Page 60 of Dominion’s Collar

Luc has a life outside this room. I don't. The booth and the scotch and the careful remove from anything that required more than observation. That was the choice I made after the club closed.

Natalie disrupted it. The collar disrupted it.

Luc finishes his bourbon and stands. "I'll call you when Remy has the property records. Don't do anything stupid before then."

"Define stupid."

"Confronting your submissive. Confronting Gaudet. Making any decision based on what you're feeling instead of what you can prove."

He stops at the study door. "And for the record? You should've called me five years ago."

I nod. Nothing to add.

"Good. Hold that⁠—"

"Luc."

He stops. Turns. My voice sounded different enough that he's reading my face now, and whatever he finds there puts his hand back on the doorframe.

I'm staring at the legal pad.

A woman whose questions overlap with my failure to ask the right ones. A woman who writes true crime for a living.

The phrase is snagging on something. A hook buried five years deep.

The woman who died at the Elysium bar. Casual conversation with another member about her family. She'd said it the way people say things they've said a hundred times before:

'My sister writes about murderers for a living. She thinks everyone has something to hide.'

The tone was fond, exasperated. The cadence of someone complaining about a sister she loved enough to complain about forever.

I'd smiled. Involuntary. I remember the smile because involuntary smiles are rare enough that I track them.

She died weeks later.

The woman whose name I never retained. The one who asked me whether trust should feel like what she was carrying.

Her sister writes about murderers.

"Sebastien." Luc hasn't moved from the doorframe. "What just happened?"

I don't answer. The connection is assembling with a speed that makes my vision narrow.

Natalie Chastain is digging into the same ground I've been circling for years. Asking questions about incidents that cluster around the period a woman died. A woman whose sister writes about murderers for a living.

The physical resemblance I've been filing without understanding. The jaw. The head tilt. I noticed it weeks ago and set it aside because the observation had no frame.

I stand up. The chair scrapes across the heart-pine floor hard enough to leave a mark. I walk to the window because the desk is too small for what's hitting me.

"Sebastien." Luc's voice has shifted. Alert now. "Talk to me."

"She's not writing a book." My reflection stares back from the dark glass. "She's investigating her sister's death."

The silence between us has weight.

"The woman who died," Luc says. He gets there fast. He was always fast. "Natalie is her sister."

"Yes."