Page 101 of Dominion’s Collar

I don't move.

"Natalie." His voice has changed. The warmth is gone, and what replaces it isn't rage or cruelty. It's competence. The same focused, methodical precision that made him beloved in a community built on trust. He turns that precision toward control with surgical focus. "Your phone. Now."

I hand it over. He drops it. His heel comes down once, deliberate. The screen spiders and goes dark.

Then his hands find the transmitter. He knows where to look. Wires go in predictable places, and someone who has spent his life reading bodies knows where to search. He peels it free and crushes it between his fingers. The components snap with a sound like small bones breaking.

"There," he says. "Now it's just us."

Except it isn't. And his believing it is might be the first genuinely stupid thing Gaudet has done in years.

The second recorder is still running, nestled in a place Ezra chose specifically because a pat-down wouldn't find it. And everything the first transmitter captured before Gaudet crushed it was broadcasting live to the van. Rapier already has it. Gaudet searched for what he expected. He found what he expected. And his confidence in having neutralized the evidence is the thing that will destroy him.

I know what he's doing. I've studied his methodology for years. Isolate the target. Control the environment. Remove witnesses. Construct a plausible alternative explanation.

With Claire, the equipment provided the cover. With me, the building itself provides it. A fall in an old service corridor. An accident in a space no one knew existed. A researcher who wandered into an unsafe area of a renovated property.

Claire would appreciate the irony. Her sister, the true-crime author, becoming a chapter in someone else's book.

I know his pattern, and the knowing is what keeps me standing instead of screaming.

"Claire figured you out," I say. My voice doesn't shake. I don't know how. "She saw what you did to Cécile, and she started asking the right questions."

"Claire was a child playing detective," Gaudet says. He's moving me deeper into the corridor, one slow step at a time. I let him. Every step is another second. Every second is time for the people in the van to solve a problem they didn't know existed. "She had no idea what she'd stumbled into. She believed the community would protect her if she raised concerns through proper channels."

"And you sat on the committee that handled those channels."

"I built those channels." The correction is automatic. Reflexive. The ego I'm counting on, surfacing through a crack in his control. "The mediation process was my design. The reporting structure, the incident reviews, the follow-up protocols. All of it. Elysium's safety infrastructure was my work."

"And you used your own system to identify vulnerable members and isolate them from the community's protection."

His jaw flexes. "Cécile was troubled. She needed guidance."

"Cécile needed someone who wasn't using the support structure to groom her."

Another step deeper into the corridor. Another second. I've lost count of how long we've been down here. The conversation has been running long enough that the adrenaline has shifted from spike to sustained burn, and my legs are starting to feel it.

Above us, somewhere beyond the concrete and the old brick, a team of very competent people is trying to find the door that doesn't appear on any blueprint. Cole walked this building. He measured rooms. If the interior dimensions don't match the exterior footprint, he'll find the gap. They'll find it. I believe this like I believe in gravity. Functionally and without negotiation.

"You didn't improvise with Claire," I say. "You don't improvise. You plan. You used Étienne's booking to know when his room would be empty. You delayed him. You brought her a drink because you were the safe man, the helpful man. She drank it because why wouldn't she?"

Gaudet stops walking. In the yellow emergency light, his face is stripped of everything that made him safe. What's left is the thing Claire saw in the last minutes of her life.

"You have no evidence," he says.

"I'm not the only person who has evidence." I hold his gaze. "Vivienne talked. Cécile talked. The booking records are already with people who know what they mean. And you're standing in a corridor with me right now, repeating the pattern you used on my sister. Isolation. Control. Tell me how that plays when the rest of it comes out."

"Your equipment is destroyed."

"You think breaking a transmitter erases what they already heard? Already recorded?" I keep my voice level. "The case isn't in this corridor, Prosper. It's already with people you can't reach."

His expression doesn't change, but his stillness does. It hardens. The difference between a predator who is hunting and a predator who realizes the ground has shifted.

"I don't think you're lying," he says slowly. "But it doesn't matter. In this corridor, right now, the only thing that matters is which one of us walks back through that panel."

A sound. Above us. Muffled but specific: impact against a surface. Someone testing the wall on the other side.

Gaudet hears it. His eyes cut toward the panel.