Page 65 of Dominion's Guard
"I'm aware." The words come out level, and the composure is genuine, which surprises me. The woman who tried to kill me is in a federal holding cell with her own attorney and her own recording and her own version of events, and the distance between that cell and this conference room is measured in hallways and locked doors and the jurisdictional machinery that turns a woman with a knife into a defendant with a case number. I should feel more about that distance than I do. I should feel the proximity of it, the thinness of the margin between sitting in this chair giving a statement and lying on the floor of a private room with a wound that went deeper than the one I got.
Instead I feel the stitches pulling when I flex my fingers, and I feel the industrial chill of the conference room air on my bare arms, and I feel Andy's absence like a frequency I've been tuned to for weeks, present even through walls and closed doors and the professional separation the Bureau requires.
The statement takes another hour. Rivera is thorough and methodical and asks questions that circle back to details I've already provided, testing for consistency the way a good investigator tests every witness, even the cooperative ones. I answer everything. I tell her about the wire, about the text, about the door and the gun and the knife and the fight and the cuffs and the confession.
I tell her about the time before, about the parking garage where I watched a man die and the body was gone before police arrived, about the night Andy showed up at Dominion with his badge and his notebook and the intensity of a detective who takes murder personally. I tell her about the blackmail photographs I found in Lawrence's house and memorized and left in place, and her pen pauses on that detail, and the pause tells me the B&E is going to be a conversation someone has with someone else at a later date, but for tonight the FBI is more interested in the killer than the burglar.
When Rivera clicks the recorder off, the silence in the room is sudden and complete.
"Thank you, Ms. St. Clair. An agent will escort you out when you're ready."
"I've been ready since I sat down."
Rivera's mouth twitches. She collects her notebook and her recorder and leaves me alone in the conference room with the fluorescent lights humming overhead and the coffee going cold in its paper cup and the stillness that settles into a room when the purpose that filled it has moved on.
I sit with that for a minute, because the alternative is standing up and walking into the hallway and finding Andy and letting the night end. The night ending means I have to decide what happens next. After the adrenaline finishes draining. After the stitches stop being interesting. After the professional machinery that has carried me since the cuffs closed lets go and drops me back into a version of my life where the killer is caught, the case is closing, and the man who risked his badge to keep me alive is somewhere in this building, waiting for me.
The hallway door opens. Andy fills the frame.
He's shed the jacket. His sleeves are rolled to the forearm the way they always are when he stops performing for the institution and starts operating as himself, and the tendons in his wrists catch the fluorescent light in a way that has no business registering when I've spent hours recounting a knife fight to a federal agent. His eyes find me before he's fully through the door, and the sweep they make is fast and thorough and has nothing to do with the room.
He's checking me, reading my posture, my color, the bandage on my arm, the set of my shoulders. The assessment is clinical in speed and proprietary in intent, and the combination settles low in my stomach where the adrenaline used to live.
"Done?" he asks.
"Rivera is very thorough. I may have given her my third-grade teacher's name at some point. I lost track of the questions around hour two."
"Let's go."
"Just like that? No debrief? No comparing notes in the hallway like they do on television?"
"Separate statements. They don't want our stories contaminating each other."
"Contaminating. Romantic." I stand, and the stiffness in my legs makes the motion graceless enough that his hand movestoward my elbow before he stops himself. The aborted gesture tells me more than the completed one would have. He wants to touch me, he's choosing not to in a federal building, and the discipline that choice requires is visible in the tension along his jaw. "How bad was Hebert?"
"We'll talk about it later."
"That bad."
"Later, Renata."
The tone is low and final, the one that closes conversations the way a deadbolt closes a door, and my body responds to it the way my body always responds to it: a flush of heat followed by the immediate impulse to push back, followed by the slower, deeper recognition that the pushing is half the point.
We walk through the federal building and I'm aware of him beside me the way I'm always aware of him, the way he fills a hallway, the breadth of his shoulders relative to the width of the corridor, the measured pace he sets that I match without deciding to. We pass the security desk, where the guard nods at Andy's badge without comment, and move through the lobby, where the marble floor reflects the exit lights in long green streaks.
The front doors open onto predawn air that hits me with the thick weight of a New Orleans morning that hasn't decided yet what season it is.
His car is in the lot. He opens the passenger door, and his hand finds the small of my back as I climb in, a brief press of palm against the hospital scrub top that burns through the thin cotton like a brand. The interior smells like him, cedar and leather, and the familiarity of the scent loosens the walls I've been holding up through hours of professional composure before I can brace against it.
"Nice outfit, by the way," he says as he pulls out of the lot. His eyes stay on the road, and the delivery is dry and even. "Powder blue is your color."
"The ER nurse had limited options. It was this or a gown with no back. I considered the gown. Better ventilation."
"You'd have given the security desk a hell of a night."
"They looked like they could use the excitement."
The banter is thin, stretched over the exhaustion like fabric over a frame, and we both know it, and neither of us stops, because the alternative is the silence below it, and the silence is full of things that don't belong in a car at four in the morning with the case still cooling.
