Chapter 5 #2
"From anyone who sees uncollared and available as the same thing." He states facts that carry entire power structures inside them.
I take a sip of water from the glass on the table. My mouth has gone dry.
"The collar is mine. Locked closure. You can't remove it yourself. When we're here, you wear it. When you leave, I remove it. It stays in my keeping between sessions."
"And if I want out?"
"You tell me. We have a conversation. The contract dissolves. The collar comes off."
"That simple?"
"Endings should be. Beginnings are where the complexity lives."
"Do you rehearse these conversations, or do they just arrive fully formed?"
His eyes stay level. "You tell me. You're the writer."
I almost smile. Almost.
"Hard limits," he says, shifting the angle.
I give him the list I wrote before I ever walked through Dominion's doors. No breath play. No permanent marks. No humiliation, public or private. No scenes involving other participants without prior negotiation.
They come out steady and rehearsed, because they are. I wrote them in a notebook in my apartment, cross-referencing community standards against my own research.
He listens without interrupting. When I finish, he leans forward.
"Those are the limits you prepared."
"They're still my limits."
"I didn't say they weren't." He waits. "I'm asking what informed them. Experience, fear, preference, or research. I need to know which is which."
"What informed yours?"
He goes quiet. Not the deliberate silence he uses as a tool. Actual quiet, the kind that happens when a question arrives at an angle he wasn't expecting.
"I asked first," he says.
"And I'll answer. After you do."
The corner of his mouth moves. That fractional shift I'm learning to read. "Experience," he says. "All of mine come from experience."
"Then you already know that research and experience produce different lists." I hold his gaze. "Mine will change. That's the point, isn't it?"
He studies me for a beat longer than comfortable. "Yes. That's the point."
The reframing tilts the ground beneath me. My research covered the vocabulary. It didn't cover sitting across from this man while he strips the preparation away and asks what's underneath.
But I just made him answer first, and the small victory straightens my spine.
"Bondage." It comes out steadier than the pulse behind my ears. "Rope work. I've studied shibari patterns extensively."
"Studied." He catches the verb and holds it, deciding. "Have you experienced them?"
"No."
The word hangs in the air. I hear what it actually means: I've read about rope against skin the way someone reads about drowning. The mechanics are precise. The sensation is foreign.
"We'll start with rope." The register drops. The authority in it isn't an affectation. It's where he lives. "I want to know how your body responds to progressive restriction before we build from there."
My response is involuntary. A slow tightening between my hips, a flush climbing my neck.
I keep my expression controlled. Edited.
He sees it anyway. His gaze drops from my eyes to my neck for exactly long enough.
"Impact play?"
"Flogging is a soft limit. I want to know the implement before it touches me."
"Always." No hesitation. "Open hand?"
The last two words hit differently. His palm, my skin, nothing between them.
"Soft limit. Not without a conversation first."
"Understood." Then, quieter: "Aftercare."
"Aftercare isn't something I'll need."
He shakes his head. "Non-negotiable. Every scene ends with it."
"I've done the research. I understand the concept—"
"This isn't a debate." His eyes don't release mine. "I'll need to know what brings you back."
Brings you back. He says it as if he already knows where he's planning to take me, and the return trip requires navigation.
"Fire play?"
"Soft limit. I want to negotiate it after we've scened. I need to know how you handle me first."
"Fair." He absorbs whatever I just revealed and moves on. "Sensory deprivation?"
"Blindfolds. Nothing further until trust is established."
He goes still. Not his usual stillness, which is controlled and deliberate. This is the stillness of a man holding something down. It lasts less than a second, and if I weren't trained to watch for cracks in careful surfaces, I'd have missed it.
The word trust did that.
"Safeword," he says.
"Traffic light system. Green, yellow, red."
"Good. I also want an additional word. Something you wouldn't say during a scene by accident. Something that means everything stops and we have a conversation as equals."
I think of it immediately. Not Claire's name. Too close, too raw, too likely to surface for the wrong reasons.
But the place where Claire was my sister and not a case file. The place I left to come here.
"Savannah."
His expression doesn't change. He doesn't ask why Savannah. He accepts the word with precision and without comment. The absence of inquiry tightens something behind my ribs.
"Savannah," he repeats. "If you say it, everything stops. Lights up, contract paused, my hands off you until we've spoken."
"Thank you." It comes out unedited. Too honest. Too close to genuine.
He catches the crack. He lets it pass. Grace or strategy. The ambiguity is the thing that keeps pulling the pins out of my certainty.
His hand moves. His fingers catch my chin and tilt it up. The contact is brief and absolutely deliberate. His thumb follows my jaw and drops away.
I don't pull back. My skin burns where he touched it. A contact so brief it shouldn't leave anything behind. It does.
"Good," he says. "Frequency?"
"Twice a week. More if I choose."
"If we agree."
"If we agree."
"I'll draft the contract. Review it. Mark anything that doesn't fit. We finalize terms before the collar goes on."
I nod. A woman accepting a negotiated agreement. Definitely not a woman whose skin is humming.
He stands. At the door, he pauses without turning.
"A collar from me changes how people see you here. It also changes what you can see." He turns his head just enough. "Be certain you want both."
Then he opens the door and the music from the main floor rushes into the space he left behind.
I sit for a full minute. My breath is shallow and deliberate. The negotiation ended when he walked out. My thighs are pressed together, my spine rigid.
The conversation wasn't a scene. He sat in a chair and asked me questions. My body doesn't appear to grasp the distinction.
I compose myself. The collar offer is the break I needed. Access, proximity, trust. Everything I came here for.
The thing they don't organize is the guilt.
He's never done this before. I'm the one tracking his tells, cross-referencing his history, calculating the investigative value of his collar while his voice sinks into the small of my back.
When he finds out why I'm really here, it'll cost him something. I don't know him well enough to name what. But I watched him negotiate with an exactness that doesn't come cheap, and none of it was performance.
I push the guilt down. Claire matters more. The dead sister outweighs the living man. And Cécile, wherever she is, deserves to know that someone is still looking. If she's hiding, I owe her answers. If she was silenced, I owe her more than that. If the trade is ugly, it's the only one I've got.
The thing the guilt doesn't reach is his voice saying 'Savannah' like the word was something he intended to keep.
On the main floor, the atmosphere has shifted. Subtle: the social equivalent of furniture rearranged while you were in another room.
Renata catches my eye and pours me a Negroni without asking. "You were in a private room with Obsidian."
"We talked. He offered me a consideration collar."
Renata's hands stop moving. A small, real pause. "He's never done that."
"So I gathered."
She studies me. The protectiveness is for the man in the corner booth, not for me.
"Then don't treat it casually."
"I wasn't planning to."
Across the room, Prosper holds court near the lounge area, hands moving through a story for a small group. He catches my eye and raises his glass. The smile makes me feel welcome.
His name is in Claire's emails. He was at Elysium. The connection is circumstantial, but circumstantial is where most investigations begin.
Sebastien is in his booth when I leave. Corner seat, sight lines, the scotch in front of him untouched.
He watches me walk toward the exit with the steady attention of someone who's already decided what I am to him. Simply waiting for me to catch up.
I hold his gaze long enough to make it a choice. Then I look away.
On the sidewalk, the New Orleans air hits me: humidity, jasmine, the distant brass of a second line rehearsal from somewhere I can't see. The club's controlled atmosphere peels away. The world floods back in, indifferent to what just happened in a dark-paneled room upstairs.
Walking to my car, I reach for the base of my throat. My fingers find bare skin. The hollow where Claire's pendant used to rest.
Claire's necklace hasn't been there in years. The thin gold chain I wore until the gesture became conspicuous.
Soon, something with a lock will take its place.
I check my phone before I start the engine. No messages. No missed calls. No sign that Cécile still exists anywhere a phone signal can reach. The silence has weight now. I can no longer afford to assume Cécile chose it.
The woman who may have caused it just agreed to let a man lock a collar around her throat. And she did it so she can keep asking questions that keep putting people in danger.
Claire would understand. At least I need to believe she would.
I pull away from the curb. In the rearview, Dominion's facade shrinks to a dark line against the sky. My investigation just became something I can't take off by myself.