The woman in the mirror is a stranger. Pale skin, dark eyes, hair plastered to her skull. There are red marks on hershoulders where Gabriel's fingers dug in. There will be bruises tomorrow. Evidence.
Evidence of what, though? That he grabbed me? That would support my story. What story? The truth—that he slipped because the storm was dangerous and that I couldn't save him? Or the other truth—the one I can't quite access, the one hiding in the gaps of my memory like a monster under a child's bed?
I turn from the mirror. Open my closet—the one Gabriel organized by color, by season, and occasion. I pull out jeans, a sweater, and underwear. Clothes I chose myself, bought on one of those Tuesday afternoons he interrogated me about. I dress methodically, buttoning each button, pulling the sweater over my head, and stepping into shoes.
Now I look normal. Now I look like a woman about to make a terrible phone call, not like a woman who just watched her husband die and can't remember her role in it.
I pick up my phone from the nightstand. The screen shows the gallery text from earlier—the automated invitation Gabriel turned into an interrogation—and nothing else. No missed calls. No one knows what happened here tonight.
I should delete it. I should care about covering tracks, about what the police might read into an innocent message. But all I can think about is the weight of Gabriel's body as it tilted backward, the way his eyes went wide, and the moment when his fingers lost their grip on my arms.
Did I push him?
The question echoes. Unanswered. Unanswerable.
I dial 911.
The operator answers on the second ring. "911, what's your emergency?"
My mouth opens. The words should be simple: My husband fell. He's dead. Please send someone.
But what comes out is different.
"I think I killed my husband," I hear myself say. "I need help."
CHAPTER 1: JAX
The control center hums the way a confessional might—sealed, subterranean, designed for witnessing without being seen. I descend the steel staircase every evening at six, leaving the polished marble of The Dominion's upper floors for this bunker of monitors and servers. Down here, the walls are concrete, the lighting is the blue-white of surgical theaters, and the only sound is the machine's pulse keeping watch over everything above.
I like it down here. It's honest.
My chair is Herman Miller, ergonomic to the point of medical intervention, positioned at the exact center of sixteen monitors arranged in a curve that mirrors the limits of human peripheral vision. Each screen shows me a different angle of The Dominion: entrance, lobby, main floor, private rooms, kitchens, exits. I can switch to any of the eighty-seven cameras installed throughout the building with a keystroke. I know the blind spots—there are three, all intentional, all in locations Lucien decided should remain unwatched.
I pour coffee from the French press I keep on the console. The ritual is meditative. Grind the beans, heat the water to exactly 200 degrees, four-minute steep, press. The coffee is perfect every time because I make it the same way every time. Consistency is control. Control is the only thing that matters in this work.
The overnight report waits on my second monitor. I scan it while drinking: two members stayed past closing, both regulars, both cleared by Lucien personally. One altercation in the main bar, resolved by floor security before it escalated. Camera malfunction in the east corridor, maintenance scheduled for tomorrow. Nothing that requires my intervention.
Good. I prefer when nothing requires my intervention.
I run through the evening's system checks. Cameras: online. Audio feeds: clear. Biometric scanners at the entrance: functional. Panic buttons in the private rooms: armed. Fire suppression: ready. The Dominion is a machine, and machines only fail when someone forgets to maintain them.
I don't forget.
Two years I've been doing this. Two years since I came back from overseas, Elias Voss—my former mentor, the man who taught me everything about security work before I even understood what security meant, told me Lucien Armitage was building something new in the ruins of Dom's old club. The original club had been different: darker, rawer, a place where power was traded as openly as money.
Dom had built an empire on discretion and desire until both became liabilities. He died badly, the way men in that business tend to when they forget the difference between control and hubris.
Lucien bought the remains and rebuilt it into something cleaner—same location, same clientele, different wrapper. The Dominion offers the appearance of respectability while serving the same appetites. Just better lit.
Elias had spent years molding me into the perfect operative: observant, disciplined, and ruthlessly effective.
Then he sent me abroad to "refine my skills," which was his way of saying I needed distance from the work we'd done together. When I returned, he connected me with Lucien. "You'd be good at this," Elias had said, which was his way of saying I'd be useful. I've spent my entire adult life being useful to someone.
The difference is that now I'm useful at a distance. No blood. No bodies. No standing in rooms while men makedecisions I'll regret. Just screens and cameras and the comfort of surveillance.
Except I'm not comfortable. That's the part I don't tell Elias when we have our monthly dinners, the part I don't tell anyone. I'm performing competence while something in my chest has gone hollow, like I'm a building someone forgot to furnish. The surveillance gives me purpose the way food gives a starving man sustenance—it keeps me alive, but it doesn't make me less empty.
I think about Elias more than I should. I wonder if he knew this would happen, that the emptiness is inevitable when you spend your life watching instead of acting. If this is what reform looks like—not transformation, just a different flavor of disconnection.
