Chapter 9 #2
"I'm asking you to cross-check Margot's records against what this bartender remembers, the one who never forgets a face, a drink order, or a room number.
If the records and my memory don't match, that gap is your evidence that someone tampered with the system.
" I pull out a chair and sit, reaching for his notebook before he can.
His hand lands on it first, fingers closing over the leather cover with the easy authority of a man who controls what belongs to him, and the look he gives me over the top of his reading glasses, which he has apparently already put on because the man sleeps in a state of professional readiness that borders on pathological, is pure Dom.
He is steady and patient and absolutely certain that I'm going to let go.
I do let go, not because the look makes me want to comply, though it does, in a place low and warm that I'm choosing not to examine while people are dying.
I let go because he's right, and the notebook is his, and the investigation runs on his terms even when my brain is the one doing the heavy lifting.
He opens to a clean page and sets the pen on the table between us.
"Start whenever you're ready," he says.
"Are you going to be this gracious all morning, or is the bossy part coming later?"
"Start." He gives me one word, stripped of everything except the expectation that I will.
His voice drops into the register that presses against the base of my ribs and stays there, the one that makes my hands want to be still and my mouth want to test how far I can push before the patience runs out.
I close my eyes and let the bar come back.
Dominion's private hallway runs off the main floor past the lounge seating, a corridor lined with the custom wallcovering Margot replaced after the security breach and the amber sconce fixtures that cast warm pools at intervals.
The hallway bar cart sits near the entrance, stocked with water, juice, and light snacks for members between sessions.
I restocked that cart at the start of every shift and topped it off throughout the night, and the names come with drink orders and physical descriptions and behavioral patterns attached, because that's how my brain stores people.
I remember Thomas Arceneaux with his Maker's Mark, neat, third stool, fleur-de-lis tattoo.
I remember a financial consultant whose name I'm holding back until I've worked through the full sequence of what I can recall.
I remember a defense attorney who booked room eight on the same night every week and always left a generous tip on the cart, and a married couple who used room three for rope work and never spoke to anyone at the bar except each other.
Andy writes. He doesn't interrupt. He asks one question for every stretch of my talking, and each question is precise enough to confirm he's tracking the pattern I'm building and specific enough to push me toward details I might have skipped.
Which night of the week? Did they arrive alone or with a partner?
Did you ever see them interact with staff you didn't recognize?
The coffee he made is good. He brought me a mug without asking and set it at my left hand while I was talking, and the gesture was proprietary in a way I would have resented from anyone else and noticed from him, stored under the growing pull between us that neither of us has been stupid enough to name out loud.
Names accumulate. By the time I open my eyes and reach for the mug, the notebook has pages of names and notes and the morning light has shifted from gold to white.
"There's more," I say.
Andy looks up from the notebook. His glasses are perched near the end of his nose, and behind them his eyes carry the gathered attention of a man who has been absorbing information without judgment for the better part of the morning and is waiting for the piece that changes the shape of everything he's just written.
"When I first came to Dominion, I used the private rooms."
It lands in the kitchen and stays. Andy doesn't move. His pen doesn't move. His jaw holds steady, locked in the kind of composure that only looks effortless to people who have never tried to maintain it, and the stillness is its own answer.
"I was new," I say. "Margot had just hired me, and the lifestyle was something I was still figuring out. I didn't want an audience for that. The main floor felt like performing, and I wasn't ready to perform when I didn't know what I was doing yet."
I wrap my hands around the mug because they want something to hold.
"I scened in the private rooms for my first few months, rooms three and five mostly, small sessions that were nothing intense, just learning the basics with Doms who were patient enough to teach a green sub who couldn't keep her mouth shut. "
"Patient enough." He gives me a fraction of movement at the corner of his mouth that isn't quite a smile. "How many did you go through?"
"I went through enough that Margot started vetting them in advance.
" The admission costs less than it should, maybe because he's watched me scene on the main floor and already knows what I look like when I'm testing someone's limits.
"Once I figured out what I wanted, or at least what I was willing to let people see, the main floor made more sense.
The audience became part of it. The performance was the armor. "
"And the private rooms?"
"They stopped feeling safe. They felt like boxes, small spaces where nobody could see what was happening, and the only person who knew whether you were okay was the person you were scening with."
I meet his eyes, and the vulnerability costs more than anything I've said since the night I confessed the break-in. "The main floor has witnesses. Having witnesses felt better."
"When was this?"
"It was before you joined, before the cameras were discovered, during the window when Ridgewater was still working there and Julien's cameras were recording."
I set the mug down carefully, as if the ceramic might shatter if I grip too hard. "I was in those rooms, Andy, during the time the footage was captured. If the archive is as comprehensive as we think it is, I could be on it."
What follows has a texture I can feel against my skin. Andy takes his glasses off and sets them on the table, the motion unhurried and controlled, a man clearing his sight line before he looks at something that requires his full, unobstructed attention.
"You're telling me you might be on the target list."
"I'm telling you that I used the rooms that were compromised during the period they were compromised, and that a man who spent his time at Dominion watching the staff with the attention of someone building an inventory would have known exactly who I was and what I was doing in those rooms."
My voice holds because I am making it hold, the same way I kept my hands steady in Lawrence's study while the photographs burned their way into my memory.
"Ridgewater lingered near the private hallways.
He watched the staff. He watched me. If his archive has footage from those rooms during my first months at Dominion, then he has footage of me. "
"Has anyone contacted you with demands, or threats, or anything unusual?"
"There's been nothing, which either means I'm not on the list yet, or I'm being saved for later, or the footage of the bartender with no money and no reputation isn't worth as much as a retired patriarch and a finance executive and a real estate developer."
"Or he doesn't know you're connected to the investigation."
"He'd have to be blind to miss that at this point. I'm living in your house, Andy. If he's watching anyone the way he watched Susan's building, he's seen me come and go from here."
The fear I've been processing since Thomas Arceneaux's name came out of Andy's mouth settles into a specific shape for the first time.
It has edges now. It has the partial match from the surveillance footage outside Susan's building, and it has the memory of a man who stood in Dominion's hallways watching me restock the bar cart with the flat, predatory patience of someone building a file he intended to use.
I am afraid. The fear is clean and specific and grounded in facts rather than shadows, and I prefer it that way because fear with facts attached is something I can work with. Fear without facts is just panic, and panic has never gotten me through a locked door or out of a bad situation.
Andy stands. He moves around the table, and every step is calculated, placed with the awareness of a man who understands that proximity is a tool and is choosing exactly how much of it to apply.
He stops beside my chair, close enough that I have to angle my chin up to see his face, and the height difference that usually registers as physical reality registers this time as a claim.
He's standing over me and the position is a choice, and the choice is about making me feel covered rather than cornered, except the line between those two things has been getting thinner every day I've spent in this house.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him. His eyes are the blue-grey that shifts depending on the light, and in the white morning glare of his kitchen they're closer to grey, steady, and stripped of everything except the intensity he reserves for things he's decided to protect.
His hand comes up and his thumb catches the edge of my jaw, tilting my face half an inch higher, a correction so small it barely qualifies as touch and so precise that my breathing forgets its pattern.
"You're not on his list," he says. "You're on mine."
It lands in two places at once, the part of me that tracks threats and the part of me that has been tracking how this man's voice sounds when the distance between detective and Dom collapses to nothing.