Chapter 14
RENATA
The wire itches.
It sits against my sternum, taped flat between my breasts with medical adhesive that the FBI tech applied with clinical efficiency and zero eye contact, which was considerate of him given that I was standing in Andy's kitchen in a bra and jeans while a federal agent I'd never met turned my body into a surveillance device.
The transmitter is the size of a matchbook, nestled against the underwire where the contour of the bra holds it flush.
The tech told me the adhesive would feel warm at first and then I'd forget it was there, and he was half right: the warmth faded, but the awareness hasn't.
Every breath pushes the edge of the housing against skin that is already raw from the tape, and the low-grade friction has become a metronome I can't stop counting.
Andy is just behind my left shoulder and has been since the tech opened his kit.
He positioned himself there before the tech touched me, a placement that looked casual and wasn't. The way a man stands when he's letting another man work but making sure the geometry of the room communicates exactly whose kitchen this is and whose bartender is standing in the middle of it with her shirt off.
The tech felt it. He kept his hands clinical, his movements efficient, his eyes on the equipment. He was a smart man.
"Clear transmission," the tech says, checking his tablet. "Range is solid through the full building. You'll come through clean."
"Can he hear me if I whisper?" The question sounds operational. It isn't. Some of the things I say behind that bar aren't meant for broadcast.
"Depends on ambient noise. Club volume, you'll need to speak at conversational level for clean audio."
Andy's hand settles on my hip from behind, brief and proprietary, his thumb pressing the bone through my jeans while the tech packs his kit.
The touch says nothing and communicates everything: I was here before you arrived and I'll be here after you leave and the skin under that wire is mine.
The tech nods once, to Andy rather than to me, and lets himself out through the front door.
The kitchen is quiet after he goes. I pull my shirt on, a black fitted tee, dark enough that the wire doesn't print through the fabric and turn to face the man who hasn't moved from the spot where he planted himself like he was growing roots through the floorboards.
His sleeves are rolled to the forearm, the way they always are when he's working through something that involves risk and restraint in equal measure, and the tendons in his wrists hold the same taut geometry they held last night when his hands were in my hair and his patience was the only thing between me and the kind of surrender I'd been performing for years without it ever actually being real.
That was last night. Tonight I walk into a building where four people earned their way onto a dead man's blackmail list and three of them are in the ground, and the fourth hasn't been found.
"Stop staring at my sternum," I say. "The wire's fine. Locke's guy was very thorough and very polite about the whole situation."
"He was polite because I was standing behind you."
"Is that what that was? I thought you were just guarding the coffee maker."
His jaw tightens, and the look he gives me holds the heat of a man who spent last night taking me apart with his hands and his voice and the kind of patience that borders on cruelty, and who is now watching me cover genuine terror with the same bratty deflection I've been throwing at him since the first night he sat at my bar.
"Come here."
Two words, and they land in the command voice, the one that bypasses every smart comment I've ever crafted and lands in the part of my spine that still feels like it belongs to him after last night.
After the way he held me through the shaking and said 'thank you for trusting me' like he meant it more than anything he'd ever said with his badge on.
I go. I'd like to pretend I took my time about it, but my feet cover the distance before the defiance can catch up, and when I stop in front of him he tips my chin up with two fingers and holds me there.
"You don't have to be brave right now," he says.
The gentleness in it almost cracks me open, and the almost is doing all the work, because the part of me that Margot rebuilt from a burglar into a bartender, the part that learned to carry fear in a pocket where it fuels instead of freezes, locks down hard around the fracture and holds.
"Yes I do."
He studies me for a beat. His thumb traces the edge of my jaw, a slow stroke that could be tenderness or assessment and manages to be both, and whatever he finds in my face, he accepts without argument.
That is the grace of this man: he understands that the performance and the person underneath it aren't always separate, that sometimes the bravado is load-bearing and pulling it away does more damage than leaving it in place.
The hand drops. The operational cadence returns to his voice, but the undertone doesn't shift, and what lives in the gap between the command and the tenderness is the thing that makes me want to test every boundary he sets just to feel him hold them.
"Comms check at seven. Behind the bar by eight.
You stay on the main floor, you stay visible, and you stay where I can see you on the monitors.
" The last part has nothing to do with tactics.
"Remy's got operatives on the main floor, the hallway, and the rear exits.
Margot cleared the staff rotation. Terrence is your only backup behind the bar. "
"Terrence doesn't know about the wire?"
"Terrence doesn't know about any of it. Margot's call. The fewer people who know, the cleaner the operation stays."
"So I get to pour drinks all night with federal surveillance equipment taped to my chest and nobody to share the joke with. Terrific. This is exactly how I imagined spending my evening."
"You imagined spending your evening arguing with me about the plan you volunteered for."
"I can do both. I'm an excellent multitasker."
I pour myself coffee from the pot that I made an hour ago because the ritual of grinding the beans and measuring the water gave my hands something to do that wasn't shaking.
The ratio is the one I fixed weeks ago, the one Andy hasn't mentioned noticing, and the familiarity of it steadies me the way rituals are supposed to.
"What's my cover if someone asks why I'm back on a regular shift after being out for days?"
"Personal time. Margot called you back because the floor's been short-staffed." He pulls his keys from the counter. "It tracks well enough that you won't have to sell it."
"I can sell anything, Detective. That's the job."
The corner of his mouth tightens, and the tension in it belongs to a man who watched me sell a scene with Arnold Voss from across a crowded room and has been holding the memory of it ever since.
He doesn't take the bait. He checks his phone, pockets it, and looks at me with the focused calm that makes his interrogation room the most dangerous space in the building.
"Car's out front. I drop you at the club at quarter to eight. I go in through the service entrance after you're on the floor. And Renata." He waits until my eyes are on his. "Everything you say tonight, I hear. Keep that in mind."
The sentence is operational. The way he delivers it is not.
The pause before my name, the weight on everything, the steadiness of his gaze: he's telling me the wire is a tether and the tether runs directly to him, and the possessiveness in that arrangement would have sent me running six weeks ago.
Now it lands somewhere warm and low where the fear can't reach it.
"Wouldn't want you to get bored up there," I say. "I'll try to keep it interesting."
"You always do."
The drive across the city takes longer than it should because the evening traffic through the Quarter is thick with tourists and rideshares and the chaos that New Orleans exports to people who come looking for it.
Andy drives with controlled precision and a patience that makes the twenty-minute crawl feel deliberate rather than delayed.
His right hand rests on the console between us, close enough to mine that the gap is a choice, and I spend the first half of the drive pretending I don't want to close it and the second half acknowledging that pretending is beneath both of us after last night.
The wire shifts when I shift in the seat, the adhesive pulling against skin that has been registering every movement since the tech pressed the transmitter into place.
These are small, physical complaints, manageable and constant, and they hold me in my body in a way that the larger fears can't, because the larger fears are enormous and the tape on my skin is specific and real.
Andy pulls onto the side street behind Dominion and stops the car.
"You hear anything, see anything, feel anything that's off, you say my name. That's your signal. You say my name and Remy's team moves."
"And if I just want to say your name because I like the way it sounds?"
"Then we'll have a conversation about operational discipline when this is over." His eyes hold mine in the dark of the car, and the promise in them has nothing to do with reprimands. "Go."
I get out of the car and walk toward the service entrance, and the night air hits my face with the warm, wet weight of a Louisiana evening in the part of the season when the heat doesn't leave after dark, just softens into something that clings.
The smell of the Quarter reaches me from two blocks over: river water and frying oil and the sweet rot of jasmine that grows wild along the wrought iron.