Page 76 of Dominion’s Collar

I pull the sheet over us. Her breathing lengthens into a rhythm and slows. Deepens.

She's falling asleep against the man who knows the worst secret of her life.

I don't move.

The fire equipment downstairs needs to be cleaned and stored. I'll do it later.

She trusts me. She also lied to me for weeks before I caught it. Neither of us has been fully honest, but the shibari cracked her performance. The flogging made the surrender public. The fire made the trust absolute. Whatever she walked in here to do, what's between us has outgrown her cover story.

Which means the cover has to come down. Hers and mine.

She breathes against me. Slow. Steady. The breathing of someone who is safe.

She's not safe. Not from what I know, and not from what Gaudet might be. The investigation Luc is running through Rapier won't stay invisible forever, and whatever she's been tracking on her own is converging on the same territory.

Tomorrow. I'll find the right moment. When she's standing, fully dressed, on equal footing.

She sleeps against me with the trust of a woman who has decided I'll protect her from whatever comes next.

She's right. I will.

Tomorrow I tell her what I know. And she'll tell me all of what she's been carrying since she walked through Dominion's doors.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Natalie

The skin on my ribs is still tender when I open my laptop the next morning. Not sore. Sensitized. The ghost of fire tracing paths that my fingertips keep finding when I'm not paying attention. I press two fingers against the spot where his hand held me down, and the pressure sends a line of warmth straight to my hips.

I close the laptop, open it again, force myself to focus.

Stephanie Dufrane agreed to meet me yesterday. Former Elysium member, peripheral to the social circle that included Claire and Cécile. She'd been cautious in our email exchange, vetting my credentials, confirming the book premise, asking who else I'd spoken to. By the time she said yes, I'd spent three weeks earning it.

This morning, Stephanie says no.

The email is brief. She appreciates my interest. She's reconsidered. She doesn't think she has anything useful to add. She wishes me luck with the project.

The language is polite and empty, the verbal equivalent of a door closing quietly in a well-maintained house. No explanations offered. No opening left for follow-up.

Cold feet sounds like hesitation. Stephanie's refusal sounds like a decision made after a conversation with someone who wasn't me.

I read the email again. The phrasing is careful, almost coached. I don't think I have anything useful to add is a telling construction. It positions the problem as relevance, not willingness. Someone must have told Stephanie that knowing something that mattered was dangerous. Better she didn't know anything at all or continue to hold her silence.

My digital archive is open in the next tab. Earlier this week I bookmarked a set of Elysium-related records from an online community forum that predated the club's closure. Event calendars, discussion threads mentioning dates and attendees, group photos with timestamps. Ambient digital detritus that platforms forget to scrub when the humans who created it move on.

The links are dead.

Every single one. The forum threads still exist, but the attachments are gone. The image hosting service returns 404 errors. The screenshots that I downloaded and cross-referenced against my case files have been removed at the source.

I check my local copies. Safe on my hard drive, intact. But the originals are gone, which means anyone else who tries to verify what I found will hit nothing.

Someone is cleaning the record.

I sit with that for a full minute, my fingers resting on the keyboard without typing. The fire play left me raw in places that have nothing to do with my skin, and the analytical distance I rely on keeps slipping. Sebastien's hands replacing the flame. The way I stopped trying to manage what my body was doing and let him have it. The look on his face when I said I trust you, which I now realize carried a weight he heard and I didn't intend.

I switch to my email. A message from an address I don't recognize, sent in the middle of the night.

You should look at Tomas Hébert's financial records from the year Elysium closed.