Chapter 20
ANDY
The bourbon is waiting before I reach the stool.
Renata sets the glass on the bar top with the particular precision she reserves for me, the Woodford Reserve on the rocks built exactly the way I like it, the pour generous to say I know what you want and restrained to say don't get comfortable.
She flips the bar towel over her shoulder and cocks her hip against the rail.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm early. You started counting from the wrong time."
"I started counting from when you told me you'd be here. If you want a different baseline, give me a different number."
"Noted."
"Noted. The cop's favorite word." She turns to pull a bottle from the back shelf, and the stretch lifts the hem of her fitted black tank to expose a strip of skin above her waistband, the curve of muscle along her lower back that I've traced with my mouth and my hands and the flat edge of a leather strap.
The motion is unhurried and aimed at nobody, which is how I know it's aimed at me.
"Your tab's open, by the way. Margot's going to start charging you interest."
"Add it to my dues."
"Your dues are current. I checked."
She checked. The admission slips out inside the banter, the kind of tell she'd bury if she were paying attention, and I keep it the way I keep every unguarded thing she gives me, held, not forgotten.
I pick up the bourbon and let the first sip settle.
She watches my mouth on the glass for a fraction of a second before her gaze slides back to the member a few stools down who needs a refill, and the fraction is enough.
I know what that mouth feels like on my cock, and she knows I'm thinking it, and the shared knowledge sits between us on the polished wood alongside the bourbon like a third drink neither of us ordered.
Weeks have passed since Patricia Moreau's arrest. The scar on Renata's forearm has faded to a thin white line that she doesn't bother to cover. She wears it without explanation; the same way she wears everything she's earned.
Dominion has recovered. Margot's rebuilt protocols held.
The membership stabilized. The lounge has its rhythm back, the amber lighting and the cedar and the low negotiations that make this place what it is, and the energy tonight is warm in a way that feels earned.
New members are scattered through the crowd, vetted through the tightened application process, sitting a little straighter than the regulars and watching the room with the careful attention of people who haven't yet learned to stop scanning.
I run my own scan out of habit, checking exits and sight lines and the choreography of the floor. The detective and the Dom read the same room through different lenses and both registers confirm the same thing: Dominion is breathing again.
The man in the far corner catches my eye the way he always does, not by moving but by the quality of his stillness.
Obsidian is the only name anyone uses for him, a club name with no real one attached.
He's occupied that booth for as long as I've been a member, same posture, same unfinished bourbon, same watchful economy that reads less like a Dom cruising the floor and more like a man running surveillance he didn't clear with anyone.
I've seen enough predators to know the difference between appetite and calculation, and Obsidian calculates.
He reads the room the way I read crime scenes, and the recognition runs in both directions.
We are two men who clock each other across a crowded floor and have never spoken beyond a nod, and the nod has always been enough.
Tonight his pattern has a glitch. His gaze keeps pulling toward the main entrance at intervals too regular to be casual. He's waiting for someone who hasn't shown.
I catalog the deviation and let it go.
Renata has leaned her elbows on the bar, close enough that the warmth off her skin cuts through the cedar and the bourbon, and the scent underneath both is just her: soap and clean sweat and something I can still taste at the back of my throat from the last time I buried my face between her thighs. Obsidian and his glitches can wait.
"You're staring at the corner booth," she says.
"I'm scanning the room."
"You scan. Then you scan again. When you scan a third time and your eyes stop in the same place, that's staring." She tips her chin toward Obsidian's corner. "He's been here every club night for years. Same seat, same drink he doesn't finish, same tip. He's about as interesting as the wallpaper."
"You just described him in operational detail."
"I described his drink order and his tipping habits. That's bartending, not surveillance."
"The line between those two gets thinner every time you open your mouth."
The slant of her mouth is the one that pulled me across this bar and hasn't let me go, the one that says I see you seeing me and I'm not going to make it easy. It hits the same place it always does: low, blunt, possessive. She is mine.
"Your room's booked," she says, dropping her voice below the noise of the bar. "I checked when I came on shift."
"You checked."
"Someone has to make sure you don't double-book yourself, Detective. You're very popular with the staff."
"Am I."
"The barback thinks you tip too well. I told him you're compensating for personality."
The banter has changed over the weeks. The sharpness used to be defensive, every line a wall she built mid-sentence.
Now it's recreational. She pushes because she likes the way I hold when she does, and the difference between this and what she used to perform for Arnold Voss is the difference between armor and foreplay.
I finish the bourbon. She pours another without being asked, her fingers precise on the bottle, her wrist turning with the control she brings to everything, and I watch the tendons flex under her skin and think about those hands fisting my sheets an hour from now.
She catches me watching and doesn't look away. The dare in her eyes is quiet and constant.
Her shift ends an hour later. She unties the apron, folds it into the space below the register, and disappears toward the staff area to change.
I wait at the bar and let the bourbon work. The main floor holds active scenes, spaced with the geometry Dominion's layout encourages, and the sounds of the floor settle into the low-frequency register that means the negotiations are done and the real work has started.
I know those sounds. I've made those sounds. The woman changing in the staff area has made them underneath me, and the memory of her voice breaking on my name tightens something behind my sternum that has nothing to do with patience.
Renata returns dressed for a scene, and the shift from bartender to submissive isn't in the clothes.
It's in her shoulders, a loosening I've learned to read as the moment she sets down the armor and picks up the want.
The want is harder for her. It always has been.
She lets me see it now, and that's worth more than the kneeling.
"Ready?" she asks.
"When you are."
"If I waited until I was ready for you, we'd never leave the bar."
She takes my hand as we cross the lounge toward the stairs, and the contact is casual and public and deliberate. Members who know the shape of us register it and look away with the practiced courtesy the floor extends.
The private room is the same one I booked the first time, with clean sheets, low lighting, and a lock that clicks from the inside. The noise from the floor fades to a vibration through the walls.
Renata turns to face me with the look that has become the opening move of our scenes: lifted chin, widened stance, the expression that says I'm here and you're still going to have to earn every inch.
"You look like you're planning a heist," I tell her.
"If I were planning a heist, you wouldn't see it coming."
"I'd see it coming. I'd just enjoy watching the approach."
The corner of her mouth pulls. "What's the scene tonight, Detective? You've been eyeing me across the bar for an hour like a man with a plan."
"I always have a plan."
"That's what worries me."
"Liar." I close the distance between us, slow enough that she can track every step, and stop with my hand at the side of her throat, my thumb at the hinge of her jaw where her pulse kicks fast under the skin. "Your safeword."
"Copper."
"Good. Strip."
"Make me."
I tighten my grip by a fraction. Her pulse jumps under my thumb, and the jump goes straight through my hand into my bloodstream. The defiance is calculated and precise and she delivers it with a look that says she knows exactly what it costs me and is charging interest.
"That's one," I say.
"One what?"
"One correction you've earned. Want to go for two?"
Her mouth curves wider. She undresses herself with the efficiency of a woman who spent years changing between shifts, and the speed is its own kind of challenge: I'll give you what you asked for, but I'll do it on my terms. She stands in front of me bare, chin lifted, stance easy, the scar on her forearm catching the low light, and the trust in that ease hits harder than any submission she's performed on the main floor.
I take my time looking. She lets me. The night is ours and the pace is mine and the woman standing in front of me with her weight on one hip knows both of these things and is daring me to make good on them.
I guide her to the bed and sit her on the edge, then kneel between her thighs. The reversal puts my mouth level with her stomach and my hands on her knees, and the sight of me on the floor sends a visible crack through her composure.
"This is new," she says. Her voice has dropped a register.
"This is overdue."
"I can't believe Andy Broussard is on his knees. The membership would riot."
"The membership isn't here." I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh, feeling the muscle tense under my lips. "Lie back."