Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Natalie
Vivienne has been carrying a secret for five years, and today she plans to tell it...
to me. She's picked the location herself: a café on Magazine Street with wrought-iron tables crammed too close together and a ceiling fan that wobbles on every rotation.
The kind of place where the ambient noise swallows conversation a few feet from its source.
She's already seated when I arrive. A café au lait in front of her, untouched, the foam separating. She's in a dark blouse, hair pulled back, the same understated composure she wears at Dominion. Except her hands are folded too tightly. The knuckles are white.
"Thank you for meeting me," I say, and sit across from her.
"I should've done this years ago." Vivienne looks at me, then down at her hands, then at me again. "But there wasn't anyone to tell who'd listen."
I don't rush her. Rushing a source who's been holding silence this long is the fastest way to lose everything she's carrying. I order a coffee and let the silence sit between us.
"You know Claire was investigating Elysium," Vivienne says. "Not just participating. Investigating."
"I know she was asking questions." I pull from what I've gathered, not from assumption. "About incidents that were handled internally."
Vivienne shakes her head. "She wasn't just asking questions, Natalie. She'd identified someone."
The café noise becomes a wall around us. The couple at the next table arguing about parking. The barista calling a name that isn't ours.
I keep my breathing even.
"Claire noticed a submissive named Cécile Doucet," Vivienne says. "This was months before Claire died. Cécile was relatively new to Elysium. Confident, from what I could see. She participated in demonstrations, attended workshops. Then she changed."
"Changed how?"
"Like someone who's been cornered but doesn't have words for what cornered her. She stopped attending events unless she had to. She avoided certain parts of the club. She flinched when specific people approached her."
Vivienne picks up the café au lait and sets it back down without drinking. "Claire noticed before anyone else did."
"Did you see this yourself?"
"Claire told me what she was seeing. Once she pointed it out, I started watching too." Vivienne's mouth tightens. "She was right. The change was obvious once you knew where to look."
"Because Claire paid attention."
"Because Claire paid a specific kind of attention. She'd been in the lifestyle long enough to recognize what it looks like when a submissive goes from exploring to surviving."
Vivienne's voice drops. "Claire started asking Cécile questions. She said Cécile didn't give her direct answers, but she didn't shut Claire out. They were building something. Trust, I think. Slowly."
My hand is on the table. I keep it flat, keep the pen I want to reach for inside my bag. Pulling out a notebook right now would turn this into an interview. Vivienne needs it to be a confession.
"Then Prosper got involved," Vivienne says.
The name lands differently now. Weeks ago it was a thread in Claire's emails. A pattern in official reports. A name connected to the follow-up chain of every complaint I've tracked. Now it's Vivienne saying it out loud in a café with shaking hands and years of silence cracking open.
"He'd known Cécile since she joined," Vivienne continues.
"He knew everyone. That was his role, or the role he'd given himself.
The community's welcome committee. New submissive at Elysium?
Prosper made sure she felt at home. He introduced her to the right people.
He explained the protocols. He bought her a drink and made her laugh. "
The description matches every encounter I've had with him. I've seen the warmth, the ease, his talent for navigating a room as if his only purpose is making sure everyone in it is comfortable.
"When Claire brought her concerns about Cécile to the community leadership, Prosper volunteered to mediate.
He was the obvious choice. Everyone trusted him.
He'd been at Elysium longer than most of the safety committee.
" Vivienne's mouth presses into a line before she continues.
"The matter was handled quickly. Everyone seemed relieved to have a reasonable explanation. "
"But Claire wasn't satisfied."
"Claire told me it was resolved too fast. That nobody wanted to sit with the question long enough to see what was underneath it." Vivienne meets my eyes. "That's not much to go on. I know that. It wasn't enough for me to act on, and it wasn't enough for Claire to take anywhere official."
"But she kept digging."
"She kept digging. She was talking to other women who'd left Elysium.
She was comparing dates and timelines. She had a notebook.
" Vivienne pauses. "She had a whole system.
Cross-references, color codes. A person doesn't build that unless they're trying to prove something they can feel but can't see. "
I close my eyes for a second. I can see my sister at a kitchen table after midnight, transferring everything she'd observed at Elysium into a notebook of color-coded suspicions, chasing the same invisible shape I've been circling since she died.
"Vivienne. Did Claire have a standing arrangement at Elysium? A regular scene partner?"
"étienne Comeaux." Vivienne says the name carefully, as if she's rehearsed it. "They had a booking most weeks. Claire trusted him. She'd been scening with him for months."
"So the night she died, she would've gone to étienne's room as a matter of routine."
"She wouldn't have questioned the booking. It was their arrangement. She'd done it dozens of times."
I file this. The booking, the room, the routine. A person who knew which room étienne had reserved could've used that information. The question forming at the edges is who would've had that access, and why no one thought to ask.
"What happened to Cécile after Claire died?" I ask.
Vivienne's composure fractures along a line I can see. "She disappeared. From Elysium first, then from everything. She left the community entirely. I tried to reach her. Once. She didn't respond, and I didn't try again."
The words hit close. I spent months reaching for the same woman and got the same result.
The self-recrimination in her voice is thin and sharp. "I told myself she was grieving. That she'd lost a friend and couldn't face the world. I told myself a lot of things."
"You couldn't have known."
"I could've tried harder."
The café fan wobbles overhead. Vivienne stares at her untouched coffee as if it owes her something.
"I found Cécile," I say. "Through Claire's emails. Months ago, before I came to Dominion."
It took months of slow, patient work. Cultivation, I'd called it. Research methodology. The professional language I've been wrapping around something that was never professional.
"She agreed to talk. Set a time and a place. Then she vanished. Phone disconnected, email bouncing, every trace of her online presence scrubbed clean as if she had been erased."
Vivienne's face goes white. "She went dark after Claire died too," she says quietly. "Left the community. Stopped answering. Her social media went quiet, but it was still there. Like she was hiding, not erased."
The distinction lands. When I found Cécile, her accounts existed. Her phone worked. She was reachable, just reluctant. The total erasure—phone disconnected, email bouncing, profiles scrubbed—happened after she agreed to talk to me.
Two disappearances. The first looked like grief. The second looked like someone made sure she couldn't be found.
The realization doesn't arrive all at once. It assembles piece by piece across the wrought-iron table, between the untouched drinks and the wobbling fan and Vivienne's white knuckles.
I didn't find Cécile independently. I found her name in Claire's emails, mentioned in messages Claire sent to Vivienne and others.
Claire's notes on a frightened woman she was trying to protect at Elysium.
I tracked the name until I found a phone number, an email address, a person who had disappeared so completely it no longer looked accidental.
Claire was doing what I'm doing. Asking the same questions. Following the same threads. Finding the same name at the edges. She was further along than I'd thought, building exactly the case I've spent years constructing from the outside.
I didn't stumble onto Claire's investigation. I followed it.
"She was so close," I say. My voice isn't steady, and I don't try to make it steady. "Claire was building toward a case."
"She was brave," Vivienne says. "And I think she was right."
And then she was murdered.
I press my palms flat on the table. The iron is warm from the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows.
A street musician somewhere outside is playing something jazzy and slightly off-key, and the normalcy of it is obscene.
"One more thing," I say. "You told me Claire was happy at Elysium. That she'd found something real."
"She had—both happy and real." Vivienne's expression doesn't waver. "She loved the lifestyle. She loved what it gave her. And she was trying to protect someone inside it. Those aren't contradictions."
They aren't. Claire died inside the place that made her feel most alive, protecting a woman no one else seemed to notice needed protecting.
And her little sister walked into another version of that place and started over. I didn't know I was following a map Claire had already drawn.
I reach for my bag. "I need to talk to a few more people."
"Natalie." Vivienne catches my wrist. The contact is brief, careful. Years in this community taught her to ask before reaching. "Claire trusted the wrong person. Make sure you're not doing the same thing."
I hold her gaze. "Which wrong person are we talking about?"
Vivienne releases my wrist. She looks away, gathers her purse and the cardigan draped over the back of her chair, and leaves without another word.