Dominion’s Collar (Velvet Dominion #3)

Prologue

Claire

Five Years Ago

The room is wrong.

I know this before I can put words to it, the way you know a door has opened behind you before you hear the hinges.

The restraints are familiar. The leather is étienne's, the particular softness of cuffs he conditions by hand.

I've felt them before. I know the weight, the give, the slow heat of them against my wrists.

But the hands adjusting them aren't his.

I try to focus. The room keeps tilting. My tongue is thick and everything has gone soft, blurred, in a way that doesn't make sense because I had one drink tonight. One. I don't mix substances and scenes. Ever.

Fingers move to my throat. Steady. Unhurried. They know what they're doing, and the knowledge in them is precise enough that it should be reassuring. It isn't.

I want to say something. Wait. Or stop. Or who are you. The words are there, sitting right behind my teeth, but my mouth won't cooperate and my arms won't pull and everything keeps sliding sideways in slow, nauseating waves.

This isn't a scene.

The realization doesn't arrive all at once. It seeps through whatever is clouding my head, cold water filling a space where cold doesn't belong. The cuffs are étienne's. The room is étienne's. The booking is étienne's.

The man standing over me is not étienne.

Pressure at my throat. Not hands. Something else. Deliberate. Measured. The work of someone who understands exactly how the body responds to restriction. Someone using that knowledge with a patience that has nothing to do with my pleasure or peace and everything to do with his power.

I can't scream. I can't move. I can't make my fingers close around the cuff releases that étienne showed me how to reach.

Natalie.

The name surfaces from somewhere beneath the fog, bright and specific and the only thing in this room that's still mine.

The pressure doesn't stop.

Natalie will know. Whatever they tell her, whatever this looks like when they're finished, Natalie will know.

The dark closes in, and my sister is my last thought. This will be so much easier for me than it is for her. I’m sorry, Natalie.

SEBASTIEN

I see her earlier that evening. She's at the bar, laughing at a joke I don't catch, and she looks fine. Relaxed. Normal. She catches my eye and lifts her glass in a half-toast that I return with a nod.

I'm supposed to be reviewing numbers for a commercial property my family is acquiring in the Warehouse District. Managing the Villere holdings means there is always another property, another investment, another problem someone believes requires my attention before morning. The file can wait.

The scene on the far side of the floor can't.

A newer Dom is running a suspension rig with more confidence than competence. I watch him instead of her.

Later she passes behind my chair on her way toward the private rooms. She puts one hand against the wall for a moment, just a moment, and then keeps walking. She looks tired. It doesn't register as anything else.

An hour after that, étienne Comeaux starts screaming.

The sound doesn't belong in this building. It comes from the corridor where the private rooms are, raw and ragged and carrying something worse than pain. People freeze. Glasses stop halfway to mouths. The music keeps playing because the music doesn't know something is wrong.

I'm on my feet and running. Down the corridor. Past the doors. étienne is on his knees outside the room he always books, his hands in his hair, a sound coming out of him that doesn't belong to any language I recognize.

The door is open. Inside, a woman is in étienne's restraints, in étienne's cuffs, on étienne's frame.

She isn't moving.

I check for a pulse. I call for help. I go through the motions because the motions are all that's left.

Her skin is still warm.

I don't know her name. If I heard it before tonight, I don't remember it. I don't know her and I didn't save her.

By morning, everyone is using the word accident.

NATALIE

My phone rings late on a Tuesday night in Savannah.

I'm at the kitchen table with a manuscript draft and a glass of wine that's gone warm. The ringtone is the generic one I never changed, the one that means the number isn't in my contacts. I almost let it go to voicemail but instead, I answer.

The voice on the other end identifies himself. He says words in a specific order, says them clearly, because this is his job and he's done this before. The clarity is the cruelest part because it means I can't mishear him.

My sister's name.

The phone slips out of my hand and hits the table. The screen stays lit. The voice keeps talking from the phone lying face-down on the wood, and I can hear every word but I've stopped being the kind of person who can answer.

The wine glass hasn't moved. The manuscript hasn't moved. The kitchen is exactly the same kitchen it was thirty seconds ago.

Everything else is different.

I pick up the phone. My hands are steady with no reason to be.

"Where is she?"

The voice gives me an address in New Orleans.

I drive.