Page 5 of Dominion’s Collar

While I watch, a Dom stops at the booth and says something I can't hear from this distance. Obsidian responds without looking up from his drink. Three words, maybe four. The Dom laughs, the short involuntary kind that escapes before you can stop it and walks away shaking his head.

Then Renata passes the booth on her way to the service station. She says something over her shoulder. He answers. She fires back a gesture that is anatomically specific and deeply unprofessional, never slowing down.

This isn't a man brooding in a dark corner. People know him. They come to him. He chose the shadows, and the shadows did not exile him.

The glass catches the low light and holds it. It looks like he's settled into this booth so many times the leather probably knows his shape, and it gives him sight lines I'd need three different seats to replicate.

I take another sip and let the bitter complexity of the Campari sit on my tongue.

Claire would have loved it here.

The thought arrives without permission, sharp and unwelcome. I press it back down into the place where I keep the things that don't serve the investigation. Claire loved beautiful, dangerous spaces. She loved the specific thrill of being known in a way that daylight didn't allow. This room would have given her all of that. Elysium probably looked like this once, before it became the place where my sister died.

Elysium is dead. Some of its people are drinking at this bar, and somewhere among them is the piece I've been missing for five years.

My gaze pulls back to the corner booth, and this time the man in the shadows is already looking at me. The scan is gone. The methodical sweep has stopped, and what's replaced it is a focused, held gaze that pins me to my stool. He's not watching me the way he watches everyone else. He's watching me the way a man looks at something he's already decided to take apart.

The heat hits low, a pull behind my navel that tightens and spreads before I can do anything useful with it. My spine straightens without my permission, chin lifting, the involuntary response of a body that recognizes authority before the brain has finished deciding whether to challenge it.

Strong jaw, heavy brow, a face that's more compelling than pretty, the kind of handsome that comes from living hard and coming out intact. His focus narrows until I can feel it against the back of my neck, my collarbones, and the hollow of my throat.

I hold it for a beat longer than I should, because looking away from this man feels like conceding something I haven't agreed to give. I don't concede.

Then I lose the argument. My gaze drops to the Negroni and stays there. The submission in the gesture is small and involuntary, and it lands with a specificity that makes my teeth clench.

I look away first. I once held eye contact with a convicted murderer through an entire prison interview. This man in a booth just beat that record, and my pulse has relocated to the base of my throat.

I drain my glass, leave a tip that says I'll be back, and walk toward the exit with my spine straight and my skin still humming from the weight of his attention. Outside, the New Orleans air hits like a wall of wet heat after the controlled cool of the club.

My left hand finds my throat. Bare skin. Bare collarbone. Claire's pendant used to rest here. I can still feel the phantom weight of it, two years after I put it in the box.

I start walking. The phone in my clutch is silent. Cécile hasn't called. The man in the corner booth is still watching the door I walked through, or he isn't, and either answer tells me something I'll need to know.

I came to New Orleans for two things. One of them just proved more formidable than my research predicted. The other hasn't answered her phone in three days.

CHAPTER TWO

Sebastien

She came back.

The new member with the careful posture and the rehearsed smile is sitting at the bar for the second time.

I've been watching her for the better part of an hour instead of watching everything else. That's a problem. Problems in this room tend to compound.

Renata sent my scotch without asking when I sat down. Single malt, the bottle she keeps on the top shelf behind the Lagavulin because I told her once that the Lagavulin was overrated and she's never forgiven me.

The glass has been in my hand long enough to warm. I haven't tasted it.

The booth gives me the room. I chose it years ago for the sight lines, and at some point everyone else decided it was mine.

Renata doesn't seat anyone here when I'm expected. Members who want to talk stop at the edge and wait until I look up. The ones who've been here long enough know that looking up isn't guaranteed.

Tonight the room is doing what the room does. A newer Dom near the lounge is running his pre-scene negotiation loud enough for three tables to hear. He's performing the negotiation rather than conducting it. The woman across from him looks patient in the specific way that means she's already decided to say no.

A submissive near the hallway keeps checking her phone between sips, waiting for someone who hasn't arrived and pretending the waiting isn't the point. Two regulars at the lounge tables are sharing a bottle of wine and arguing about something that has them both leaning forward, voices low, hands moving. At the bar, a member I've seen every week for two years is nursing the same glass he started with. He comes here for the belonging, not the whiskey.

I see all of them. I have opinions about all of them. None of them are the problem.