Page 19 of Crown of Ash

"Say that again," Dray said, and his voice had dropped into a register Andre hadn't heard from him yet, quiet and absolutely certain, nothing left in it that belonged to a DPD detective having a beer after shift. "He approached Jaz directly? At Velvet, in front of people?"

A pause. Andre sat very still and didn't pretend not to be listening.

"I'm coming," Dray said. "Don't let him leave the building. Any of you."

He hung up. He looked at Andre for a long moment, jaw still tight, and didn't try to hide what he'd already decided.

"That question you asked me," Dray said. "About carrying a badge and still sleeping at night?"

"Yeah?"

"Come with me and I'll show you the other half of my answer instead of telling it to you."

From the street, Velvet didn't exist. No sign, no name anywhere on the building, nothing to mark the unbroken stone front from any other converted warehouse along that stretch of the riverfront. Dray didn't park on the street. He took a ramp down into an underground garage that gave no hint from above it led anywhere at all, and the man waiting by the elevator didn't ask either of them for a name.

Inside, the music was still playing to an empty stage. Somebody had cleared the floor.

Cass was waiting in the back hallway, and Andre understood within about four seconds why the room had gone quiet around him. He wasn't shouting. He wasn't even raising his voice. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, a three-piece suit that looked wrong for a burlesque club and exactly right for him, and every person in that hallway was giving him a wide, deliberate berth, the way people did with a storm.

"Dray." Cass's eyes moved to Andre and stayed there a beat too long to be casual. "You brought company."

"He's fine. He's with me."

"That's not the same thing as fine." But Cass let it go, already turning. "Jaz is in the back. He's not hurt. He's already asked me twice for the security footage and a name. That's worse. He's mad."

"Where was he?"

"By the bar. In front of thirty witnesses, most of whom think the son of a bitch was just an aggressive fan. I didn't recognize him, but he said shit and tried to put a hand on Jaz." Cass's jaw worked once. "He knew his name. Not his stage name. His real one."

Andre's stomach went cold and tight, right where his own buried file had been sitting all day. Not a hypothetical anymore. A stranger had targeted someone connected to Marcus, even if seemingly tangentially. There was only one thorn in their side right now… Even if it wasn't Drakov himself, which seemed the most likely because even Drakov would have been mad to cause too much trouble in a safe haven created by the Lords of Darkness MC. Sovriegn had made plenty of examples over the years that even the PD didn't look into overly closely. They knew better.

"That's not possible," Andre said, before he could stop himself. "Nobody outside this building should have that. I happen to know for a fact that the Lords keep this place clean and their people protected. It's why the department leaves them alone."

Cass looked at him properly for the first time, winter-water eyes doing a slow, unhurried assessment that felt more thorough than most interrogations Andre had sat through.

"You're the detective." Not a question. "Dray's been careful about what he tells people. I'm curious what you think you're doing here."

"Learning something I should have figured out a long time ago."

Cass's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "That's the only honest answer anyone's given me all night." He looked back at Dray. "Get him settled. I need forty minutes with Jaz before he does something that gets him arrested, or worse. Then… we're having a little house chat about what we're going to do about this. No one touches what's ours." There was death in the pale eyes of the man before him, and Andre could not surpress a shiver. He was glad that quiet rage wasn't directed at him.

Dray took him to the bar on the main floor instead of following Cass, didn't explain why, and Andre didn't ask. With their(?) person working here, it stood to reason he'd be familiar with the place. The room was empty except for a bartender polishing glasses that were already clean, pressed velvet walls the color of old wine soaking up what little light the candles on each table gave off. Mahogany everywhere, wood worn dark and soft from decades of hands passing over it.

"He'll be a while," Dray said, sliding onto a stool. "Cass doesn't rush people down off a ledge. He just stands close enough that they know somebody's there."

Andre sat down next to him, his legs unsteady under him without warning.

"This is real," Andre said. Not a question.

"All of it. The building, the man who just walked away from you, the meyhem he's about to unleash for someone we've loved for less than a year like it's the easiest decision he's ever made." Dray signaled the bartender for two glasses of the same amber pour, unasked, like a standing order neither of them needed to place out loud. "None of it exists on paper anywhere. None of it ever will."

"And you've been doing this for…?"

"Years. The number doesn't matter." Dray turned his glass a slow circle on the bar top, not drinking it yet. "Badge in the morning. This at night. Nobody in either building knows about the other one, except the people who matter."

Andre thought about a file in a folder in cold storage with his own initials at the bottom of it, and the three years he'd spent pretending it was anything other than him covering for Marcus.

"How do you live like that? Both things true at once, and neither one canceling out the other?"