Chapter 15 #3
He's fishing. The technique is polished enough to be invisible if I weren't trained to see it. He's asking about my sources, which means he's been briefed on something I wasn't copied on.
"Then I'll find out which one it is," I say.
Luc grins. The grin is genuine, and that's the dangerous part. "I like her," he says to nobody in particular, and takes his bourbon down the bar.
Sophie appears at my elbow. "You're composing again."
"I'm always composing. It's an occupational hazard."
"It's a defense mechanism." She says it without judgment, clinical as naming a cloud formation. "Sebastien does the same thing from a different angle. He watches. You compose."
I take a sip of the Negroni. "Are you psychoanalyzing me at a BDSM club?"
"I'm making conversation at a bar." Sophie's smile is warm and unbothered.
"The psychoanalysis is free. You're welcome.
" She glances toward the main floor, where Cole and Ezra are positioned near the hallway.
Luc is at the bar. Margot is on the mezzanine with her tablet, her gaze tracking from Sebastien's booth to me and back. "You do realize he comes with people."
I follow her gaze around the room. Cole just pulled Sebastien away with the clipped urgency of an assignment, and Ezra stands beside him with the easy banter gone quiet. Luc materialized at my elbow and probed my sources like he already knew the answers. Margot reads the room from above.
"I'm beginning to notice."
"It's the collar." Sophie lifts one shoulder. "You're not just a member anymore. You're family. And this family has opinions."
She finishes her drink and leaves without ceremony. She's said what she came to say.
The collar changed something in how these people see me.
I'm Sebastien's, and that apparently comes with a gravitational field of opinions about what he does and who he does it with.
A month ago I would have called it surveillance.
Tonight it feels more like the walls closing in, and I can't decide whether the walls are protecting me or trapping me.
It's annoying. It's also dangerous, because the part of me that should be calculating an exit strategy is starting to feel at home. And feeling at home in a place you infiltrated under false pretenses is how you get killed, or worse, how you lose the ability to leave.
Cole passes the bar on his way to the lounge entrance and pauses beside my stool. "You driving yourself tonight?"
"I always drive myself."
"Which block are you parked on?"
The question is casual. The attention behind it is not. "Around the corner. Two blocks east."
Cole's expression doesn't change, but something behind it recalculates. "Someone from the club will walk you out tonight. Probably Sebastien. If not him, me or Ezra."
"I don't need an escort."
"Wasn't a question." He moves on. The exchange takes ten seconds and leaves me with the distinct impression that my evening's exit has been planned by people who didn't consult me about it.
I open my notes on my phone. The mental map is getting too complex for memory alone. Source: refused. Records: erased. Tomas redirect: planted. Vivienne: warned. Cécile: alive, in hiding, one piece of evidence delivered.
Gaudet was in possession of information Claire didn't give him.
Today confirmed what I suspected and added something I didn't expect. I'm close enough to the truth that someone is tearing my case apart. And that person has the relationships and reach to do it without leaving a fingerprint.
If Gaudet is who I think he is, then he's the person who killed Claire. And if he killed Claire, then erasure has already become violence at least once before.
Sebastien is back in his booth. His scotch sits on the table.
He hasn't come to find me, and whatever Cole told him has shifted his attention.
The stillness that radiates from his corner carries a quality I can feel across the room: possessive, patient, a man waiting for something he's decided is his.
He said: 'I'll come find you.' He hasn't.
I could sit here. I could finish my Negroni. I could go home, plan my next move, come back another night with a better strategy.
That's what the old Natalie would do. She spent five years building a case from her apartment in Savannah, rehearsing every interaction before she had it. That Natalie is not the woman sitting at this bar.
The woman at this bar is wearing a collar she chose and carrying a dead sister's unfinished investigation. She's looking at a man who told her he has something to say and then let circumstances pull him away. Claire would tell me to stop composing and start moving.
I set the Negroni down, stand, and cross the room. Sebastien sees me coming. His expression doesn't change, but his body shifts to make room.
I slide into the booth across from him. "You said you had something to tell me," I say. "And I said I have questions. So let's stop circling."
He holds my gaze. The scotch sits between us, untouched. The corner booth has always been his territory, and I just walked into it uninvited.
"Ask," he says.
"Tell me about Elysium."