Page 35 of Dominion’s Collar

It still doesn't tell me why his name appears in Claire's emails.

Two data points. The man who just offered me a research contact with the kindness of a friend. The name my sister typed into an email in the weeks before she died.

The data points don't reconcile. I don't force them. Forcing evidence into a shape is how you miss the shape the evidence is actually making.

The rest of the evening yields useful conversations and details I didn't have before. The collar keeps opening doors.

At midnight, Sebastien is waiting at the hallway when I say goodnight to Renata. The collar comes off in the corridor, his thumb on the lock, the same motion reversed. The click of the mechanism releasing is quieter than the click that locked it. He lifts the leather away from my throat, and the air hits the bare skin like a correction.

He folds the collar into his jacket. The ruby disappears into dark fabric. The terms are clear: the collar is his, and when I leave these walls, it stays with him.

The dresser unlaces me. Jeans, fitted jacket, boots. The transformation in reverse, from declaration to disguise. I'm almost grateful for the structured fabric, the coverage, the feeling of being contained by my own choices rather than his.

He walks me to the car without touching me. The restraint isn't courtesy. It's control, visible in the way he keeps his hands at his sides—the deliberateness of a man choosing not to reach for something he's already decided is his.

At my car, he opens the door and leans down to the window after I'm behind the wheel.

"Lock your doors."

"I always lock my doors."

"Lock them anyway." His eyes drop to the base of my throat where the collar sat. He studies the absence the way he studied the leather. Like he's deciding which version he prefers. "I don't like the distance between this car and your apartment door."

"That's not your problem to solve."

"Not yet." He holds the look a beat too long. The 'yet' lands in a place I wasn't defending. "Go."

He taps the roof twice and steps back.

The drive home is short. The windows are down, the night air carrying river water and jasmine across the skin at my throat where the leather sat all evening. The phantom weight lingers.

I haven’t worn the collar long, but my body has already started treating the absence as the deviation and the wearing as the norm. That's a problem I'll address later. The list of things I'll address later is getting long enough to require its own filing system.

My apartment door opens into the dim entry. Coffee, paper, lavender sachets. Everything where I left it. Claire's photograph on the bookshelf angled toward the kitchen table. The locked document case in the back of the closet. The normalcy is reassuring in a way that used to be automatic and now requires verification.

I open the laptop out of habit. The research check is routine: bookmarked forums, archived threads, the digital archaeology that took months to build before I came to New Orleans.

The first thread loads as a 404 error.

I blink. Try the next bookmark. 404. The third. The fourth. By the seventh dead link, the pattern is clear enough that the caffeine I don't need jolts through me anyway.

Specific threads. Not the forums themselves. The threads I bookmarked because they contained dates, names, incidents I've been tracking at Elysium. Threads where former members discussed concerns that never made it into official reports.

Gone. Every single one.

I pull up my screenshots. They save the content. They don't give me back the originals or the people who wrote them.

Cécile vanished. Now the specific Elysium threads I've been using are disappearing. Calling the timing coincidence is becoming harder than calling it deliberate.

I have to work on the assumption that someone is dismantling the evidence trail. The source. The forum posts. The public record that could connect Elysium's incidents to a pattern.

I sit at the kitchen table and calculate what I can't tell anyone.

I can't tell Sebastien. Inviting him to examine what's threatening my research means inviting him to examine the research.

Margot would want to know why old Elysium forum threads matter to my book, and the honest answer leads to Claire.

The police aren't an option. What crime do I report? Missing forum threads? The department that closed my sister's death as an accident isn't going to reopen anything because old posts disappeared.