Page 99 of Dominion’s Collar

"That was the worst night of my life at Elysium," he says. "A young woman dead in circumstances none of us fully understood. It shattered the community."

"The official conclusion was accidental death during a scene," I say. "Restriction-related."

"Yes." He nods. "Claire went to Étienne Comeaux's room for a scheduled session. The equipment involved was consistent with their established dynamic." He pauses. "Étienne was still in the Doms' changing room when it happened. He left with another Dom. They walked upstairs together. When Étienne opened the door to his own room, Claire was already dead. The other man was standing right behind him."

"So Étienne never touched her."

"No. His alibi was absolute. Two people saw him enter the room for the first time and find her."

"Then what happened?"

"Panic," Gaudet says. "Étienne was devastated. The safety committee arrived within minutes. I was one of the first. We secured the room and tried to preserve the scene while protecting everyone's privacy." He spreads his hands. "The equipment was Étienne's. The room was Étienne's. The booking was in his name. Everything pointed to a scene that went wrong, despite the fact that Étienne hadn't been there to conduct it."

"And the police?"

"We called them immediately. They examined the room, spoke to Étienne, spoke to the committee." He pauses. "They agreed with our assessment. Accidental death during a consensual activity. No fault attributed to anyone. The case was closed within weeks."

"And the committee's own review?"

"I drafted the incident review myself," he says. "The evidence was consistent with a restriction scene that exceeded safe parameters. Self-inflicted, or a session that began before the scheduled Dom arrived."

I hear it now. The careful arrangement. Facts assembled into a narrative by the one man who knew the real sequence because he'd created it. Gaudet didn't lie to the committee. He selected which truths to emphasize and let the room's staging do the rest.

"Can you tell me more about the staging? What the room looked like?"

"I saw what everyone saw. Claire in Étienne's restraints, in Étienne's room, after what appeared to be a restriction scene that went wrong."

This is where I push.

I flip to a new page in my notebook. The gesture is casual. The question isn't.

Luc spent days reconstructing the staging from the incident report before I walked in here. The report described the final state of the room. Luc reverse-engineered the sequence from the physical evidence, the anchor points, the equipment specifications. He gave me the real version. I built the wrong one.

"My research suggests the restraints were applied in a specific sequence," I say. "Wrists first, then the secondary anchor points, with the restriction element added last. A bottom-up configuration. Is that consistent with what you saw?"

The sequence I just described is wrong. Luc's reconstruction shows a top-down configuration. The restriction element applied first, anchored to the overhead point, secondary restraints added afterward to create the appearance of a progressive scene.

The difference matters. A bottom-up configuration is standard for the type of scene Claire and Étienne practiced. A top-down configuration is unusual and suggests someone who was staging an outcome rather than conducting a scene. Only two categories of people would know the actual sequence: investigators who read the full technical analysis, and whoever put Claire in those restraints.

Gaudet tilts his head. The gesture is small. A fraction of a degree. His eyes stay warm. His posture stays open. But the tilt is the first time I've seen him react before speaking.

He's processing my question against what he knows, and what he knows is more than what the report contains.

"I believe so," he says. "Though my memory of the specifics is imperfect after so many years."

He's lying. I can feel it the way you feel a current shift in water. The warmth is still there, but something underneath it just recalibrated.

In my ear, Luc's breathing changes. Sebastien says something I can't make out, muffled, directed at Luc rather than me. His voice, even clipped and distant through the earpiece, lands low in my belly. Involuntary. Infuriating.

I push further. This is the moment Sebastien's observations told me to push. Gaudet's ego is the crack. His belief in his own precision is the thing he can't tolerate having questioned.

I need to describe his work as sloppy, and I need to do it while looking like I'm just a researcher who got the details wrong.

"The impression from the records is that the staging was somewhat haphazard," I say. "Opportunistic. As if whoever was in the room didn't fully understand the equipment and improvised with what was available."

There it is.

The warmth doesn't vanish. It thins. Like a cloud passing across the sun, the light shifts and what's behind it is briefly visible. His jaw tightens by a millimeter. His fingers, folded on the table, press together with slightly more force.