Page 27 of Dominion’s Collar

Her questions pattern. Tourists wander. Investigators circle. Natalie circles.

And she circles the people who were at Elysium. Not obviously. Not by name. But the people she gravitates toward, the conversations she initiates. It all orbits territory my fragments have occupied for years.

That could mean anything. Writers research. True crime writers research obsessively and without apology.

Or she could be looking for something particular that happened there.

I reach for the glass. Hold it without lifting. Let go. In here the only sound is my own breathing and the occasional creak of a house older than anyone currently living on this block.

The terms are sound. I wrote them myself. Consideration. Thirty days. Exclusive. Safeword protocol: traffic light system plus the word 'Savannah'.

Savannah. Her hometown, according to Margot's membership records. She offered it without hesitation and without explaining why home is the word she needs when everything else fails.

But I noticed how her body changed when she said it. The crack in the control, the fracture that lasted less than a second before she rebuilt. That word costs her something.

Five years ago, I watched a community I helped build collapse. A submissive I barely knew spoke to me shortly before she died. I've forgotten her name, if I ever knew it.

There were other things. A different submissive left without explanation. An incident was smoothed over as a negotiation failure. These are fragments. They don't resolve into anything I can prove. But the shape they almost make is reason enough to keep looking.

That failure lives in me like a low-grade fever. Not debilitating. Constant. The kind of thing you stop noticing until someone new walks in with questions that make the temperature rise.

I pick up the glass again. This time I drink.

The phone on my desk lights up. A text from the contact I used for verification. I read the report. Exactly what I asked for: verification, not excavation. I asked whether Natalie Chastain is who she claims to be and whether anything in her background poses a risk to Dominion. I didn't ask someone to dismantle her life.

She checks out. Published author. Legitimate research interests. Finances that make sense. References confirmed.

Nothing in the report suggests she's dangerous to Dominion. Nothing in the report explains what I read in her either. A clean report doesn't tell me why she's really here. It tells me she's not a threat. Those aren't the same thing.

None of the other submissives at Dominion interest me. Natalie interests me because past the research, past whatever she's running, there's a woman who doesn't know what she is yet.

I told her that during the negotiation and saw it land. The composure slipped for half a second before she pulled it back into place. I want to see it again.

I offered her a collar before the verification came back. Worse, I offered it knowing I don't believe the whole story she's given Dominion.

I'm not recklessly trusting her. I'm knowingly accepting uncertainty because I want her.

That's worse.

The glass is empty when I set it down. That hasn't happened in this study in longer than I can remember. The held glass is a ritual. Finishing it means the ritual failed.

I want to take Natalie apart. To find the seam between the performance and the person, put my hands on it, and open it. The first time I put my rope on her, I'll learn things that weeks of conversation haven't shown me.

The contract goes into my jacket. I drive to Dominion.

New Orleans slides past in its gold-and-shadow palette. Streetlights through live oaks. The smell of the river carrying through the open window. I've driven this route for years. Tonight the familiar streets feel charged with a decision I've already made and haven't fully examined. Heart-pine and twelve-foot ceilings behind me. Whatever Natalie is, ahead.

The Lower Garden District gives way to the area where Dominion sits, quiet behind an unremarkable facade. You'd walk past it without knowing what the doors held. That's by design. Everything about Margot's operation is by design.

Dominion's entrance is quiet tonight. Cole is at the staircase, phone in hand, looking like a man with nothing more pressing than checking the weather. I've been around him long enough to know that look is a choice. Every relaxed gesture is a calculated one.

"Evening, Obsidian." I nod. The private room is already set. Amber warmth. Wood paneling. Two chairs.

Luc intercepts me at the hallway.

His gaze drops to the box under my arm. Then back to my face. The expression that forms is the precise intersection of delight and vindication.

"No," I say.