Chapter 9 #3
She reaches for the wine glass. Stops. Looks at me with an expression I can't reduce to a single emotion.
"She talked about you, you know. Claire." Vivienne's voice is quiet enough that only I can hear it. "She said her little sister was the most stubborn person she'd ever met. That once you got hold of something, you never let go."
My hand finds the collar. The ruby sits against the hollow of my throat. Beneath it, Claire's absence presses with a weight that is older, heavier, and more complicated than any grief I carried into this building.
Vivienne stands. She touches my shoulder once, briefly, and walks back toward the lounge entrance without looking back.
I stay in the chair. The wine glass she left behind still has an inch of red in it. Claire's name hangs in the air between the place where Vivienne sat and the place where I'm still sitting.
A scene catches my eye across the main floor. The severe European woman from my first weeks here—Sophie DuBois, who I read as a Domme based on the efficiency and authority she carried through the corridor like a weapon.
She's kneeling. Gracefully, deliberately, for a Dom I don't recognize.
Her spine is straight, her head lowered, and the severity I associated with command is gone.
She's present in a way I haven't managed yet.
The sharp edges that made me step aside in the hallway weeks ago have dissolved into something fluid and willing.
She looks like she's exactly where she wants to be.
The Dom places a hand on her shoulder, and Sophie leans into the touch the way a person leans into gravity. Not giving up power. Choosing where to put it.
Sophie looks more powerful on her knees than I've felt standing. I add it to the growing list of things my research failed to prepare me for. Right between orgasm denial as a negotiation tactic and developing feelings for the man whose collar you're wearing.
I file it. The filing happens without effort now.
I find Sebastien at the booth. Whatever he sees on my face when I sit down makes him set the scotch aside.
"Not tonight," I tell him. Borrowing his language. Borrowing the economy that means I need to leave and I can't explain why.
He studies me for exactly one beat. Then he nods and stands.
The collar comes off in the corridor outside the submissives' lounge. His thumb on the lock. The click. The leather lifting away.
Inside, the dresser unlaces the corset. Jeans, jacket, boots.
Every time the costume comes off, the transition takes longer. Not the physical change. The internal one. The version of myself that wears the collar is becoming harder to fold back into the version that drives home alone.
Sebastien walks me to the car without touching me. At the door, the same exchange. "Lock your doors." I always lock my doors. He tells me anyway.
The drive home is quiet. Vivienne's words fill the car—present, heavy, reshaping the space around them.
Once you got hold of something, you never let go.
At the apartment, I open the laptop and run the full sweep. The pattern I found the morning after the shibari has expanded.
Cécile's digital presence is being erased across every platform I've tracked.
Three more forums, two archived discussion boards, and a defunct community newsletter that hosted member comments.
Every post, every comment, every trace of her participation—gone.
The timestamps show steady, systematic work across the past several days.
Whoever is doing this isn't panicking. They're organized. Patient. They know where to look and what to remove, scrubbing a single user's contributions without disturbing the surrounding content.
The source who went silent. The forum threads that disappeared. The user erasure accelerating. The odds that these are unrelated are collapsing. I have to treat them as one effort until something proves otherwise.
My screenshots preserve the content, but the originals are gone. The person who wrote them might as well be a ghost.
Cécile, who was willing to talk about Elysium until she suddenly wasn't, is being removed from the digital record one post at a time.
I can't tell Sebastien. I can't tell Margot. The collar opens doors at Dominion. The lie underneath it closes the one door that matters most: finding Claire's killer. And to do that, I'm going to need Sebastien's help.
I lock the deadbolt. Spread the files. Start mapping what Vivienne gave me against the gaps in Claire's emails.
Vivienne's descriptions—women who left without explanation, incidents handled privately—give shape to entries in Claire's notes that I've been reading as random until tonight.
They aren't random. Claire was tracking the same pattern Vivienne described for weeks before she died.
Claire was building something. Following complaints, comparing incidents, asking questions people didn't want answered. She died before she could find where those questions led.
Five years later, I'm standing in the trail she left behind.
I know how Claire's investigation ended.
I intend to make sure mine ends with the man who stopped her.