Chapter 1 #2
Second level. My hands hit the door bar and the door flies open and my feet find the pavement and my car is right there, the little blue MINI Cooper that has never been a more welcome sight. My thumb finds the fob button between my clenched fingers. The locks chirp. I'm inside.
The engine catches. The tires bark as I reverse out. Headlights find the exit ramp and I take it too fast, the suspension bouncing hard over the transition, and I am past the barrier and into the street with my foot on the accelerator before the stairwell door on the ground level opens again.
Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe he didn't follow. Maybe I imagined the door.
Except I didn't imagine Lawrence's body hitting the ground. I will hear that sound for the rest of my life.
I drive several blocks before my hands shake enough to make steering unsafe. I pull to the curb, kill the lights, and call 911 with fingers that take three attempts to find the right icon on my phone.
The dispatcher is professional. Takes my location, takes my description, asks me to stay on the line.
I give her everything I can: the parking garage address, the ground level, one victim, one shooter, suppressed weapon, dark clothing.
My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else, someone who watches her words the way I used to watch alarm panels, checking each one for flaws before letting it through.
Two patrol cars arrive within minutes. I lead them to the garage. Ground level, past the stairwell exit, between the support columns.
There is nothing there.
No body. No blood. No shell casing. The floor is clean in a way that garage floors are never clean, scrubbed with effort and chemicals that leave a faint bite in the air beneath the usual oil and exhaust. The ground level is fully lit now, every fluorescent humming, flooding the space with bright, even light.
When I came through minutes ago, this level was mostly dark.
Two tubes working, the rest dead. Now it looks like a showroom, and the chemical smell confirms what the lighting suggests: someone cleaned this space with speed and precision while I was calling 911.
The officers look at me. I know that look. I've been on the receiving end of it from cops my entire life, the one that says they've already decided what kind of person I am and what kind of story I'm telling.
"Ma'am, are you sure this is where you saw it?"
I am sure. I am standing on the exact spot where Lawrence Blanchard died, and there is nothing here, and the nothing is so complete it feels like the ground is sliding under my feet.
They take my statement. They are polite about it in the way that means they won't do anything with it. One of them asks if I've been drinking. I tell him I'm a bartender, not a customer. He writes something in his notebook that I know is a waste of ink.
They leave. I stand in the garage that smells like chemicals and listen to their engine fade and I pull out my phone and call Margot.
She answers on the second ring. Her voice carries the calm that tells me she was still awake, still working, already ahead of whatever crisis is about to land on her desk.
"Renata. What happened?"
I tell her. All of it. The words come out steadier than I expect, organized the way she taught me to organize information behind the bar: relevant details first, context second, personal feelings never.
Lawrence Blanchard. The parking garage. The gun.
The body. The sound. The nothing that replaced it all.
The silence on her end lasts a few seconds. I count every one.
"Come back to the club. Now. Don't stop, don't go to your apartment, don't talk to anyone. Come straight to me."
"Margot, the cops already think I'm—"
"I don't care what the cops think. I care that you're standing alone in a parking garage where someone was just murdered. Move. Now."
I move.
The drive back to Dominion is white-knuckle steering and obsessive mirror checks.
Every set of headlights behind me could be the shape from the stairwell.
Every shadow at every intersection could be the gun rotating toward me.
My body hasn't come down from the sprint up the stairs and doesn't intend to, every nerve ending lit and screaming.
The underground lot at Dominion has never felt safer. I park in my employee spot, take the service elevator, and the doors open onto the third floor, where Rapier Strategic's offices glow with the kind of light that means someone got here fast.
Remy Pascal meets me in the corridor. He's the oldest of the three Pascal siblings, built from the same blueprint as Luc but with a sharper edge, a man whose stillness makes you nervous because you understand what it costs.
He takes one look at me and steps aside, gesturing toward the conference room without a word.
Margot is on the phone inside. She holds up a hand, finishes the call, and crosses the room. Her hand grips my shoulder, firm, grounding, the touch of a woman who does not hug but whose grip says everything a hug would.
"Tell Remy what you told me. Every detail."
I sit. I talk. Remy listens with the focus of a man building a tactical map in his head, and his questions are precise, the sort that tell me he believes me without needing to say so.
Where exactly in the garage. What time. What angle.
How far from the stairwell. How many shots.
What direction did the shooter turn. How fast did I run. Which exit did I use.
I am partway through the debrief when the elevator opens and a voice I know too well carries down the corridor.
"Remy. Where is she?"
Not "the witness." She. My stomach tightens.
Detective Andy Broussard fills the conference room doorway, broad shoulders consuming the frame, dark suit jacket open over a white dress shirt buttoned in a hurry, collar uneven.
His dark hair is untidy, and the stubble along his jaw is heavier than the groomed version he wears to the club.
He looks like he got pulled out of bed, and my brain supplies that image before I can stop it.
The badge on his belt glints. The gun on his hip sits matte and quiet.
I know this man. Every bartender at Dominion knows the members, but Andy is the sort you learn to track across a room even when you're trying not to.
He comes in a few nights a week, orders Woodford Reserve on the rocks, sits where he can see the whole floor, and watches with a focus that says he has never needed to rush anything in his life.
He scenes with submissives who like firm hands and clear instructions, and none of them come back for a second round.
I've watched them leave the private rooms looking satisfied and shaken in equal measure, and I've watched them choose other Doms on the next visit.
Not because anything went wrong. Because something went too right, and they weren't ready for what that meant about them.
I've spent months avoiding him. Not because of the badge, though cops have never been my favorite species.
I avoid Andy because he watches me differently than anyone else at Dominion.
Every bratty deflection and sarcastic comeback I throw at the Doms who try to scene with me is a tell he's filing away for later use.
He is the only Dom at Dominion who has ever made me feel like my performance might not be good enough.
And right now those blue-grey eyes are locked on me, and the expression behind them has nothing to do with club nights and everything to do with the badge.
"Remy called me," he says, but he's looking at me. Then, directly: "You all right?"
The concern in his voice is genuine. I hate that I can tell the difference.
"Fantastic," I say. "Nothing like watching someone get executed in your parking garage to really cap off a Friday night."
His expression doesn't shift. Most people flinch when I go sharp. Andy absorbs it, holds it, gives me nothing back. His gaze stays level, and heat gathers low in my chest, a pull I refuse to examine right now or possibly ever.
"Have a seat, Andy," Remy says from the far side of the table. "She's been debriefing. You can catch up."
Andy doesn't sit where Remy gestures. He pulls out the chair directly across from me, close enough that I catch something woody and warm underneath coffee.
He drops into it with the ease of a man who owns whatever seat he picks, and the conference chair that looked institutional when Remy sat in it somehow looks like a throne.
He pulls out a notebook. Worn leather cover, pen clipped to the spine. He opens it, clicks the pen once, and looks at me.
"Tell me what happened tonight."
"I already told Remy everything."
"Now tell me."
"Why? So you can write it down in your little notebook and file it with the patrol officers who already decided I'm drunk or delusional?"
"Did they ask you if you’d seen or smelled any cleaning agents?"
That stops me. "No."
"Did they say if they pulled the camera system records for the garage?"
"They didn't mention cameras at all."
"Did they check whether Lawrence Blanchard has been reported missing?"
My breath catches. "Has he?"
Andy holds my gaze for a long beat before he answers. "I'm asking the questions right now, Renata. Not you."
My name in that tone does something to the base of my spine.
That calm authority hits differently very early in the morning in a room that smells like tactical equipment and cold coffee than it does across a mahogany bar with ambient music and warm lighting.
At the club, I can hide behind the drinks, behind the professional distance between staff and member.
Here there's nothing between us except a conference table and the fact that my body just responded to his voice before my brain caught up.
"Fine." I cross my arms. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything you saw. Not just what you think matters."
"That's not a question, Detective. That's a fishing expedition."