Chapter 15 #2
"It's fine." Her voice is still controlled; the delivery still pitched exactly the way she pitches it in situations at the bar.
“Flesh wound. Barely qualifies. I'd rate it a solid four out of ten, which for the record is lower than the time I caught my hand on a broken window during a second-story job in the Garden District. "
"Renata."
"I'm just saying, if we're ranking injuries by severity, this one doesn't even make the top five. I once dislocated a thumb picking a Medeco in a pantry closet because the homeowner had the world's worst taste in hardware, and that was at least a six."
"Give me your arm."
"You're very bossy for a man who just broke into one of my employer's private rooms. Margot's going to invoice you for that, and she's not cheap."
"I turned the handle. The door was unlocked. Give me your arm."
"Well, that's less dramatic. I was going to tell people you kicked it down."
"You can tell people whatever you want after you stop bleeding on Margot's expensive rug."
She holds my gaze with the defiance I've memorized over time watching her work at the bar, the version that dares me to push harder and wants me to win.
The adrenaline is still running through both of us.
I can feel it in the heat coming off her skin from a foot away, can see it in the vein at her throat and the quick, shallow rhythm of her breathing.
The awareness that the last time we were this close with this much adrenaline in our blood I had her underneath me is doing something to my focus that Locke's team does not need to hear on the wire.
"Stop." The word comes out low, quiet, and I don't raise my voice because I've never needed to with her.
The tone is the one she recognizes from the negotiations we've had since she sat in my living room in the dark, and the effect is the same as it always is: the defiance holds for one more breath, sharp and bright and refusing to fold, and then it gives.
The brat act falls in pieces. The mouth goes first, the corners releasing the smile she was holding like a weapon. The shoulders follow, dropping the tension she'd been carrying as armor.
Then the eyes give, and the eyes are the worst, because when Renata stops performing, what lives underneath is the woman who trusted me with the full measure of her surrender last night and is trusting me again now, in a room that smells like gunpowder and copper, with federal agents around and another woman's blood mixed with hers on the floor.
She extends her arm.
My hands are on her skin before the breath she releases finishes leaving her body.
The wound runs along the outer forearm, a clean slash that will scar.
The edges are ragged where the blade caught, and the blood flows fast enough that pressure is the priority but not fast enough to mean arterial damage.
The relief that moves through my hands is possessive and entirely too large for the clinical task of applying a bandage.
I strip off my overshirt, fold it lengthwise, and wrap the fabric around her forearm. The pressure is firm and even.
My fingers circle her wrist to hold the bandage in place, and her pulse beats against my thumb, fast and hard from the adrenaline, and the intimate familiarity of touching her arm, the same spot I held her wrists above her head last night while she arched against me and said my name in a voice that had nothing to do with a wire and everything to do with want, is a physical problem I can't address in this room with an audience.
She knows it, too. The catch in her breath when my thumb presses against the pulse point tells me the adrenaline isn't the only thing driving her heart rate, and the look she gives me from under her lashes is the one she's been giving me across the bar for over a year.
The one that says she sees exactly what I'm keeping leashed and she's deciding whether to pull it tighter or cut it.
"You moved into her," I say, because if I don't redirect my focus to the case I'm going to do something that ends up in Locke's after-action report. "When she had the knife. You closed the distance."
"Seemed like the right call at the time."
"It was the right call. It was also the move of someone who's spent time in rooms where the exit is behind the threat."
"Are we adding that to the list? Because the list is getting long enough to need its own filing system, and you already have a notebook problem."
My hand moves from her wrist to the back of her neck. The grip is firm, my thumb against the tendon that runs along the side of her throat, and the shiver that runs through her is visible and immediate and has nothing to do with blood loss.
"The medics are on their way up," Locke says from the doorway. "Ms. St. Clair, we'll need your statement after you're treated."
"She'll give it when she's ready," I say without turning around. The possessive edge in my voice is not appropriate for an NOPD detective speaking to a federal agent, and I don't moderate it.
Renata's mouth curves. The smile is small and private and meant only for me, and the warmth in it slides under my ribs and stays there, lodged in the place where this woman has been setting up residence since she sat in my living room in the dark and told me the truth about who she is.
Remy appears in the doorway seconds later. He reads the room with the efficiency his training requires and moves to Renata's other side without being asked.
"I've got her," Remy says. The look he gives me over her head is direct and unambiguous: the room needs processing, the evidence needs securing, and the arresting officer standing here with his hand on a civilian's neck instead of holding a notebook is a problem the defense will exploit.
He's right. The gun on the floor needs to be tagged.
The knife needs to be collected. The blood needs to be mapped and the ceiling examined where the bullet lodged in the plaster.
The chain of custody starts now, and if I'm not the one documenting the scene, Moreau's lawyer will ask why the detective who built this case walked away from the evidence to hold a woman's hand.
My hand tightens on her wrist, one last press of my thumb against her pulse.
The beat is fast and strong under my touch, and my fingers don't want to open.
The reluctance is physical, lodged in the tendons of my hand, a refusal that takes more effort to override than any instinct the badge has ever trained into me.
"Stay with her," I tell Remy.
Renata watches me pull back. The mask hasn't fully reassembled yet, and what shows through the cracks is a version of her I've only seen twice: once last night, when she stopped performing and let me hold what she was carrying, and once now, in a room that's about to become a crime scene, with my shirt wrapped around her arm and my handprint still warm on her throat.
"Go, Andy." Her voice is rough and stripped to the bones of it, all banter spent, all deflection gone, just the sound of my name in her mouth the way it sounded last night. "I'll be right here giving Remy a hard time until you're done. He's much easier to irritate than you are."
"That's because he doesn't enjoy it," I say, and what passes between us in the silence after is a conversation we'll finish later, when the room is empty and the badge is off and the only audience is the dark.
I pull the notebook from my pocket. I click the pen.
I turn toward the evidence with the disciplined focus the badge demands and the full knowledge that the woman behind me just said my name without the word Detective in front of it, and the absence of the title tells me more than anything she's said tonight in a room full of people.
The room gives up its story in pieces. The gun on the floor is a compact semi-automatic I'll run through the firearms database before morning.
The folding knife lies near the chair leg.
Blood covers the floor, two women's worth, and the pattern tells me where they fought and how they fell.
Plaster dust coats the carpet beneath the spot where the round lodged in the ceiling.
Drag marks cross the floor where Renata took Moreau down with body weight and leverage and the scrappy, vicious resourcefulness that Margot saw in a young burglar and decided to save.
I photograph and note and measure. The notebook fills with the precise, unhurried attention I've brought to scenes for the past decade.
Across the room, the medic is cleaning Renata's wound and she's giving him the same hard time she gives everyone, her voice carrying just enough of the brat to tell me the shock is wearing off and the real Renata is coming back online.
Remy stands beside her with his arms crossed, and the flicker at the corner of his mouth tells me she's already found whatever button of his is easiest to push.
She catches my eye over the evidence markers.
The glance is fast and targeted, the same one she's been giving me over the bar for over a year, the one that tracks me with the precision of a woman who memorizes sight lines for a living and has decided that I'm the most interesting thing in any room she enters.
What it tells me is simple: I'm here. I'm fine. Finish your work and come get me.
I hold it for a beat longer than the scene requires, then go back to the notebook.
The evidence needs my attention. The case needs closing.
Patricia Moreau's confession is on a federal recording, and each detail I document tonight is a brick in the wall between her and the defense attorney who will try to take it apart.
Renata sits a dozen feet away with a medic's bandage on her arm and my overshirt by her side.
She is alive and sharp-tongued and already making Remy regret volunteering for bedside duty.
When this room is processed and the evidence is logged and the jurisdictional paperwork begins its slow federal grind, I am going to take her home and put my hands on her and find out what she does when there's no audience and no badge and no distance left between us.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. The screen shows Hebert's number, and the timing tells me everything the conversation will confirm: the captain just learned that his homicide detective ran a bait operation inside a private club using federal resources he never authorized, in coordination with a security firm that has no business inside an NOPD investigation, and made an arrest that's going to generate the kind of attention that ends careers or makes them.
The notebook can wait. Hebert can't. And the woman sitting across the room with my shirt around her arm and my name in her mouth is about to find out what happens when the man who just risked his badge to keep her alive has to decide whether the badge is still worth keeping.