Page 62 of Dominion’s Collar

"That's not your⁠—"

"It is." My hand closes around the scotch glass. Doesn't lift it. "And now the other sister is wearing my collar and I didn't see it."

Luc watches me for a long moment. Then his phone is in his hand, thumbs moving.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Bumping the priority on the Elysium records." He doesn't look up. "You need information, not feelings. I'll get you the information. You sort out the rest."

He stands. This time he doesn't stop at the door.

"Luc."

"Don't tell her tonight. You're not thinking straight enough to have that conversation." He turns. "And Sebastien? The sister who died. You had one conversation with her. That doesn't make you responsible for what happened to her. But what you do with what you know now—that's yours."

He walks out. The front door opens and closes.

I stand at the desk. The pad. Gaudet's name circled twice. The fragments that refused to assemble for years now forming a picture with a clarity that has no mercy in it.

A name surfaces. Claire.

I don't know whether I learned it at the time or absorbed it from the aftermath. The incident reports. The hushed conversations.

But the name is there. Claire Bergeron. The name she used at the club, the name on the death report.

Claire Bergeron asked me for help. I gave her a textbook answer. She died.

Her sister walked into Dominion. Sat at the bar. Wore my collar. Knelt at my feet. Surrendered to my rope and my flogger and my hands. And I didn't know.

Gaudet sits inside my fragments. Whatever Natalie is investigating runs through the same territory.

And she's managing a threat outside Dominion she hasn't disclosed, because disclosing it would mean telling me why she's here.

I pick up the phone. Put it down.

The desk is waiting. The legal pad. The pen.

For five years she was the submissive who died. The woman whose name I told myself I'd forgotten. The question I answered wrong.

I write: Claire Bergeron.

The ink is steady. The hand holding the pen is not.

Beneath it: Natalie Chastain.

Two names on a page. Sisters. One dead. One wearing my collar.

I set the pen down. Turn off the lamp. The streetcar passes on St. Charles. The sound is the same as every other night.

The silence underneath it isn't.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Natalie

Vivienne has been carrying a secret for five years, and today she plans to tell it... to me. She's picked the location herself: a café on Magazine Street with wrought-iron tables crammed too close together and a ceiling fan that wobbles on every rotation. The kind of place where the ambient noise swallows conversation a few feet from its source.

She's already seated when I arrive. A café au lait in front of her, untouched, the foam separating. She's in a dark blouse, hair pulled back, the same understated composure she wears at Dominion. Except her hands are folded too tightly. The knuckles are white.