Chapter 5 #3
"I used to break into houses." I say it without standing up, without flinching, without giving him the satisfaction of retreat.
Andy doesn't want a story. He wants the truth.
"It's what I did before Dominion. Before Margot.
" I swallow. "She caught me robbing a friend of hers and gave me a choice: a job behind the bar or a ride in the back of a police car.
I took the job. I promised her I was done. "
"And two nights ago you broke that promise."
"Yes."
He stays where he is, standing over me, close enough that the pulse in his throat is visible and the unevenness of his breathing is apparent. The anger isn't the only thing running hot under his skin.
He's fitting pieces together: the spatial awareness, the way I slipped Rapier Strategic's detail, the evasion skills that aren't in any bartending manual.
All of it clicks into place, and understanding moves across his face alongside something colder, the realization that I've been lying to him, to everyone, about who I am since the moment Margot handed me an apron.
A flash of raw, involuntary fascination crosses his expression underneath the coldness, killed before it can take hold but not before I catch it. He's furious. He's also recalculating who I am, and the new version interests him in ways that his anger can't quite overwrite.
"You broke into a crime scene." His voice drops, and the quiet is worse than volume. "You found evidence that connects a murder to a blackmail operation targeting Dominion members, and you sat on it while I was working this case with nothing."
He leans down, bracing one hand on the back of the couch beside my head, and the proximity collapses the distance between the investigation and something much less professional. His face is inches from mine. The ring of darker grey around his irises is visible, fine as a wire.
"A woman died, Renata."
"I know a woman died." My voice cracks on Susan's ghost, and I let it crack because I am done performing composure for a man who can see through it anyway.
"She sat at my bar. She asked about my week.
I have been carrying what I saw in that study wondering if I could have saved her by being less afraid of what telling you would cost me. "
He holds the position. Heat comes off him in waves, the anger and the restraint and the effort it's taking him not to do something with the hand braced beside my hair.
Then he straightens and steps back. The distance is deliberate, and it's for his benefit, not mine.
The guilt sits where he was standing, visible and ugly. I don't dress it up. I chose self-preservation over disclosure, and whether that choice killed Susan Landry is an equation that will never balance.
"There are two more people in those photographs," I say. "Two more Dominion members whose faces I recognize from behind the bar. I can give you their names, their schedules, their habits. If the pattern holds, someone is going to kill them the same way."
"The camera angles." Andy turns back, pacing now, burning energy he can't spend on me. "You said fixed cameras in private rooms. Dominion had a security breach. Cameras were found and removed."
He knows, of course. He's a Dominion member, a detective who catalogs everything, and who was involved in the LaCroix situation.
"The photographs in Lawrence's study match.
Same rooms, same positions, same elevated angles.
Whoever planted those cameras copied the footage before Luc swept the rooms. The hardware is gone, but the recordings survived. That's what the blackmailer is using."
"That breach involved a federal investigation."
"I know what it involved." The boundary forms between us, clear and deliberate. "The details of how Dominion handled it are Margot's to share with you, not mine. I'm a bartender, Andy, not management."
The slip, his name instead of his title, catches us both. His pacing stutters for half a step, his shoulders resetting by a fraction, a recalibration so subtle I wouldn't notice if I hadn't spent over a year memorizing the geography of his composure. I push past it.
"What I can tell you is that the blackmailer is working from footage that predates the sweep. Same rooms. Same source."
He absorbs that. The boundary I drew gets filed without challenge, and the restraint costs him. His hands tell me that much, curling and releasing at his sides.
Then he stops and stands in the middle of his own living room and turns the full force of his attention on me, the focus I've spent over a year deflecting from behind a bar. Without a mahogany barrier it presses against my sternum. It finds my pulse.
"The evidence is untouched," he says. "Susan Landry's homicide gives me probable cause to search Blanchard's residence for connections between the victims. If the folder is where you say it is, I find it through a legal search. Admissible. Untouchable."
"That's why I put it back."
Recognition moves through his expression, the play I made, the training that told me to memorize and restore rather than take and run. I was protecting the evidence before I knew I was protecting it.
His jaw tightens over what rises next: the smart play for the case was the wrong play for Susan Landry's life.
"I need the names. The other two members."
I give him the names, along with their drink orders, their usual nights, their seating preferences, the small details a bartender collects without trying and a former burglar catalogs out of reflex.
I describe each photograph from memory with the specificity of someone trained to recall room layouts in the dark, and the shift happens while I talk.
The anger doesn't leave, but a focused intensity rises alongside it, a detective building a case in real time.
His questions are precise, surgical, each one cutting closer to the information he needs, and despite the guilt and Susan's ghost, some part of me responds to the competence the same way I respond to the command, with an attention I can't entirely control.
When I finish, he pulls out his phone and dials. He puts it on speaker, and Remy's voice comes through on the second ring.
"Broussard."
"Renata's my witness now. Susan Landry homicide, officially linked to the Blanchard disappearance. I need her accessible, and I can't work through your checkpoint system to get there."
He says it flat and certain, leaving no room for discussion. He's not asking. He's informing.
The authority in his voice, badge and man aligned into one immovable thing, presses against my skin like a palm on the back of my neck.
The silence on the other end is measured and deliberate. When Remy speaks, his voice carries the patience of a man choosing not to be angry yet. "Margot asked us to protect her. That's our contract, and I don't break contracts because NOPD decides it wants a shorter chain."
"Does your detail know where she is right now?"
The silence that follows is a different kind. Shorter. Sharper.
"She's at her apartment," Remy says. "My team confirmed her arrival after she left Dominion."
"She's sitting on my couch, Remy. She left your coverage, drove across the city, broke into my house, and waited in the dark for me to come home.
Your team confirmed nothing." I watch Andy deliver the words without raising his voice, and the calm precision of it does more damage than shouting would.
"And if she can walk out of your perimeter without tripping a single alarm, someone with worse intentions can walk in.
The killer already knows she's connected to Dominion.
For all we know, they already know where she lives. "
The silence stretches long enough that I hear Luc's voice in the background, low and clipped.
Remy comes back on, and the earlier patience has been replaced by something colder. "What are you proposing?"
"Your security wall keeps her safe and keeps her cut off from my investigation. She's the case, Remy. I need to be able to pick up the phone and get to her without routing through your ops desk."
"You can interview her at Rapier Strategic. We've accommodated that before."
"Interviews aren't going to cut it. I need ongoing access. Real-time."
A second voice rises in the background, lower and clipped. Luc.
Remy comes back on. "Luc wants to know what protection you're offering that justifies pulling her out of a rotating tactical detail. One detective with a service weapon doesn't replace a team with surveillance infrastructure and tactical training. His words. He's being polite."
"He's right." Andy offers no flinch, no ego, and the admission shifts the temperature of the room.
He could posture, could pull rank. Instead he concedes the tactical point and redirects.
"Which is why I'm not replacing you. She stays with me for investigative access.
Your team maintains overwatch, tech resources, and rapid response.
I'm the front line. You're the backup I call before I call dispatch. The checkpoint system is what goes."
The silence stretches. The pause runs long enough for me to read the debate in it, Margot's instructions pulling one direction and the operational reality pulling another. The resistance shifts before Remy speaks again, objections giving way to terms.
"We maintain a mobile detail. Close enough to respond in minutes. You give us your address and your schedule so we can position accordingly."
"Done."
"Daily check-ins on the threat assessment. If the threat level escalates past what you can handle, she comes back behind our wall. Nonnegotiable."
"Agreed."
"Broussard. If anything happens to her because you changed this arrangement, Margot will hold you personally responsible. So will I."
"Understood."
The call ends. Andy sets the phone on the coffee table and turns to face me, and the look he gives me holds no warmth, no grudging admiration, no trace of the current that usually runs between us.
He's looking at me the way he'd look at any witness who just handed him a felony confession and a complicated story.
I read the assessment in his face: useful, necessary, not trusted.
I want the current back. The wanting is immediate and involuntary, because the current is dangerous and the absence is worse, and the precise temperature drop between the man who watched me pour drinks with fascination he didn't bother hiding and the detective standing in front of me with nothing in his face but cold professional assessment tells me exactly how much I've been depending on a thing I wouldn't name.
"The guest room is down the hall on the left," he says.
"We start in the morning. You walk me through what you did at the Blanchard house.
Entry point, timeline, what you touched, where the evidence sits.
I'm writing a warrant affidavit that puts me inside that study legally, and the details you give me need to hold up when the defense asks how I knew where to look. "
"You'll frame it as an anonymous tip."
"I'll handle the warrant. You handle being accurate.
" He closes a step, and the proximity is deliberate, calibrated to remind me that the power in this room sits squarely on his side.
"No more disappearing. No more picking locks.
No more solo operations." His voice drops into the register that bypasses my brain and speaks to somewhere lower. "Are we clear?"
"Crystal." The word comes out edged with defiance I can't suppress even when I know it's not buying me anything.
My chin tilts up from the couch, my spine straightens, and I hold the line from below rather than rising to meet it, because standing would mean admitting the position bothers me.
"Anything else, Detective? Curfew? Approved reading list?
Should I raise my hand before I use the bathroom? "
For half a second, the man behind the badge registers the challenge in my voice and my posture and the deliberate provocation of my angle, and something live and dangerous crosses his expression.
Then the badge wins. The expression goes flat.
"Get some sleep. You're going to need it."
He disappears down the hallway and comes back with a faded NOPD academy t-shirt that should hit me at mid-thigh. He sets it on the arm of the couch without ceremony, without lingering, without letting his fingers brush mine when I reach for it.
"Bathroom's across from the guest room. Towels are in the cabinet."
He turns toward the kitchen without looking back. His shoulders carry the weight of Susan Landry and the warrant he needs to write and the complicated reality of a witness who just proved she's both indispensable and dangerous in the same breath.
The professional distance he's erected between us holds without a crack. I handed him the truth and it didn't bring us closer. It built a new wall, higher and colder than the one I put up with Detective.
The guest room at the end of the hallway is small, clean, and impersonal, a room belonging to a man who doesn't have guests often enough to bother decorating for them.
The sheets smell like detergent and cedar, his presence threaded through fabric that's been absorbing this house, this air.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark and close my eyes.
Susan Landry's face is behind my eyelids, as clear as the photograph I memorized in Lawrence Blanchard's study. I spoke two more names aloud for the first time tonight, and two more people don't know they're on a list.
The guilt will be there tomorrow and the day after, and no amount of confessions will answer the question of whether Susan would still be alive if I'd been faster, braver, less afraid of losing what I'd built.
I am in Andy Broussard's house, wearing the scent of his sheets and the weight of his anger, and he is more furious with me than he has ever been.
We are bound by what I saw and what he needs to prove and the hard truth that neither of us can solve this alone.
He doesn't trust me. I'm not sure he should.
The case is all that matters, and whatever I thought I saw between us at the bar and in the hallway and through the gap in my door will have to wait until the killing stops.
If any of it is still there after everything I've just told him, I'll find out when the bodies stop falling and he finally looks at me again without the badge between us.