Dominance: A Blackburn Erotic Thriller (Book 2)

Dominance – Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The LED lights stung Blackburn’s eyes, carving pale rectangles across the battered linoleum. She perched at her desk, spine rigid against the chair’s broken lumbar support, pen poised mid-signature as the squad room’s noise pressed in, phones needling her nerves, keyboards clattering out syncopated Morse, Reeves cursing low and viciously at the coffeemaker’s terminal sputter. The air smelled of burned grounds and last night’s sweat.

Ten minutes since she’d first seen Jenna Langston’s face staring up from the file. A photograph slick with police gloss, Jenna’s features half-shadowed, mouth caught between laughter and alarm. Smoke behind glass. Blackburn couldn’t shake it. Every time she blinked, the image curled tighter around her mind, a phantom taste on her tongue.

Her hand moved with surgical precision over the evidence transfer forms for Traffic Services (signatures, dates, initials), an old ritual meant to anchor her. Outwardly composed. Hair pinned neat, sleeves rolled just so, expression carved from stone. But her jaw ached from clenching. Her left thumb worried a groove into the pen barrel. Beneath the surface, questions gnawed at her ribs.

Why had Brynn called? Why point her here? Blackburn could still hear that voice, too bright for dawn, crackling through static. “I was hoping you might investigate and uncover those details yourself.” Had Brynn spoken to Jenna before three tons of driverless steel snapped bones and scattered blood across Oak Street? Brynn always knew too much. She made secrets feel porous. Did she know about that night? About Kissthiskitty, Jenna’s hookup alias? Blackburn held tight to that separation. Usernames instead of names, digital shadows instead of flesh. If anyone dug too deep, if Brynn pressed, Blackburn could still deny everything.

A folder thudded onto her desk, a sharp intrusion. Detective Riley Cooper hovered close, arms full of dog-eared files.

“Morning, boss.” He kept his voice low, careful not to break whatever spell held her so still.

She didn’t turn fully, just lifted her eyes enough to catch him in peripheral focus. A subtle frown flickered across her brow, a signal of concentration interrupted rather than true annoyance.

“Over there.” She gestured toward the precarious stack already threatening collapse at the desk’s edge. Her fingers returned instantly to the crime scene photo splayed before her.

Jenna Langston sprawled on asphalt. Arms twisted beneath her torso, legs bent wrong at every hinge. Blood pooled beneath one temple and streaked through dark curls, a grotesque halo glistening under streetlamp glare. The photo pulsed with memory. Heat against skin, the cold kitchen floor, demands whispered into darkness. Then gone.

Blackburn lingered half a second too long before flipping it face down. The next page brought witness statements. Contradictions stacked like bad bets. Two pedestrians swore they’d seen an empty driver’s seat as the car drifted down Oak. Another insisted he’d glimpsed movement, a shadow writhing behind glass just before impact. One woman claimed the vehicle reversed after hitting Jenna, then rolled back over shattered limbs as if directed by malice rather than code.

Her pen hovered above a blank notepad. Jaw tight. Breath shallow in her chest.

She slashed notes in quick strokes, each line an attempt to impose order on chaos left by Traffic Services’ half-hearted investigation. Frustration sharpened her focus. She stood abruptly, files clamped tight beneath one arm, legal pad pressed flat against hipbone. Years navigating rooms thick with ego and rivalry lent grace to each movement, a choreography learned by necessity.

She stepped into Homicide’s bullpen. It was a mosaic of battered desks drowning under loose papers and greasy cartons stacked like barricades against fatigue. The air buzzed with idle chatter until she cut through it.

“Eyes up.”

Silence snapped taut around her words. Four heads jerked upward in unison. Sinclair lounged back but watched her over steepled fingers. Reeves froze mid-spin atop his chair. Cooper straightened as if bracing for impact. Dawson fussed with an empty stapler he pretended needed urgent repair.

Blackburn let silence coil a moment longer before slicing it open again.

“This case just landed,” she said, voice honed to an edge that demanded attention without volume. She held up Jenna’s file as she strode into their circle, worn chairs ringed by coffee stains and exhaustion.

“Autonomous vehicle hit-and-run on Oak Street this morning,” she continued, tone clipped but urgent. “Traffic Services spent hours at the scene. No word yet from the M.E., but we’re treating it as homicide until proven otherwise.” She let that hang, the weight of media scrutiny implied in every syllable. “No-driver angle guarantees headlines.”

She dropped the folder onto Sinclair’s desk with deliberate force. The sound ricocheted off grimy walls like live ammunition.

“Sinclair.” Her gaze pinned him where he sat. His mouth twitched into something insolent but deferential, a game they both played too well. “Tech is yours. Coordinate with forensics on hardware and software pulls from the car.” She tapped two fingers against her temple, a silent metronome echoing old confidences, and added, “Get Willow Adler on it too.”

“Traffic Division owes us incident reports by noon,” she finished flatly. “Line-by-line analysis on my desk today.”

Sinclair spun his pen between nimble fingers, a defiance, but nodded all the same.

“Re-interview every witness claiming they saw something strange,” Blackburn added before he could speak again. “Especially those two insisting there was no driver.”

He met her stare for a heartbeat longer than protocol allowed, charge flickering beneath boredom, then dropped his gaze to his notes.

She turned to Cooper next. He was broad-shouldered and worn thin by years of carrying burdens no one else would claim. Without preamble she continued.

“Langston herself is yours,” she said firmly, her own pulse ticking faster as Jenna’s name left her lips. “Start with family if they’re alive, then coworkers.” A pause, a flicker of memory pressed between syllables, then steel again, “Dig into online history too. Friends, hookups…everything.”

Cooper nodded once, shorthand already scrawling across a legal pad stained by old coffee and older regrets. He looked up, question forming in his eyes, but hesitated as if weighing whether to ask or simply obey.

Blackburn waited in that hush, the squad room holding its breath around them, all senses tuned for what might come next. Another contradiction, another secret surfacing where none should exist.

“Has the family been notified yet?”

Blackburn didn’t so much as glance up. “Find out. Call Beckett in Traffic. Now. Priority one.” Her tone was considered, not sharp, but it left no room for delay. Her authority woven through the words like wire.

She turned to Reeves next. He stood rigid, reluctance wound tight beneath his uniformed obedience, but he held her gaze as she spoke. “You’ll ride with me later,” Blackburn said, voice even and edged in iron. “We’re going back to Langston’s scene.” She watched him for a beat, weighing the possibility of pushback. He only nodded, knuckles whitening around a battered pen he twirled unconsciously, his nerves betraying what his silence would not.

“We need a warrant for Jenna Langston’s home,” she continued, each syllable pressed flat and final as a gavel strike. “Move on it.”

Reeves’s assent came low and grudging, his eyes flickering with fatigue before he masked it behind the slow drag of breath.

The air in the squad room thickened as Blackburn leaned over Sinclair’s desk, palms splayed wide against the cool veneer, posture calculated for command rather than threat. Her words cut into the hush. “We treat this like all eyes are on us.” The statement landed quietly but left an aftershock in its wake. She didn’t look at Sinclair alone. Her voice carried to every ear within reach. “A victim dead by autonomous vehicle? If we don’t control the narrative, the press will eat us alive.”

She straightened, letting her gaze sweep the bullpen, a silent invitation for dissent that never came. Only the scratch of pens and staccato clatter of keys answered her decree. No one dared challenge her logic.

Satisfied, she pivoted and strode to her office, closing the door behind her with a click soft enough to be deliberate. For a moment she hovered over the phone, hesitation disguised as calculation, then dialed Dr. Petrović’s number. The preliminary report had offered only bones, she needed marrow.

The line hissed before Petrović’s voice emerged, gravelly with exhaustion and accented by Serbia’s shadow. “Detective Blackburn,” he greeted, words stretched thin by too many hours awake. “I’m still reviewing my initial findings.”

“Don’t repeat what I already know,” she replied, impatience threading through her restraint. “Tell me something that matters.”

Papers shuffled on his end, a sound like dry leaves underfoot, before he resumed. “Ms. Langston was struck at considerable speed by the autonomous vehicle. Impact pattern suggests forty miles per hour.” His delivery was clinical, but she pictured his furrowed brow bent over notes stained with coffee and regret.

“She suffered multiple fractures along her left side. Arm, leg, pelvis,” he went on. “There’s a deep scalp laceration down to bone. But it’s the chest trauma that stands out.” He let silence bloom, an unspoken warning, and then, “Massive compression of the thorax, ribs shattered and splintered, one lung collapsed… internal organs torn.”

Blackburn stilled, fingers poised mid-drum on the desktop.

“When will I have your report?”

“Tomorrow morning at the latest,” he promised, and then more quietly, “detective… those injuries suggest something very different from an accident. It suggests aim.”

“That’s why I’m calling you.” She ended the call without ceremony.

Crime scene photos lay scattered across her desk. Evidence was arranged like tarot cards, daring her to divine order from chaos. Recognition shivered through her. This woman was under her care and control, a private night when pleasure had blurred into risk. Now, that secret threatened to surface alongside blood and asphalt.

She exhaled slowly and leaned back, tension thrumming through shoulders that refused relief no matter how rigidly she braced herself. One problem at a time, she repeated it like a mantra, but first, Hayes had to clear her continued involvement in this case officially. Procedural risk hung over her like stormlight. Hayes respected protocol above all else.

Her gaze drifted past glass toward the bullpen in search of distraction, or perhaps opportunity, and landed on Dawson slouched behind a newspaper, half-concealed and wholly disengaged from actual work.

Quarry found.

Blackburn rose with predatory precision, each movement economical and unhurried, as she crossed to his desk on silent soles. The room’s ambient noise receded. All sensation sharpened into detail, cool air brushing exposed skin, distant phones ringing unanswered, Dawson oblivious beneath newsprint.

She let herself feel it, that low pulse of anticipation humming beneath composure, as she closed in behind him.

Sinclair spotted her first. His body tensed reflexively, throat clearing twice, a clipped warning lost on its intended target.

Dawson didn’t look up from his page-turning ritual. “You coming down with something?” he muttered absently.

“No.” Blackburn let her reply slip between them, a slow blade drawn across velvet space. “He’s warning you I’m right behind you.”

Dawson froze mid-motion, paper crinkled under trembling fingers as realization dawned slowly and unwelcomed across his face. He turned by degrees until his eyes met hers, shock mingling with apprehension in every line of his posture.

She circled behind him, not hurried but inexorable, a lioness drawing close enough for him to feel heat radiate off her presence alone.

“Boss,” Dawson managed as he straightened awkwardly in his chair, voice thin with nerves masquerading as casualness. “Just checking for media coverage on Deonte Mills… seeing if any witnesses talked before we did.”

Blackburn stood over him, eyebrow raised, a silent rebuke that made Dawson shift, the chair creaking beneath him. She let the moment stretch, her gaze sharp and unwavering.

“A solid plan,” she said at last. Her voice was clinical. “Except Mills hasn’t played defense for the Eagles in years.” She nodded, once, toward the bold SPORTS header crowning Dawson’s newspaper before returning her eyes to him.

Color rose up Dawson’s neck. He fumbled to fold the paper, but only managed to crush it further, the dry rasp of newsprint suddenly too loud in the brittle hush of the office.

Sinclair sat nearby, still as stone, his gaze flickering between Dawson and Blackburn. Watchful. Cautious. Something like relief passed through his eyes. Admiration, too, shaded by gratitude that this time he was only a witness.

Dawson’s shoulders rounded under Blackburn’s scrutiny. He tried for levity but his voice barely carried. “Come on,” he murmured. “Give me a break.”

Blackburn leaned forward, just enough to close the distance, her presence pressing down like cold iron. “A break?” Her words were soft-edged but precise, each syllable landed with surgical intent. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t break you in half.”

Silence fell, heavy, and electric. Cooper and Reeves across the bullpen buried themselves deeper in their paperwork, eyes fixed anywhere but here. The tension radiated outward, a silent current beneath LED lights.

Blackburn let it linger before she spoke again. “Crime scene photos from Mills’s murder.” Each word clipped, final. “On my desk. Now.”

She turned without waiting for acknowledgment and strode toward her office, her stride unhurried but absolute, each step a quiet assertion of command. The frosted glass swallowed her silhouette. Only the echo of her departure remained.

Sinclair exhaled slowly, tension draining from his posture by degrees once she was gone. His glance swept over Dawson, pity there, edged with relief that he had escaped notice today.

The bullpen settled into uneasy quiet as Blackburn closed her door behind her. The latch clicked, a small sound that folded the room into itself.

Sinclair’s attention lingered on Blackburn’s hands as she disappeared, the way her fingers curled around the handle. Strong, immaculate. Nails gleamed against glass, their careful polish an incongruity amid the grit of homicide work. He traced that contrast in his mind, the elegance poised above violence, and felt heat rise along his collarbone before he looked away.

Dawson remained motionless in his chair, newspaper crumpled in one fist. Sinclair blinked once, and his eyes drifted back toward where her hands had vanished from view.

Inside her office, Blackburn lowered herself into the leather chair with restraint. The seat exhaled beneath her as she leaned back, one hand hovering above the phone before settling on its cool surface.

She dialed Chief Hayes’s number.

One ring, sharp against quiet.

A second, drawn out.

Then Hayes answered with a gruff “Chief Hayes.”

“It’s Blackburn.” Her tone was even, stripped of everything except necessity, each word weighted by what she did not say.

“What is it?” Hayes replied, impatience threading through his words like static charge.

Blackburn straightened in her chair, one hand curled into a fist at her side until nails bit flesh, a small anchor against drifting memory.

“The Jenna Langston case,” she began carefully, the syllables deliberate. “Transferred from Traffic Services today.” She paused, a breath suspended between them, then continued, “I knew the victim before this investigation came my way.”

A silence stretched across the line.

Hayes’s voice returned, lower now. Wary, precise. “Explain.”

She pressed on despite how each word caught in her throat. “Jenna Langston,” she said. “I met her once.” A pause gathered before she finished. “We spent a night together.”

“You spent the night with our victim?” Hayes’s tone flattened, danger sharpened its edge. “You realize what you’re saying? You may have been the last person to see her alive.”

“Yes.” The word left Blackburn without adornment or apology, only fact and fatigue beneath it. Her eyes closed briefly. Memory flashed cold and bright behind them. A threat, parting words left unfinished.

“I offered to drive her home.”

Blackburn listened to the chief rise, the scrape of his chair a warning shot behind closed doors. His footsteps cut restless arcs across the office carpet, each pass a metronome for her nerves. She fixed her gaze on the sterile lines of code flickering across her screen, but Jenna’s face bled through in fractured glimpse. The tilt of a smile over shared wine, the promise of pleasure collapsing into midnight orders, their connection already dissolving into memory.

“Stop.” Hayes cut across her, voice abrupt as a slammed door. “This isn’t about appearances anymore.” Silence pulsed down the line. “You’re now a potential witness in an open homicide investigation, or worse.” Another pause, a stone dropped into water. “You need to recuse yourself immediately.”

Blackburn sat motionless in her chair, a single point of tension within the quiet, the phone still pressed to her ear as Hayes’s words settled over her like fallout from an unseen blast.

Her own office pressed in around her, air thick with Jenna’s threat, blinds cinched tight against the late sun’s glare. She perched at her desk, spine straight as a blade, phone pressed cold to her ear. One hand braced against polished wood, her knuckles blanched, a hairline fracture in an otherwise flawless mask.

“I know protocol, chief.” Her voice sliced through the hush, steady, honed to a scalpel’s edge. “But let’s not pretend paperwork is purpose. Procedure means signatures, not shuffling pawns. Don’t lose sight of what we’re actually risking.” She let the silence gather like storm clouds, each word left suspended, heavy with intent. “Jenna Langston didn’t die by chance. An autonomous car killed her. A vehicle that didn’t just strike but, if witnesses are right, reversed to finish what it started.” Her upper lip curled, almost a snarl. “Angry cars. That’s every conspiracy theorist’s nightmare clawing its way into daylight.”

The line stretched taut as a wire. She refused to yield.

“This isn’t only Jenna’s story anymore, it’s a fault line running under everything. This car industry, this department, this city.” She rose abruptly and crossed to the blinds, prying open a sliver between the slats. Afternoon light knifed through in thin gold blades across her desk and skin. “Stan Raider Group just signed with New Dresden PD. Autonomous patrol cars meant to prevent crime, not manufacture it. You think anyone out there,” she said as her gaze swept over rooftops and glass towers, “will bother parsing nuance? They’ll see one headline and collapse it all together. This incident, Raider’s tech rollout, they won’t separate us from the wreckage.” Her voice dropped lower, sharper still. “They’ll tear apart the department. The city. You.” A pause that vibrated with threat. “And the mayor.”

A faint cough on the other end. The chief gathering himself before stepping onto treacherous ground. “Blackburn, you’re getting ahead of yourself again. The investigation hasn’t even ruled out malfunction or—”

“It wasn’t a malfunction.” She cut him off cleanly. Turning from the window, she leaned over her desk, the surface reflecting back a fractured version of herself, and spoke low but unyieldingly. “I spoke directly with Dr. Petrović. The injuries weren’t random, they were vicious. No machine stumbles into that kind of precision.” She let that image hang between them, a wound that wouldn’t close, then added quietly, “This isn’t about mechanical failure anymore, it’s about whether anyone will ever trust policing technology again.”

Her grip eased fractionally as she recalibrated, her voice softer now but no less relentless. “Do you want someone else in charge? Someone who can’t see what we’re up against? Someone without my clearance rate?” The challenge landed like a gauntlet.

On the line, hesitation, a breath caught on barbed wire.

“You don’t think you’re too close?” Hayes finally asked, his question brittle at the edges.

A ghost of a smile played at Blackburn’s mouth, not warmth but something sharper, edged with memory and resolve. “I’m never too close,” she murmured. Then, after a beat, “But I met her.” Her eyes flickered down to an empty case file splayed open on her desk, a blank waiting for truth, before snapping back up again. “I’ll put flesh and blood on this case, chief, and I’ll work harder for it.” Her spine straightened, intensity surged back into her tone like current through copper wire. “No one will match my drive or focus. You know that as well as I do.”

A long exhale crackled across the line, a sound of fatigue or capitulation, as Hayes forced himself onward, slower now but no less wary. “The optics are bad… Press is already circling.”

Blackburn glanced at her bulletin board, a riot of notes and photographs pinned in feverish constellations, Brynn Cassidy caught mid-motion among them, prey frozen in amber beneath LED light. She answered briskly. “It’s Brynn Cassidy,” she said with cool dismissal before softening just enough to make impact land razor-sharp instead of blunt force. “She’ll chase her angle. I’ll handle everything else.”

Without giving him room to maneuver, she pressed on. “Give me seventy-two hours,” she said, finality ringing beneath composure, resolve flooding every syllable like floodwater breaching levees. “I’ll prove no one is better suited than I am to run point here. If anything threatens my objectivity, or risks derailing resolution, I’ll step aside myself and ensure the transition happens cleanly.”

Then music bled through, the insipid jingle of bureaucratic purgatory.

He put me on hold.

She could picture Hayes conferring behind closed doors. His problem was now metastasizing among assistant chiefs and anxious whispers.

At last, a click. His voice returned from exile.

“Seventy-two hours,” he said flatly. “No more.” Weariness frayed his words now, but steel threaded through them still. “Last thing I need is Major Crimes making this a circus, and you’re right about one thing, nobody else can figure out autonomous systems like you do.” A sigh dragged across miles of static and misgiving. “But if you screw this up, I’ll pull you so fast your badge won’t even hit your desk before you’re gone.”

And then only silence, the unresolved note hanging in air thick as dusk, as Blackburn stared past shuttered blinds into the gathering dark, pulse thrumming with everything left unsaid.

Blackburn’s hand hovered over the receiver a moment after the line clicked dead, fingertips pressed to cool plastic as if measuring its residual warmth. Her face remained an unyielding mask, the only concession a slow exhale, barely more than a shift in air. She set the phone down with a care that bordered on ritual, each motion precise.

Hayes had bitten, just as she had anticipated. He always did when her record was at stake. Another detective might have been yanked from the case at the first tremor of doubt, but Blackburn knew how to ration her own leash. Enough candor to pacify, enough control to hold the reins. No need for self-congratulation. The evidence lay in her continued presence, the case still hers to shape.

A name surfaced again, unwelcome and persistent. Jenna Langston. The syllables clung to her mind like bloodstains beneath fingernails, refusing to be scrubbed away by logic or time. Not just another file. This was pursuit, one she refused to lose.

A sound scratched at the threshold, a hesitant scuff of shoe against tile. Blackburn’s gaze flicked up, catching Dawson half-formed in the doorway, shoulders caved inward as though bracing for impact. He edged forward, eyes fixed on some safe middle distance, and placed a folder on her desk with hands that trembled at the edges.

“Photos,” he managed, voice thinned by nerves.

She slid the folder toward herself without breaking eye contact for long. Dawson lingered an instant too long before retreating, his exit quiet as a door closing on itself. She didn’t call him back.

With the file clamped beneath her palm, a tangible assertion of authority, she moved into the bullpen. LED light pooled across battered desks and dust-furred monitors, conversations stilled under her approach. Her gaze swept until it caught Reeves.

“Oak Street,” she said, each word clipped sharp as broken glass.

Reeves straightened abruptly, guilt flickering across his features before discipline took its place.

“We’re leaving now.” She shrugged into her coat, motions brisk but never hurried. “Let’s see if we can salvage what’s left.” Reeves scrambled after her without protest, obedience written in every hurried movement.

From across the room, a muffled snort, Sinclair’s attempt at levity leaking through his facade. Blackburn’s stare snapped his way, cold and unblinking. Silence settled like frost over his smirk and left him shrinking behind his monitor.

She gathered Langston’s file and Mill’s photos beneath one arm, her grip tight enough to crease cardboard, and strode toward the exit. Each step threaded purpose through stale air. Behind her, voices resumed only in whispers.

Her mind worked in tandem with her body. Details from blood-spattered photographs stitched themselves into memory while jaw muscles tensed unconsciously. Someone had wanted Jenna Langston dead, that much was no longer theory but fact, and whatever truth died with her wouldn’t surface easily. Shards of glass, muddied tire tracks, surface noise concealing something buried deeper.

But Blackburn was not built for surrender. She would dig until she struck either bedrock or bone. Nothing in this office or beyond would stop her hands from closing around what lay hidden underneath.

---