Page 86 of Dominion's Guard

"Nobody tamed her," I say. "She chose this. She chose me. That's a different thing."

The member nods and moves on. Renata doesn't look at me. The loosening through her shoulders and the way her hand finds mine say everything her mouth won't.

The drive to her apartment takes us through the Irish Channel, past the parking garage where Lawrence Blanchard died, where Renata called 911 from her car and got written off by a patrol officer who decided a bartender reporting a murder at three in the morning was probably drunk. She doesn't flinch when the concrete structure slides past the passenger window. The woman who witnessed a killing in that garage and wasn't believed is sitting beside the man who believed her, and the distance between those two versions of her is measured in case files, scars, and a trust she built rather than inherited.

"Your place or mine?" she asks.

"Mine. You left coffee in my cabinet."

"I left coffee in your cabinet because yours tastes like an evidence locker."

"It tastes fine."

"It tastes like a misdemeanor."

We drive in comfortable silence for a few blocks, her hand resting on my thigh, the city sliding past in amber streetlight and dark water reflections. I let the quiet sit until the right moment finds its own weight.

"Your lease is up next month," I say.

She goes still. Her hand doesn't leave my thigh, but her fingers stop their idle tracing. "How do you know that?"

"I'm a detective."

"You pulled my lease?"

"I didn't need to pull your lease. You mentioned it to Margot at the bar three weeks ago while I was sitting six feet away drinking bourbon you poured me."

The silence that follows has a texture I can feel against my skin. She's calculating. She's reading the angle, running the geometry of what I'm about to say and what it will cost her to hear it.

"Move in with me," I tell her.

"That's not a question."

"It wasn't meant to be."

"You're asking me to give up my apartment. My space. The place I go when I need to not be around anyone."

"I'm asking you to stop paying rent on a studio you sleep in twice a week while your coffee and your shampoo and your lock picks are already in my house."

"The lock picks are in my bag."

"The backup set is in my nightstand drawer. You put them there a week ago and didn't mention it."

She turns to look out the passenger window, and the reflection of her face in the glass is doing something complicated. Her jaw is set. Her eyes are bright. The brat is fighting the want, and the want is winning, and she knows I can see all of it.

"I'll think about it," she says.

"Take your time."

"I said I'll think about it. That's not a yes."

"I heard you."

"It's also not a no."

"I heard that too."

Her hand resumes its tracing on my thigh, and the touch is lighter than before, tentative in a way Renata almost never is, as if she's testing the weight of a decision she's already made and isn't ready to say out loud.

The night is warm, heavy with jasmine and river water, sitting on the skin the way New Orleans sits on everything: humid, close, impossible to shake. She rides beside me with her bag on her lap and the scar she doesn't hide catching the light from the passing streetlamps.

She is Renata St. Clair, who picked a lock to get the evidence my badge couldn't reach, who bled on a private room floor and got back up, who pours bourbon with the hands of a burglar and submits with the precision of a woman who knows exactly what she's giving and what it's worth.

She's mine. She decided that with her eyes open, and she keeps deciding it, and her sitting beside me in the warm dark of this car on a New Orleans night is the only thing I've ever wanted that the badge couldn't give me.

I turn onto my street. The live oaks throw their shadows across the windshield, and the air through the cracked window smells like jasmine and asphalt and the river. Renata reaches across the console and laces her fingers through mine, and I let her, because following Renata St. Clair has never led me somewhere I didn't need to be.