Chapter 7
RENATA
The drive back from Dominion is quiet in the way that silence gets when two people are choosing not to talk about the same thing.
Andy keeps his eyes on the road and his hands steady on the wheel, and I watch the city slide past through the passenger window and pretend I can't still feel the heat of his gaze from the barstool while Arnold Voss had me on my knees.
He saw the scene. He saw the aftermath. He'd asked, 'good scene?
' in a voice that didn't sound professional, and I'd deflected because that's what I do, and neither of us has mentioned it since.
The marks Arnold had left behind ache dully against the seat, a reminder of a man who tried and failed and walked away without understanding why. The man driving me home understood exactly why and hasn't said a word about it, which is worse.
His Craftsman sits dark and quiet on the Mid-City street.
He pulls into the driveway, kills the engine, and we sit for a beat in the cooling car while he scans the block, checking sight lines and parked vehicles and anything that doesn't belong.
The Rapier Strategic detail is somewhere out there, invisible and present, and the layered protection should make me feel safe.
What it makes me feel is watched, which is a sensation I've spent my whole adult life avoiding.
"I'll grab my bag from the trunk," I say.
"I'll get it."
He gives me three words and no room for negotiation. He's out of the car before I can argue, and arguing with Andy Broussard about carrying things is like arguing with weather. You can object all you want, but you're still getting wet.
He carries the duffel and the garment bag to the guest room and sets them on the bed, and the small act of a man carrying my things into his house settles over me like a weather change I'm not dressed for.
"This is temporary," I tell his back as he reaches the doorway.
He turns. The leather and linen he wore at Dominion give him a different shape than the suit and badge, broader through the shoulders, looser through the frame.
The linen shirt is untucked from where the holster sat against his hip, and the leather pants fit in a way I'm not going to think about right now, or ever, and definitely not while he's standing in a doorway looking at me like he's already decided how long temporary is going to last.
"Temporary," he says, and the word holds no argument and no agreement, just an acknowledgment that he heard me and filed it somewhere he doesn't plan to revisit. He pulls the door closed behind him and his footsteps move down the hallway toward the back of the house.
I sit on the bed in the quiet and I do what I always do in a new space. I catalog.
I slept here last night, but that was crashing in a stranger's guest room after a confession that left me too wrung out to drive home.
This is different. This is unpacking. The guest room is small and bare, the kind of space that exists because the house came with the square footage rather than because Andy Broussard has any interest in hosting.
The room holds a bed with a dark quilt, a nightstand with a lamp, and an empty dresser.
The closet door is open and holds nothing.
The walls are blank. The sheets smell like detergent and the cedar sachets he must keep somewhere I haven't found yet.
I unzip the duffel. My clothes go into the dresser, folded the way I fold everything, edges aligned and stacked by function.
Toiletries line up in the bathroom across the hall.
My garment bag with the Dominion work clothes hangs in the empty closet and looks lonely against the bare rod.
The whole process takes less than ten minutes, and when I'm done the room looks marginally less like a holding cell and marginally more like a place where someone is staying who doesn't intend to be staying long.
I change out of my bar clothes and into sleep shorts and a tank top, and I brush my teeth with the door open because the silence in Andy's house is the kind you can hear through walls, the heavy, insulated quiet of a man who lives alone and likes it that way.
From the bathroom I can hear him moving in the kitchen, the clink of a glass, the hiss of a tap.
Then his footsteps pass the hallway, and a door closes at the other end of the house.
I get into bed. The ceiling has fewer cracks than the one in my apartment, and the mattress is better, and the pillow smells like cedar and laundry detergent, and I lie in the dark and listen to the unfamiliar rhythms of someone else's house settling around me.
Sleep doesn't come. It circles at a distance, close enough to taunt and too far to catch.
My body is tired from the shift but my brain is running the reel from the platform, the paddle and Arnold's grip and the sound I made when he finally hit hard enough to get past the act.
It was one genuine reaction in the entire scene.
Andy heard it from across the bar with a bourbon in his hand and a look on his face that told me he caught the exact second it happened.
He caught it. Arnold didn't.
The thought loops until the clock on the nightstand reads well past closing time, and I give up on sleep the way I give up on most things that require stillness and surrender, which is to say, completely and with prejudice.
The hallway is dark. My bare feet are silent on the hardwood because quiet movement through other people's spaces is a skill that lives in my body whether I want it there or not.
The kitchen light is on, a warm yellow glow spilling across the floor, and when I round the corner I find Andy sitting at the kitchen table with case files spread in front of him and a mug of coffee going cold at his elbow.
He's wearing sweatpants and a faded t-shirt.
His feet are bare. His hair is loose from whatever product he uses to keep it civilized, falling over his forehead in a way that makes him look younger and less armored.
And he's wearing reading glasses, black-framed, sitting low on the bridge of his nose while he scans a document.
I have never seen this man without the badge or the leather or the deliberate composure he wears like a second skin.
The reading glasses undo something low in my stomach that I didn't give permission to be undone.
He looks human, and the humanness of it is more dangerous than the authority because the authority I know how to fight.
A man in reading glasses with bare feet and loose hair, sitting in his kitchen in the small hours like a person instead of a force of nature, is a problem I have no smart-ass answer for.
He glances up. He doesn't take the glasses off, doesn't straighten, doesn't reassemble the composure he puts on for the rest of the world. His gaze drops to my bare legs below the sleep shorts, holds for a beat longer than professional, and comes back to my face without apology.
"Coffee's still hot."
"You just happened to make a full pot at his hour of the morning?"
"I made a full pot at midnight. It's been a long night." He nods at the chair across from him. "Sit down. I want to show you something."
He doesn't say would you like to see or if you're interested. The command sits so naturally in his voice that my legs are moving before my brain has time to object.
I pour a mug and take the chair across from him.
The kitchen table isn't large, and his files have colonized most of it, which means my mug lands close enough to his that our hands would touch if either of us reached at the wrong moment.
The proximity is obvious. So is the fact that neither of us is pretending it isn't.
The case files are spread in a pattern that looks like chaos but isn't. I've watched Andy work all afternoon and I've learned that his mess has an architecture, documents grouped by connection rather than chronology, each cluster a thread he's pulling from a different direction.
"Susan Landry's social circle," he says, turning a page toward me. "Her employer gave me a list of close contacts. Three of them are Dominion members."
I scan the names. Two I recognize. The third I don't.
"Genevieve Marchand," I say, tapping the name. "She comes in most Thursdays. Gin martini, dirty, extra olives. She scened with a regular for months and then stopped. I haven't seen her scene partner since late summer."
Andy pulls the reading glasses down his nose and looks at me over the rims. "Do you have this for every member?"
"I have it for the regulars. The ones I see enough to track."
"How many is that?"
I think about it. "A few dozen, give or take. The ones who come in on a pattern. I know their drinks, their habits, who they scene with, when they changed something. Bartenders notice things. It's the job."
"Bartenders notice drink orders. You notice operational patterns."
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"I say that like it's an asset." He takes the reading glasses off and sets them on the table. "I want everything you've got. Members whose behavior has shifted, regulars who disappeared, scene partnerships that ended abruptly. Anything that doesn't fit the baseline."
"That's a lot of members, Detective. You might want to clear your schedule."
"Then it's going to be a long session." His mouth doesn't quite smile, but something shifts in the set of it that tells me the response landed where he wanted it to. "Start talking."
I start talking. He starts writing. The kitchen fills with names and drink orders and behavioral patterns that spill out of me with the ease of a system being read aloud, because that's what Dominion's membership looks like from behind the bar.
It's a living map of habits and preferences and quiet tells that I've been building for years without ever thinking of it as intelligence.