Chapter 7 #2
Cole holds the look for a beat, then raises both hands and retreats toward the bar. Not grinning anymore. He found the line and he knows he brushed it.
Sebastien's thumb resumes its circuit along the collar. Slower now. Each pass against the leather has shifted register, less inventory and more statement.
The man who just got frozen out of a conversation by a single word felt entitled to be there in the first place. I file that under useful information.
His knee presses against my shoulder. The contact is steady and I feel it in places his knee isn't touching. "Ezra will be worse."
"Worse than that?"
"Ezra has no survival instinct."
On cue, Ezra crosses the floor toward the booth. I've seen him around on previous visits—tall, easy stride, the kind of confidence that fills a room sideways. He takes in the cushion, the collar, the hand on my neck, and his face performs an entire opera of vindication.
"I knew it." He addresses Sebastien. "I called this. Ask Luc."
"Nobody cares, Guidry."
"Luc cares. Luc owes me dinner." Ezra looks down at me with frank appraisal. "Natalie, right? The writer?"
"The writer."
"Welcome to the inner circle. The benefits are questionable and the company is worse."
He returns his attention to Sebastien and says something too quietly for me to catch. Sebastien answers with one word. Flat. Final. The same temperature he used on Cole, and Ezra reads it the same way.
Ezra leaves. Faster than he arrived. Smart man.
Sebastien's hand tightens fractionally on my neck. Not enough to hurt. Enough to feel the shift between holding and gripping. The squeeze sends a pulse of heat down my spine that I have no professional use for.
"You don't like being read." My voice is steadier than the rest of me.
"I don't like being obvious."
"Is there a difference?"
The pressure releases, but the ghost of the grip stays. A thumb traces the line where collar meets skin, following the edge of the leather to the ruby pendant. A fingernail grazes the notch of my throat above it. The touch is light and exact.
I stop breathing for a beat I can't explain away as the corset.
"There's always a difference," he says. The words arrive against the top of my head, low enough to feel. "Between people who push because they care and people who push because they're testing what happens when I stop being patient."
I file the distinction and try not to think about which category I belong to. His thumb hasn't left my throat.
Prosper finds me later. Sebastien sent me back to the bar with a nod that carried the weight of a command without the shape of one.
Prosper settles onto the adjacent stool with the easy warmth that has defined every interaction since my first night.
His smile reaches his eyes. It always reaches his eyes.
"The collar suits you beautifully," he says. "Sebastien has excellent taste, but you already knew that."
"I'm learning."
"You'll learn more." He signals Renata, who acknowledges him with the familiarity of a standing order. "I've been thinking about your research. The community evolution after Elysium."
Claire's name sits behind my teeth, held there by years of practice. When someone mentions Elysium casually, the reflex is immediate and invisible: don't react. Don't flinch. Don't let them see that the word means something different to you than it does to them.
"There's a woman you should meet. Vivienne Thibault.
" He accepts the drink Renata slides to him.
"She was part of the community during the transition.
Thoughtful. She has a perspective on those years that most people either don't remember or choose not to revisit.
I'll introduce you when she's here next. "
Vivienne Thibault. I keep my expression neutral. I've been trying to find her since before I walked through Dominion's doors. Prosper just offered to put her in the same room.
"That's generous of you," I say. "Most people get tense when I bring up Elysium."
"Most people have reasons." His expression shifts to genuine sadness, a man looking back at a community that broke. "Tragedies deserve care, Natalie. I'd rather someone thoughtful tell the story than let the incomplete version stand as the record."
He moves back into the room, pausing to greet a couple near the lounge with the same generous attention he offered me. The warmth lingers in the space he leaves behind.
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.
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.