Page 64 of Dominion’s Collar

"So the night she died, she would've gone to Étienne's room as a matter of routine."

"She wouldn't have questioned the booking. It was their arrangement. She'd done it dozens of times."

I file this. The booking, the room, the routine. A person who knew which room Étienne had reserved could've used that information. The question forming at the edges is who would've had that access, and why no one thought to ask.

"What happened to Cécile after Claire died?" I ask.

Vivienne's composure fractures along a line I can see. "She disappeared. From Elysium first, then from everything. She left the community entirely. I tried to reach her. Once. She didn't respond, and I didn't try again."

The words hit close. I spent months reaching for the same woman and got the same result.

The self-recrimination in her voice is thin and sharp. "I told myself she was grieving. That she'd lost a friend and couldn't face the world. I told myself a lot of things."

"You couldn't have known."

"I could've tried harder."

The café fan wobbles overhead. Vivienne stares at her untouched coffee as if it owes her something.

"I found Cécile," I say. "Through Claire's emails. Months ago, before I came to Dominion."

It took months of slow, patient work. Cultivation, I'd called it. Research methodology. The professional language I've been wrapping around something that was never professional.

"She agreed to talk. Set a time and a place. Then she vanished. Phone disconnected, email bouncing, every trace of her online presence scrubbed clean as if she had been erased."

Vivienne's face goes white. "She went dark after Claire died too," she says quietly. "Left the community. Stopped answering. Her social media went quiet, but it was still there. Like she was hiding, not erased."

The distinction lands. When I found Cécile, her accounts existed. Her phone worked. She was reachable, just reluctant. The total erasure—phone disconnected, email bouncing, profiles scrubbed—happened after she agreed to talk to me.

Two disappearances. The first looked like grief. The second looked like someone made sure she couldn't be found.

The realization doesn't arrive all at once. It assembles piece by piece across the wrought-iron table, between the untouched drinks and the wobbling fan and Vivienne's white knuckles.

I didn't find Cécile independently. I found her name in Claire's emails, mentioned in messages Claire sent to Vivienne and others. Claire's notes on a frightened woman she was trying to protect at Elysium. I tracked the name until I found a phone number, an email address, a person who had disappeared so completely it no longer looked accidental.

Claire was doing what I'm doing. Asking the same questions. Following the same threads. Finding the same name at the edges. She was further along than I'd thought, building exactly the case I've spent years constructing from the outside.

I didn't stumble onto Claire's investigation. I followed it.

"She was so close," I say. My voice isn't steady, and I don't try to make it steady. "Claire was building toward a case."

"She was brave," Vivienne says. "And I think she was right."

And then she was murdered.

I press my palms flat on the table. The iron is warm from the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows.

A street musician somewhere outside is playing something jazzy and slightly off-key, and the normalcy of it is obscene.

"One more thing," I say. "You told me Claire was happy at Elysium. That she'd found something real."

"She had—both happy and real." Vivienne's expression doesn't waver. "She loved the lifestyle. She loved what it gave her. And she was trying to protect someone inside it. Those aren't contradictions."

They aren't. Claire died inside the place that made her feel most alive, protecting a woman no one else seemed to notice needed protecting.

And her little sister walked into another version of that place and started over. I didn't know I was following a map Claire had already drawn.

I reach for my bag. "I need to talk to a few more people."