Page 3 of Dominion’s Collar

I spent weeks preparing for this moment. Case files memorized, cover story pressure-tested, Margot Pascal's conditions accepted without negotiation. The woman steered this club through two separate crises. She knows I'm a writer, gave me limited access, and locked every door that matters behind conditions I signed without argument.

The restrictions are tight. But restrictions have gaps, and gaps are what I'm good at.

Five years of hunting my sister's killer has trained my brain to convert every obstacle into a variable. Claire would've walked in here and felt the room. I walk in and start mapping it.

The main floor opens up ahead of me, and what I find stops the mapping cold.

I expected wreckage. I've read the leaked camera footage reports. The media coverage of the murders. The forum threads where former members speculated about whether Dominion would survive another scandal. I came in expecting a diminished institution running on stubbornness and reputation.

The club is packed. Beautiful. Controlled. The ceiling stretches high above the main floor, the warehouse bones of the building integrated into something purposeful rather than salvaged. Leather furniture arranged in conversation clusters. A full bar along the far wall with backlit shelving and a bartender whose stance says she owns the mahogany she's standing behind. The music is low enough to talk over and present enough to feel, a bass line that settles into the ribs and stays.

Beyond the lounge, the scening areas are visible through strategic sight lines, and what's happening in them is nothing I could have prepared for by reading about it.

A woman is bound to a St. Andrew's cross, her wrists in padded leather cuffs, her head tipped back and her lips parted around a sound I can hear from here, low and raw and stripped of every pretense. The man behind her draws a flogger across her shoulder blades with a patience that turns the motion into a conversation.

Nearer the back wall, a Dom is winding rope around a woman's torso with unhurried focus, his fingers pressing against her skin to check the tension. Her breathing adjusts each time he pulls a line taut.

I've studied this world for five years. The terminology, the protocols, the philosophy. Watching it happen steps from where I'm standing is a different education entirely. The distance between reading about it and standing ten feet from it is a distance I wasn't prepared for.

They call it 'power exchange.' I've researched it thoroughly or so I thought. It happens openly, without self-consciousness, and with an intimacy that makes my breath catch in a way I should probably examine later, but most likely won't.

These people are not looking over their shoulders. They're behaving with the absolute confidence of a community that trusts its own walls. I understand, fast and viscerally, why the membership fee here is worth every dollar.

The security is the second thing I notice, because the security is designed to be the second thing you notice. Discreet checkpoints at the transitions between areas, positioned where you'd have to look for them to see them. Dungeon monitors stationed with a casualness that looks like members lounging until you follow their sight lines and realize they're covering every angle. A man built like a wall stands near the hallway and stairs leading to what I'm guessing are the private spaces. His posture says relaxed. His eyes say something else entirely.

I test it. I drift toward the hallway past the bar, angling my path like someone looking for the restroom.

The man near the entrance doesn't move. His gaze shifts to me, brief and assessing. A DM I hadn't spotted materializes at my elbow with a smile that doesn't climb above the professional and an offer to help me find what I'm looking for.

"The restroom is back in that direction," she says pleasantly, gesturing behind me. "Private rooms are upstairs, but they're by private member invitation only."

"Of course. Thank you."

She disappears back into the crowd so smoothly I lose track of her within seconds. Politely, instantly shut down. Years of investigative work, two published books, and I just got redirected to the restroom by a woman in a corset, leather boy shorts and spike heels.

The system works. Whoever designed it has my professional respect and my personal frustration.

The bar feels like the right place to start. People talk to bartenders in ways they don't talk to anyone else, and bartenders know how to keep what they hear.

The bartender sees me coming before I've chosen a stool. Her hands keep moving, building a drink with the muscular economy of someone who learned this job with her body rather than a manual. Her gaze lands on me, sizes me up, and stores whatever she's concluded behind an expression that manages friendly without tipping into careless.

"What are you drinking?" she asks, and the question is half invitation, half assessment.

"Negroni." The order is calculated. A drink with enough specificity to show I know what I'm ordering and enough personality to start a conversation.

She doesn't blink. The gin hits the mixing glass, followed by Campari and sweet vermouth in proportions that tell me she's made thousands of these. The drink arrives on a napkin in front of me, garnished with an orange peel cut so clean it curls in on itself like calligraphy.

"First time?" she says, and her tone makes clear she already knows the answer.

"That obvious?"

"You keep looking at the ceiling." Her mouth tilts. "Regulars don't look up."

"It's a good ceiling."

"It's not that good." She extends her hand across the bar. "Renata."

"Natalie." The handshake is firm and brief, and Renata has calluses that tell a different story than the bottles behind her. Her forearms are lean and defined. When she stretches for a top-shelf bottle to refill another member's glass, the fitted black fabric of her top rides up and exposes a thin scar on her wrist that she doesn't seem interested in hiding.