Page 16 of Dominion’s Collar

He laughs and keeps walking.

Natalie's gaze tracks his movement. She skips the man entirely and watches the stairs. Her eyes follow the stairway up, measuring the direction, lingering on the door at the top where someone with easy authority just disappeared.

Most people would've watched the man. She watched where he went.

"You changed your schedule," I say.

"You noticed." Her voice is steady. The faint edge beneath the calm is the interesting part.

"Thursdays are different. The regulars scene on Thursdays. The tourists come on the weekends."

"Which category are you in?"

"I don't usually scene on weekends, unless Margot asks me to do a demonstration or my partner's schedule requires it." I lift the scotch. Don't drink. "But I'm here every night the doors are open."

That lands. She takes a beat before she responds, and the quality of the pause is wrong for someone composing an answer. She's working through what the information means. The delay is the tell her cover never anticipated.

"Every night." She tilts her head. "That's a lot of scotch you're not drinking."

Sharp enough to surprise me. Not many people notice the glass stays full. Renata does. Margot probably does. This woman has been here a handful of times. She's reading my ritual with the precision of someone who reads people for a living. I let the surprise register as a pause rather than a response.

"What brought you here tonight?" I ask.

"Research. Same as before."

"Your research changed its schedule."

She turns the Negroni on its napkin. "I wanted to see a different crowd. The Wednesday people don't need an audience." She glances toward the scening area. "I'm curious about who does."

"And the people who come every night?"

"I'm curious about them too." She meets my eyes. No delay this time. "What keeps you coming every night the doors are open? That doesn't read as community to me. It's something else entirely."

The question is aimed directly at me. Neither of us pretends otherwise.

"Habit," I tell her.

"Habit doesn't sit in a corner booth watching a room like it owes him something."

That's twice she's cut through the surface on the first attempt. Most people look at the booth and see a recluse. She looks at it and sees a man doing a job he assigned himself.

The accuracy irritates me. The irritation isn't the whole story, and I know it.

"You read people," I say.

"It's what I do for a living."

"So do I." I let that sit.

The corner of my mouth moves. The involuntary acknowledgment of a point scored, offered before I can pull it back.

Renata moves away with the discretion of a bartender who knows when a conversation has stopped needing her. My hand closes around the tumbler without raising it.

"Your book," I say, changing the angle. "What drew you to the lifestyle specifically?"

"The gap between how the outside world talks about power exchange and how the people inside it actually live it." The answer comes polished and rehearsed, smoothed until nothing catches. "The public narrative is damage and dysfunction. I wanted to see what it looks like when the structure works."

"And does it?"