody on staff made. Bookings moved, time slots shifted, member information accessed. He noticed because two of his shift swaps disappeared and he had to re-enter them. Someone is logging into that system who shouldn't be, Andy. The access point is still open."
The information is useful. The method she used to acquire it is the problem.
I don't raise my voice. I don't lean forward. I sit where I am and look at her with the same calm, level focus that I bring to an interrogation when the subject across the table has just handed me exactly what I need and exactly what I can't tolerate in the same breath.
"Sit down," I say.
She reads the tone. Her chin lifts. "I found something that moves the case forward, and you're going to lecture me about..."
