Page 43 of Dominion’s Collar

Prosper finds me at the bar before the stool beside me has cooled.

He approaches the bar with the same genuine warmth that defines every interaction. His smile reaches his eyes. It always does.

"I have someone for you to meet," he says. "The woman I mentioned. Vivienne Thibault."

My pulse kicks behind the collar. Weeks of searching. Months before that. Prosper is handing her to me at the bar with the ease of a man who shapes situations by choosing who gets access to whom.

I file the observation without assigning it a value. Not yet.

Vivienne is in one of the lounge chairs near the far wall. A glass of wine held with the careful composure of a woman who's been deciding whether to be here all evening. She's small, fine-boned, dark hair pulled back. Her dress code is understated—a fitted black top that covers more than the room requires, elegant rather than exhibitionistic.

Her eyes carry the particular exhaustion of someone who's been holding something heavy for a long time.

I recognize the exhaustion. I see it in my own mirror on the mornings when the case files have been open too late and Claire's photograph has been watching too long.

Prosper makes the introduction with his usual grace. "Natalie is writing about the evolution of the community. Vivienne was part of the transition from Elysium." He touches neither of us, respects the collar without calling attention to it, and excuses himself with the ease that makes him impossible to distrust.

Vivienne watches him go.

Then she looks at me, and the recognition is immediate. Raw. Her eyes travel from my face to the collar to my face again, and whatever she finds there makes her set the wine glass down.

"You look like her," she says. "Claire."

Every alarm in my body fires at once. Five years of careful separation between Natalie-the-author and Claire-the-case, and a woman I've never spoken to just collapsed the wall by looking at my face.

"You're mistaken," I say. The deflection is automatic, the same tone I'd use on a source who got too close to a detail I wasn't ready to confirm. "I didn't know anyone named Claire."

Vivienne doesn't blink. "This isn't a resemblance. You have her jaw. You have the way she held her shoulders when she was deciding whether to trust someone." She pauses. "You're deciding right now."

The cover story has about three seconds of life left. I can feel it dying.

"She was my sister."

Vivienne closes her eyes. The moisture is controlled but present. "I know. She talked about you."

The past tense cuts in a place I thought had scarred over.

We circle each other for the first several minutes. Two women with adjacent grief testing whether the other can hold the weight of what they're carrying. I don't push. Sources who've held silence for years need space to dismantle it. The dismantling responds to patience, not pressure.

She asks about my research. I give her the cover version: community evolution, the transition from underground to structured spaces, how the culture adapted after Elysium closed. She listens like someone who knows the official story and is waiting to see if I do too.

"That's the public-faced version," she says. "What's the real one?"

"The real one is that my sister died at Elysium, and nobody's given me a satisfying answer about how."

The honesty is a calculated risk. But Vivienne already sees through the cover. Pretending otherwise would cost me the one source who might actually tell me what I need to know.

She doesn't flinch. She nods, slowly, as if the confirmation is something she's been expecting.

Her eyes drop to the collar. The ruby. Back to my face.

"Does he know?" she asks. "Sebastien."

The question lands like a slap delivered with precision. "No."

"He doesn't know Claire was your sister."

"No."