Page 36 of Dominion’s Collar

The isolation is tactical and complete. Someone knows which pieces of Elysium's history matter. I don't know yet whether they know I matter too.

Claire's photograph sits on the shelf, angled toward the table where her sister works the case. The case files are in the locked document case behind the luggage. The laptop screen shows empty spaces where evidence used to live.

If someone is cleaning up, Cécile and the disappearing records are pieces of the same effort. The only safe assumption is that they are, until I can prove otherwise. The question is whether wearing Sebastien's collar is bringing me closer to Claire's killer or closer to becoming the next person who gets erased.

I lock the deadbolt. Check the chain.

My fingers find the base of my throat. Bare skin. The collar is in Sebastien's pocket, folded into dark fabric. Claire's pendant has been gone for years.

Two absences layered on the same stretch of skin. The case I came to New Orleans to build is being dismantled one source at a time.

The empty pages glow on the laptop screen. I open my files and start rebuilding.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sebastien

Marion finds me before I've changed. I told her about the collar the night I offered it to Natalie. A phone call. Brief. She took it the way she takes everything. No performance.

This is the first time we've been in the same room since.

"Obsidian." She stops in front of me. Studies my face with the calm precision of a woman who has spent a year under my hands and formed opinions she's never shared.

"Marion."

Our arrangement was reliable. Uncomplicated. Two people who negotiated a dynamic that served both of them without pretending it served anything else. Neither of us built a fantasy around it, and the absence of fantasy made the ending clean.

"She's going to be trouble," Marion says.

"I'm aware."

"No, you're not." The opinions she never shared are surfacing now. "You think you're aware. That's different."

She turns to leave. Pauses. Turns back.

"About damn time somebody got you out of that booth, Obsidian."

Then she's gone. No scene. No aftermath. The last word on a year's worth of arrangement, delivered over her shoulder on the way out.

I never once lost my discipline with Marion. Not a single session where her response reached past the technique into something I hadn't planned for. A year of clean, competent exchanges that never cost me sleep.

I'm about to put rope on a woman who costs me sleep by walking across a room.

I meet Natalie outside the submissives' lounge. The collar goes on in the hallway, the same sequence as last time. Click of the lock. Her fingers brushing the ruby before I step back. I send her to the bar and go change.

When I collect her from Renata's care, I don't take her to the booth. Tonight we go to the private room.

The room is set. Amber light on wood paneling. My rope on the side table, conditioned and broken in.

She's in the corset and thong, barefoot, the collar at her throat. The ruby catches the low light as she crosses the threshold.

She obeys beautifully. That's the problem.

Every instruction I give, she follows with the positioning of someone who studied this from the outside. Correct responses. Appropriate language. And underneath the precision, a fraction-of-a-second delay that tells me every reaction is chosen before it's felt.

I've been reading that delay since her first night. Tonight I intend to close it.

"This is shibari," I tell her. "You read about it."