Page 2 of Dominion’s Collar

I check for a pulse. I call for help. I go through the motions because the motions are all that's left.

Her skin is still warm.

I don't know her name. If I heard it before tonight, I don't remember it. I don't know her and I didn't save her.

By morning, everyone is using the word accident.

NATALIE

My phone rings late on a Tuesday night in Savannah.

I'm at the kitchen table with a manuscript draft and a glass of wine that's gone warm. The ringtone is the generic one I never changed, the one that means the number isn't in my contacts. I almost let it go to voicemail but instead, I answer.

The voice on the other end identifies himself. He says words in a specific order, says them clearly, because this is his job and he's done this before. The clarity is the cruelest part because it means I can't mishear him.

My sister's name.

The phone slips out of my hand and hits the table. The screen stays lit. The voice keeps talking from the phone lying face-down on the wood, and I can hear every word but I've stopped being the kind of person who can answer.

The wine glass hasn't moved. The manuscript hasn't moved. The kitchen is exactly the same kitchen it was thirty seconds ago.

Everything else is different.

I pick up the phone. My hands are steady with no reason to be.

"Where is she?"

The voice gives me an address in New Orleans.

I drive.

CHAPTER ONE

Natalie

Cécile Doucet was supposed to meet me on Tuesday. The café she picked is three blocks from the apartment I rented when I moved here, a place with iron tables on the sidewalk and chicory coffee strong enough to strip paint. Public, well-lit, close to a streetcar stop. A cautious woman's choice, deliberate down to the exit routes. The message confirming the time and place is still on my phone, warm and specific and exactly the kind of detail a woman includes when she's finally decided to stop being afraid.

Tuesday came and went. The iron table stayed empty.

I check my phone again, standing in the kitchen of a rental that still has someone else's curtains on the windows, case files spread across the table and the New Orleans heat pressing against every window. Three days of silence. Three days of messages that go from just confirming our Tuesday, to hope everything's okay, call when you can, to the one I sent this morning that I'm trying not to think about because thinking about it means considering possibilities I'm not ready to consider.

Cécile's correspondence was the reason I packed up my apartment in Savannah, signed a lease I can barely afford, and relocated to a city that sweats the same way home does. Months of careful emails. Months of building trust with a woman who left the Elysium community abruptly before the club closed, who carried years of silence like a stone in her pocket, and who finally wrote: There are things about the last months at Elysium that no one put in the official report.

That sentence was the first crack in half a decade of nothing. Cécile was afraid, but she chose to talk anyway. I trusted her for that. I moved for that.

Now she's gone quiet, and I have three possible explanations. Cold feet, because people who've been silent about traumatic experiences get skittish when correspondence becomes a face-to-face meeting. External pressure, because someone found out she was talking and shut it down. Or coincidence, because life happens and phones die and plans change and sometimes the simplest answer is the right one.

I don't push any single interpretation. That's how investigators get tunnel vision. But the timing nags me: the silence started roughly when my Dominion membership was approved. Possible connection? Perhaps, but absolutely no proof.

I set the phone face-down on the table and get dressed for the other half of my plan.

The drive doesn't take long through streets I'm still learning. Streetcar tracks gleam under the streetlights, and the oaks along St. Charles form a canopy so dense it swallows the sky. I park on a side street two blocks from the address, feed the meter, and walk.

The door to Dominion is heavier than I expected, and the weight of it feels intentional. A threshold engineered to require commitment before the hinges give.

The woman ahead of me pushed through without breaking stride, heels and leather and the particular confidence of someone who's done this a hundred times. She didn't look back to see if I followed.

The hallway beyond is dim. Exposed brick, amber light, bass pulsing through the floor beneath me. The air smells like cedar and good bourbon and something faintly floral I can't place but want to. My heels click against smooth concrete, and the sound gets swallowed almost immediately.