Page 85 of Dominion's Guard
"It's not supposed to."
She goes quiet, her ribs settling against mine. Her fingers trace the line of my collarbone, back and forth, the kind of absent repetition that means she's working up to something.
"I love you," she says. The words come out rough and annoyed, as if the emotion is an inconvenience she's been trying to outlast. "I didn't plan on it. I want that on the record."
"Noted."
"Don't you dare 'noted' me right now, Broussard."
"I love you." I say it into her hair, and the words are simple and steady and have been true for longer than I've been saying them. "That's not new information."
"It is to me. You never said it."
"I've been saying it every night I showed up at your bar and every morning I made you coffee and every time I put you on your knees and brought you back. You just weren't listening with the right part of you."
She's quiet for a long time. Her fingers stop moving on my collarbone. Then she presses her face harder into my chest, and the exhale she gives me is shaky and raw and the least performative sound she's ever made.
"Say it again," she says.
"I love you."
"Once more. I want to make sure it's not a fluke."
"I love you, Renata."
"Okay." Her voice is thick. "Okay. Good scene, Detective."
"You're using my title in bed again."
"Force of habit."
"Liar."
The curve of her mouth on my chest is the realest thing she's given me tonight.
We dress. The routine has its own economy now, the retrieval of clothes and the reassembly of composure carried out with the easy choreography of two people who know where the other's shoes ended up.
In the upper hallway, we pass the door to the room where Patricia Moreau pulled a gun and Renata bled and the case ended in copper and confession. The door is closed, the brass number polished, the room restored and returned to service. Dominion doesn't memorialize its wounds. It absorbs them, the same way the woman beside me absorbed the scar on her arm and kept pouring drinks.
At the top of the stairs I scan the main floor below out of habit. The corner booth is empty. Obsidian's glass is gone, the booth wiped and vacant, and the man who occupied it left without me clocking the exit. That's notable, because I notice when people leave.
At the bottom of the stairs, Renata stops at the bar to grab her bag from the staff lockup. She comes back with it over her shoulder and a piece of information she's been holding.
"There's a woman I don't recognize," she says, falling into step beside me. "She sat at the far end of the bar most of the night. Sharp features, good clothes, a notebook in her bag. She watched the floor the way you watch a crime scene, studying rather than relaxing." She glances at me. "Obsidian didn't look at her once."
"And?"
"Obsidian looks at everything. Not looking at someone specific is the loudest thing he does."
The woman at the bar and the man in the corner and the performed indifference between them add up to two data points from two vantage points, both converging on the same anomaly.
"Not your concern tonight," I tell her, holding the door.
"I never said it was my concern. I said it was interesting."
A member heading out behind us, someone who's watched us across months of club nights, catches my eye. "So, Broussard. You finally tamed the bratty bartender."
Renata goes still beside me, not offended but listening, waiting to hear what I'll say with the focused attention of a woman who knows the answer matters and is letting it arrive before she reacts.
