Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sebastien
Luc arrives at the townhouse for the second time this week with the expression of a man whose questions have multiplied since the first visit. The night I called him, he came in twenty minutes, read the legal pad, and left with more concerns than answers. He's been digging ever since.
I open the door. He's in jeans and a fitted tee, the training from his past visible only in the economy of how he moves through a doorframe. Scans the hall behind him without turning his head.
"You still look like hell," he says.
"I poured you bourbon. Again."
"Then I'll wait to judge. Again." He steps past me and heads for the study like he owns the route. Remy holds the record for time spent in this townhouse. Luc is catching up fast.
In the study a drafting table sits against the far wall, the kind with a tilt mechanism and an adjustable height, for the occasions when I need to think standing up.
The antique partners desk I found in a shop on Magazine Street is wide enough to spread documents across the full surface.
The lamp throws warm light across the legal pad sitting open between two glasses.
I've added to the notes since his first visit.
Luc picks up the bourbon. Takes a sip. Nods once and settles into the chair across the desk from me. His eyes find the new entries immediately.
"That's what you couldn't say on the phone."
"That's the list you read last time. Plus what I've added since."
Luc reads. The new entries first. Then back to the originals for comparison. He's quiet while he does it, which is unusual.
Luc's default mode is commentary delivered at a pace that suggests he's been waiting his entire life for someone to stop talking so he can start. The silence tells me the additions made it worse. He finishes, reads the new observations again.
"Gaudet chaired the safety review," he says. "The same review that cleared the incident."
"Yes."
"And you didn't find that interesting at the time."
"I found it consistent. Gaudet chaired most things. He was a trusted senior member. He was available. He volunteered."
"People who volunteer for oversight are either dedicated or positioning themselves. You're telling me you couldn't tell which."
"I'm telling you I didn't look hard enough to ask."
Luc taps the pad with one finger. "The submissive who left. No forwarding information. Nobody followed up."
"That's standard."
"It's standard because it's convenient. A club that prides itself on community lets a member vanish and calls it respecting her privacy." He lifts the glass. "You wrote 'people leave' on this pad. You know that's insufficient."
I do. I've known it for five years. The difference between knowing and acting is the distance Luc has been closing since I finally called him.
"The woman who died," he says. "You told her unease was normal."
"I told her it was common."
"And that distinction is eating you alive because you think you should've heard what she was actually saying."
I don't confirm it. He doesn't need me to.
"Walk me through what changed." He leans back, bourbon balanced on his thigh. "You sat with this since Elysium closed and got nowhere. What's different now?"
"Natalie."
The name sits between us.
Luc's mouth adjusts by a fraction. The adjustment carries more commentary than most people fit into a paragraph.
"Your submissive," he says. "The first one you've ever collared. That Natalie."
"Yes, jackass, that Natalie. She's asking questions about Elysium that don't match the book she described."
"What kind of questions?"
"The kind that overlap with the fragments on that pad. She's talking to the same people, circling the same events, pulling at the same threads I pulled back then. Except she's doing it with a direction I never had."
Luc absorbs this. "So she's researching thoroughly."
"Not researching. Investigating. There's a difference. I don't know what she's looking for, but her cover is a book on consent culture and private communities. The cover is good enough that I didn't question it for weeks."
"But now you do."
"The questions have narrowed. She's not writing about BDSM culture. She's looking for something specific, and whatever it is connects to the same cluster of incidents I never managed to resolve."
Luc stands. The motion is fluid, practiced. He crosses to the window and looks out at the back garden, hands in his pockets.
Luc thinks better when he's moving.
"And Gaudet," he says, reading the name from the legal pad without turning around.
"Gaudet keeps appearing. Then and now. At the edges, not the center. Comforting. Mediating. Explaining. Always helpful. Always present after something goes wrong."
"That's not evidence. That's a personality type."
"Sometimes, but not always."
"You also know that if you're wrong, you're accusing a respected member of the community based on proximity and instinct."
"I'm not accusing him. I'm telling you his name appears on both lists."
Luc turns from the window. "Our background check on Natalie came back clean."
"So did mine."
Luc's eyebrows lift. "You ran a separate check on your own submissive? Without telling us."
"I used a private contact for verification. I wanted it independent."
"Independent." The word comes back dry. "You mean you didn't trust ours."
"I mean I wanted two sets of eyes. Both came back clean."
"Clean means the cover holds, not that there's nothing underneath it." He crosses his arms. "You want me to take it apart? Rapier can have her real story in a day."
My hand goes still on the scotch glass. "No."
The word fills the room.
Luc watches me with the focused stillness of someone who just found what he was looking for.
"Interesting," he says.
"It's not interesting."
"You won't investigate your own submissive when she's digging around inside Dominion. That's beyond interesting. That's a decision you're making with something other than your head."
"She's not the threat."
"I didn't say she was." He returns to the chair. Sets the bourbon down. "I said investigating her would give you answers. You'd rather not have them. That tells me exactly what I need to know about where you are with this woman."
He's right. The refusal is the tell, and Luc reads my tells as cleanly as I read everyone else's.
"What I want," I say, "is the Elysium infrastructure. Not Natalie's privacy. Ownership records, access logs, booking systems, security protocols. Who had keys. Who assigned rooms. Who staffed the safety committee and how reviews were conducted. The structure of how the club operated."
"You want to know whether Gaudet's proximity had a structural explanation."
"I want to know whether the things I observed had a mechanism behind them."
"Booking systems are the interesting piece," Luc says. He's in operational mode now, the needling replaced by the focused competence that built Rapier from the ground up.
He leans forward. "If Gaudet had access to booking information through his committee role, he'd know who was using which room on any given night," he says. "That's logistical knowledge. Most people wouldn't look twice at it."
"But if someone wanted to use a specific room, or know who was using one—"
"Then that access becomes something else entirely." Luc reaches for his phone. "Remy's going to want to know why."
"Tell him I'm revisiting Elysium."
"He'll ask what prompted it."
"Tell him I should've done it when Elysium closed."
Luc makes the call standing at the window, his voice low enough that I catch tone without words.
Remy's response is brief. Then longer. Luc glances at me.
"He wants to know if you're all right."
The question lands differently coming from Remy.
Luc is the operational mind. Remy is the man I'd call if the problem weren't professional. We've been holding the same kind of weight for the same number of years, and that recognition doesn't require explanation between us.
"Tell him I will be."
Luc relays it. Ends the call. Slides the phone back into his pocket.
"He'll pull property records tonight. Archived business filings, insurance, whatever's public. The rest takes longer." He pauses. "Sebastien. If this is what you think it might be, you're going to need more than a pad and a pen."
"I know."
"And if your submissive is investigating the same thing from a different angle, at some point those angles converge. You need to be ready for what happens when she finds out you knew."
I don't have an answer for that. Not yet.
Luc checks his watch. His phone appears again. A short text, practiced, the gesture of a man whose life includes someone who expects to know where he is and when he's coming home.
"Tell her I said hello," I say.
"Tell her yourself. She already thinks you don't eat enough." But the corner of his mouth shifts. "I told her I'd be late. She reminded me I'm always late."
Luc has a life outside this room. I don't. The booth and the scotch and the careful remove from anything that required more than observation. That was the choice I made after the club closed.
Natalie disrupted it. The collar disrupted it.
Luc finishes his bourbon and stands. "I'll call you when Remy has the property records. Don't do anything stupid before then."
"Define stupid."
"Confronting your submissive. Confronting Gaudet. Making any decision based on what you're feeling instead of what you can prove."
He stops at the study door. "And for the record? You should've called me five years ago."
I nod. Nothing to add.
"Good. Hold that—"
"Luc."
He stops. Turns. My voice sounded different enough that he's reading my face now, and whatever he finds there puts his hand back on the doorframe.
I'm staring at the legal pad.
A woman whose questions overlap with my failure to ask the right ones. A woman who writes true crime for a living.
The phrase is snagging on something. A hook buried five years deep.
The woman who died at the Elysium bar. Casual conversation with another member about her family. She'd said it the way people say things they've said a hundred times before: