Page 62 of Dominion's Guard
I first heard her name on the comm channel the night the Bureau traced Julien LaSalle's signal to that decoy warehouse. Simone named her as a rival, someone who wanted her job and had the operational expertise to hire contractors. Luc told me to pull her information and financials. I did, and what I found went to the Bureau alongside the other threads I was running. The financials flagged unusual patterns. The Bureau was still working the analysis when we shifted to the bait operation.
She's the gap, the partner with direct access to the original footage, the middleman Ridgewater communicated with through encrypted channels.
"You don't understand.” Patricia’s voice is raw and cracked and threaded with a conviction that hasn't broken under the cuffs or the blood or the federal agents now filling the doorway behind me. "They're all complicit. All of them. They come here and they perform their filth, and no one, no one holds them accountable."
"Patricia Moreau, you're under arrest." The Miranda rights come out of my mouth in the order I learned them and have delivered hundreds of times, and the procedural language feels inadequate against the scope of what she's done, but the law doesn't care about scope. The law cares about rights and evidence and the chain of custody that starts the moment the cuffs close.
She isn't listening. Her words tumble over each other, cycling and repeating, the pressured speech of a woman who has been building this sermon for months and can't stop delivering it now that she has an audience.
"Armand showed me. He showed me the footage and I saw what this place really is. What they do to each other." She pulls against the cuffs, her face contorting. "Lawrence begged. He begged me to stop. As if money could wash it away. As if, as if he could just pay and keep doing what he was doing in these rooms." Her breathing hitches and the words fragment further. "Susan ran. Coward. She thought she could leave and I wouldn't find her. Thomas didn't even see me coming. Sophie fought. Sophie fought and I respected that, but she was still, they were all still?—"
The confession is live. Renata's wire is still transmitting from beneath her bloody shirt, and Locke's team is recording it all. I don't interrupt. I don't ask questions. I let her talk, because each unprompted word is a word the defense can't suppress.
Two FBI agents move past me to take custody. One of them kneels beside Patricia and begins the transfer, and I step back to give them room because the scene belongs to the Bureau now and my badge belongs to NOPD and the jurisdictional lines that got blurred during this operation are about to get very clear under the fluorescent lights of a federal booking facility.
Patricia's voice carries as they lift her to her feet, still looping, still cycling through justifications that repeat and tangle andrestart. Her voice fades with distance down the hallway, and the room settles into the particular quiet that follows violence: the ringing aftermath, the displaced air, the smell of gunpowder and copper and the chemical sweetness of fresh blood on the floor.
I cross the room to Renata, and the badge stops mattering before I cover half the distance.
"Let me see."
She pulls her arm tighter against her stomach instead of extending it. The blood has soaked through her sleeve from elbow to wrist, and the stubborn set of her jaw tells me she'd rather bleed on Margot's carpet than admit to pain in front of the FBI.
"It's fine." Her voice is still controlled; the delivery still pitched exactly the way she pitches it in situations at the bar. “Flesh wound. Barely qualifies. I'd rate it a solid four out of ten, which for the record is lower than the time I caught my hand on a broken window during a second-story job in the Garden District."
"Renata."
"I'm just saying, if we're ranking injuries by severity, this one doesn't even make the top five. I once dislocated a thumb picking a Medeco in a pantry closet because the homeowner had the world's worst taste in hardware, and that was at least a six."
"Give me your arm."
"You're very bossy for a man who just broke into one of my employer's private rooms. Margot's going to invoice you for that, and she's not cheap."
"I turned the handle. The door was unlocked. Give me your arm."
"Well, that's less dramatic. I was going to tell people you kicked it down."
"You can tell people whatever you want after you stop bleeding on Margot's expensive rug."
She holds my gaze with the defiance I've memorized over time watching her work at the bar, the version that dares me to push harder and wants me to win.
The adrenaline is still running through both of us. I can feel it in the heat coming off her skin from a foot away, can see it in the vein at her throat and the quick, shallow rhythm of her breathing. The awareness that the last time we were this close with this much adrenaline in our blood I had her underneath me is doing something to my focus that Locke's team does not need to hear on the wire.
"Stop." The word comes out low, quiet, and I don't raise my voice because I've never needed to with her. The tone is the one she recognizes from the negotiations we've had since she sat in my living room in the dark, and the effect is the same as it always is: the defiance holds for one more breath, sharp and bright and refusing to fold, and then it gives.
The brat act falls in pieces. The mouth goes first, the corners releasing the smile she was holding like a weapon. The shoulders follow, dropping the tension she'd been carrying as armor.
Then the eyes give, and the eyes are the worst, because when Renata stops performing, what lives underneath is the woman who trusted me with the full measure of her surrender last night and is trusting me again now, in a room that smells like gunpowder and copper, with federal agents around and another woman's blood mixed with hers on the floor.
She extends her arm.
My hands are on her skin before the breath she releases finishes leaving her body. The wound runs along the outer forearm, a clean slash that will scar. The edges are ragged where the blade caught, and the blood flows fast enough that pressure is the priority but not fast enough to mean arterial damage. The relief that moves through my hands is possessive and entirely too large for the clinical task of applying a bandage.
I strip off my overshirt, fold it lengthwise, and wrap the fabric around her forearm. The pressure is firm and even.
My fingers circle her wrist to hold the bandage in place, and her pulse beats against my thumb, fast and hard from the adrenaline, and the intimate familiarity of touching her arm, the same spot I held her wrists above her head last night while she arched against me and said my name in a voice that had nothing to do with a wire and everything to do with want, is a physical problem I can't address in this room with an audience.
She knows it, too. The catch in her breath when my thumb presses against the pulse point tells me the adrenaline isn't the only thing driving her heart rate, and the look she gives me from under her lashes is the one she's been giving me across the bar for over a year. The one that says she sees exactly what I'm keeping leashed and she's deciding whether to pull it tighter or cut it.
