Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Sebastien
Gaudet is talking to my submissive. The temperature in my blood drops by degrees I can count.
I don't move from the booth. The scotch is in my hand, untouched, the ritual reasserting itself after last week's anomaly. Full tonight. My grip on it is tighter than the room requires.
Natalie is at the bar getting her Negroni from Renata before coming to the booth.
She does this every visit—the drink first, then me.
The routine is hers, and I haven't corrected it.
Watching her cross the floor with a glass in her hand and the collar on her throat is a pleasure I'm not willing to sacrifice to protocol.
Gaudet got to her first. He's leaning against the bar rail, angled toward her with the ease of a man who's spent decades making people comfortable.
Open posture. Warm smile. He gestures while he talks, and whatever he's saying makes Natalie tilt her head, the motion she uses when she's deciding how much to give someone.
I've watched Gaudet work a room many times since Elysium.
He fills spaces gradually, thoroughly, until every surface has been touched and none of it feels deliberate.
Members gravitate toward him. New members especially.
He has a gift for making the unfamiliar feel navigable, and the gift is genuine.
That's the problem. I've never caught him at anything. What I have is a low-grade unease that's been running for a long time, and the unease has no evidence behind it. Instinct without data.
He doesn't touch her. Gaudet knows protocol.
Gaudet's protocol around collared submissives is immaculate. He stands close enough for warmth, far enough for propriety. The gap between is calibrated with a precision that reads as respect.
I've seen him observe the boundary with a dozen collared submissives over the years. Never a misstep.
Nobody maintains that record without effort.
The thought arrives and I hold it at arm's length because the thought is unfair. Men in this community practice collar protocol as deliberately as they practice aftercare and negotiation. Flawless protocol is evidence of discipline, not concealment. I know that. I practice it myself.
But the knowing doesn't settle it. The feeling predates reason and doesn't answer to it.
Cole mentioned a detail after the last visit. Offhand, delivered with the studied casualness Cole uses for information he considers important.
'Your girl pays a lot more attention to the street than she did a couple weeks ago.'
'How?'
'Cars. Alleys. Reflections. Who's behind her.'
Cole doesn't editorialize. He gives you the observation and lets you draw your own conclusions.
That observation has been sitting beside the ones I collected after the shibari scene.
The phone she checks with targeted attention before and after every visit.
The screen she closed when I approached during aftercare.
The way her body stiffens when it vibrates, a tension that has nothing to do with me or the dynamic.
And the empty stool where Gaudet usually sits—she watched it. Not glanced. Watched.
I didn't ask her about it then. I'm not going to ask her about it now. Asking gives her room to construct an answer, and Natalie constructs answers from prepared materials, reinforced against pressure. What I'm going to do is watch, which is what I do.
Gaudet laughs at a remark Natalie makes. The sound is full and generous, carrying across the bar to where Renata glances over from the service well. She registers the interaction, returns to her pour.
Nothing wrong with the picture. A respected elder member talking to a newer one who's wearing Obsidian's collar. Social currency exchanged in the normal rhythm of a functioning club.
I take a slow breath and examine what I'm feeling, because examining what I'm feeling is how I keep it from becoming what I'm doing.
The reaction operates on two frequencies. The first is possessive. My submissive. My collar on her throat. Another Dom in her space, however benign, however correct his protocol, triggers a response that lives below rationality and doesn't answer to it. That frequency is loud.
The second frequency is quieter and older. Gaudet was at Elysium. Gaudet was always at Elysium. When things went wrong, he was nearby, present and helpful and steady. The role suited him so naturally that questioning it felt ungrateful.
I've been questioning it for five years without being able to say why.
Now the man I've been questioning is standing next to the woman I collared, and the doubt has edges it didn't have an hour ago.
I set the scotch down. Stand. Cross the floor.
The distance from the booth to the bar is a walk I've made hundreds of times. For a drink. For a word with Renata. For the private hallway. Tonight the walk has a different weight.
Gaudet sees me coming before Natalie does. His expression doesn't change.
"Obsidian." His voice carries the pleasure of a man who genuinely likes the people around him. "I was just telling Natalie about the community archives project. Recording oral histories from the older members. She'd be ideal for it."
"She would." I don't sit. I stand close enough to Natalie that my proximity registers as a claim. Her posture adjusts, a fractional shift toward me that she probably doesn't notice. I notice.
"I'll leave you to your evening," Gaudet says. The deference is smooth and correct. A Dom acknowledging another Dom's collar. "We'll continue this conversation, Natalie. I think you'll find the project rewarding."
He moves toward a group near the lounge and disappears into the room's social current as easily as he entered ours.
"He's helpful," Natalie says, neutral enough that the remark could go either direction.
"He is."
"You don't like him talking to me."
"I don't like anyone talking to you." The honesty is blunter than I intended. I let it stand. "Cole and Ezra included. Don't tell them I said that."
"Your possessiveness isn't exactly a secret."
"My possessiveness is the least interesting thing about me." I flag the deflection and let it pass. "What did he want?"
"To discuss his oral history project. He's been collecting stories from former Elysium members."
The sentence stops me. Not the content. The territory. Gaudet is collecting Elysium stories from the same person who's been circling Elysium people since she walked through the door.
Two collectors orbiting the same history. One of them is wearing my collar. The other I've been watching for five years.
I store it. Don't react. "Sounds generous," I say.
"Generous is his default setting." Her eyes meet mine, and underneath the composure I've been studying for weeks, the new tension is present. Visible if you know where to look. I know where to look.
"Come sit with me."
Not a request. She follows me to the booth, and the compliance has changed since the shibari scene. The fraction-of-a-second gap between command and response has narrowed to almost nothing.
She isn't stopping to examine the instruction anymore. The choice is still hers. She's simply stopped needing to analyze it before she gives it to me.
The cushion is where I left it. She lowers herself onto it without being told, bare legs folding beneath her. The voluntary nature of the descent is the part that catches. She chose the floor. She chose my feet.
Last week I had rope on this woman's skin and she made a sound that hasn't left my head since.
Now she's kneeling at my feet in a corset I had made for her and my collar.
The analytical distance I need to read her properly is competing with the memory of how she breathed when the rope tightened across her hips.
The collar prominent against her skin, her hands resting on her thighs. Her eyes move through the room with the systematic attention I've been reading since her first night.
The attention is sharper tonight. Exits first, then people, then the gaps between them. She checks the room before she settles into it. She didn't do that three weeks ago, and she hasn't relaxed since she sat down.
"Natalie."
She looks at me. Waits.
"If something were happening outside this building that I should know about, you'd tell me."
The statement falls between question and command. Her face doesn't change. The composure holds.
But her hands tighten on her thighs. A small adjustment. Involuntary.
"Nothing's happening that you need to worry about."
The answer is polished, delivered from behind the fortification she builds when she doesn't want me inside. I expected exactly this.
"That isn't what I asked."
She holds my gaze. The defiance is there in the angle of her chin; the angle I've been reading since the night she told me her limits were her limits.
"I'm fine, Sebastien."
I've heard those words before. I've delivered them myself. They mean: I'm not fine, and I've decided you don't get to know why.
I let the silence do what silence does. It presses against what she isn't saying, and the shape it takes around the unsaid tells me more than her answer did.
I don't push further. Pushing is the wrong tool for someone who pushes back harder.
We sit for an hour. She nurses a water. I hold the scotch. The room does what it does around us: conversations rise and fall, negotiations conclude, Renata works the bar.
Natalie watches all of it. I watch her watch it.
Somewhere in the middle of the hour I stop calling this watching and start calling it what it is.
Possession. The consuming awareness of a woman's breathing at my knee, the warmth of her shoulder against my leg, the line of her throat where my leather sits.
I want to put my hand on the back of her neck and hold her there. Not for the room. For me.
Her shoulders have dropped a degree from the rigid posture she carried to the cushion, and the dropping is involuntary.
She's more relaxed at my feet than she's been since she arrived. That should please me. Instead it sharpens the contrast with everything else I'm reading.