The door closed.
I looked at the card.
An address in the Warehouse District. Nothing else.
* * *
Dominic came home at three forty-five. I heard the front door, then Henri's voice, brief, and then footsteps to the study rather than upstairs, which meant he'd stopped somewhere in a state that required the study rather than the rest of the house.
I went down.
He was standing at the window behind his desk, not seated, looking at the garden with the look of someone watching something that wasn't there. He looked over when I came in.
"Henri told me," he said.
"Then you know he was here."
"Yes."
I sat in the chair across from the desk. Put the card on the desk between us. He looked at it without picking it up.
"He said he was in the neighborhood," I said.
"He wasn't."
"I know." I watched him. "He mentioned my grandfather. By name. Said he was sorry for the loss."
Something moved through Dominic's face. Not quite anger, anger would have been too legible, too close to the surface. Something colder and more considered. The reaction of a man doing a rapid calculation about what the mention of a specific name in a specific context meant, and not finding the answer comfortable.
"What else," he said.
"A card with an address. 'A different perspective,' he said. On anything." I paused. "On New Orleans. He was careful not to specify."
Dominic picked up the card. Looked at it. Set it back down with the deliberate placement of something he intended to deal with separately.
"Tell me who he is," I said. "Actually."
He looked at me for a moment, the deciding pause, the one I'd learned to distinguish from the thinking pause. Then he moved from the window and sat down, and I understood from the quality of it that this was going to be more than the deflection he'd given me in the car.
"Victor Salas has been trying to establish a permanent foothold in New Orleans for three years," he said. "Port access, distribution networks, the legal infrastructure that makes those things sustainable. What he has in Houston, he wants here." He was choosing words with the care of someone who had agreed to tell the truth and was determining what truth was relevant. "The obstacle has always been the Moreau family's existing relationships, with the port authority, with the city's legal and political structure, with the networks that would need to accommodate him."
"He can't move in without your agreement."
"Or without removing the need for it."
I held his gaze. "And the meetings you've been having with him."
"Negotiation." The word landed clean. "I've been trying to determine whether there's a version of his entry into this market that doesn't require a war to accomplish."
"Is there?"
A pause. "That's what I'm trying to determine."
I thought about Thomas Reyes. About Cleo's grandmother's theory, which I had not shared with Dominic, which I was notready to share until I understood more of the structure. About the payment record in my grandfather's files that may or may not have been what it appeared to be.
"There's something else," I said. "About why he wants this specifically. What's driving the timeline."
Dominic looked at me steadily.