Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sebastien
Four words, and the booth shrinks to the size of a coffin. 'Tell me about Elysium.' She doesn't ask. She tells me to tell her, and neither of us misses who just gave the order.
The scotch sits between us. The usual weekday crowd fills the lounge: Renata behind the bar, Andy beside her, Margot's gaze periodic from the mezzanine.
Cole gave me an update before I came back to the booth.
What Luc has pulled from Elysium's old records confirms that the club's booking system was visible to anyone holding a committee or mediation role.
The access wasn't restricted. It didn't need to be.
Nobody anticipated that a trusted volunteer would use scheduling information to track where a submissive would be on a given night.
I haven't told Natalie any of this. I haven't told her what I told Luc in my study. What I pieced together from the pattern of her questions.
What Claire Bergeron's face looks like when it's wearing her sister's eyes.
"Not here," I say.
She holds my gaze. The defiance in it is controlled, calibrated. Underneath it I can see the cost of carrying whatever she found today. She walked into this booth prepared to fight me for information.
She doesn't have to fight. That's what she hasn't figured out yet.
"Where?" she says.
"Upstairs."
The private rooms are where the dynamic lives. And the only space in this building where the conversation she's demanding can happen without an audience.
She slides out of the booth. I follow.
The room is set for a session. Padded table. Restraints coiled on the side shelf. Ambient light low.
I hadn't planned on using it tonight. The plan was the townhouse, equal footing, her fully dressed. Cole's interruption and Natalie's refusal to wait have rearranged the sequence.
I close the door. She stands near the table, arms crossed, the collar dark against her throat.
"I was at Elysium," I say. "For years."
"I know." Her chin lifts. "Your turn to tell me something I don't."
"You've been investigating it since before you walked through Dominion's door."
Her arms don't uncross. "Keep going."
"And I've been carrying fragments from that place for longer than you've been looking."
"Fragments of what?"
I lean against the wall. The words don't come easily. They never do when they matter, and I've been carrying these for years. "Incidents. Things that didn't add up."
"Be specific."
"A submissive who left after a demonstration scene and never came back. A complaint about a boundary violation mediated by the same man repeatedly in the same year. Women who arrived confident and left skittish."
"And nobody connected them."
"Each one had a plausible explanation. A bad scene. A miscommunication."
"But you noticed."
"I noticed the resolution came faster than the problem warranted. When I started looking, I discovered one person kept volunteering to mediate. His warmth made everyone feel handled, and handled felt like helped."
"That's not the same as helped."
"No. It isn't."
"A woman came to me at the bar one night. Asked if I'd noticed anything wrong with how incidents were being handled. I gave her a textbook answer. Community safeguards, proper channels, trust the process." I pause. "She thanked me. She left. She died."
She studies me. The investigator's gaze, sharp and assessing. "You sat in your booth and noticed all of this. And did nothing."
"Not nothing." The words come out harder than I intended. "Not enough. But not nothing."
She waits.
"After she died, I spent months pulling at every thread I could find," I say. "Talked to members who'd left. Requested incident reports. Tried to locate the submissives who'd gone quiet."
I hold her gaze. "Every lead went cold or ended in an explanation that fit better than my suspicion. I started to wonder if guilt was making me see a pattern that wasn't there."
"Was it?"
"No. But I couldn't prove otherwise. Not until you."
The quiet that follows has weight. Her arms have uncrossed. Her hands hang at her sides, and I can see the investigator recalibrating, fitting my fragments against whatever she's been building.
"Who?" she asks.
"Gaudet."
She doesn't flinch. She nods once. Confirmation from a different direction.
"At my request, Rapier has been pulling Elysium's old records," I continue. "Booking systems. Access logs. Committee structures. They've confirmed that Gaudet's role gave him visibility into room assignments."
"Rapier."
I nod. "Rapier."
She absorbs this. Every interaction she's had with anyone from Rapier. Every appearance at the club that felt too frequent to be coincidence. The picture assembling itself.
"How long have you known what I was doing here?" she asks.
"Long enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're going to get."
"For a man who demands honesty from his submissives, you're remarkably comfortable with ambiguity."
The sentence lands exactly where she intended. I don't flinch either. "Ask me what you actually want to ask."
"I'm asking why a man who noticed a pattern at Elysium and sat on it for years suddenly started pushing when I showed up."
"Because you gave the fragments a shape I couldn't find alone."
She meets my eyes. The collar sits against the hollow of her throat, the ruby catching the low light.
"The woman who came to me at the bar." My voice drops. These are the hardest words I've spoken. "I know now her name was Claire Bergeron."
The air leaves the room.
"Your sister," I say. "I know who you are, Natalie. I've known since before the fire scene."
Natalie stops breathing. Not the investigative stillness. Not the performance. Something older, as if everything inside her has gone still while her mind catches up.
I watch the recalculation cross her face. The fire play. The first time. Every scene since I sat in my study and wrote her sister's name on a legal pad.
"You knew." Her voice is flat. Controlled. "During the fire scene."
"Yes."
"And after."
"Yes."
"You put fire on my skin while you knew who I was and why I was here."
I don't defend it. There is no defense. "Yes."
The silence stretches. She doesn't move toward the door. She doesn't reach for the key.
She stands in front of me with the ruby visible at her collarbone and an expression that will cost me sleep for a long time.
"I tried to tell you tonight," I say. "In the corridor. Cole interrupted. Before that, the plan was the townhouse. Equal footing. You fully dressed."
"But you didn't tell me before the fire scene." She's chosen the scalpel over the sledgehammer. "You made that choice for me. You decided what I could handle."
"The same way you decided what I could handle." I keep my voice level. "You walked through that door wearing a cover story. You accepted my collar while investigating the murder of a sister you never mentioned. You've been deciding what I could handle since the first night."
The words land. She doesn't flinch, but I see the hit register.
"That's not the same thing."
"No. It isn't." I hold her gaze. "What I did was worse. But the concealment wasn't one-sided, Natalie."
The silence that follows is the kind where two people recalculate each other. She doesn't concede the point. She doesn't need to. The fact that she doesn't argue it is enough.
"Don't do it again."
The sentence lands like a door closing. I hear what she's saying, and I hear what's underneath it.
She isn't leaving.
"When?" she asks. "When did you figure it out?"
"The other night when Luc came to my study. I'd been looking at your research pattern. The names you kept circling. Then Luc showed me what Rapier had pulled on the booking systems, and I started writing down what I knew."
I hold her gaze. "At the bar, before she died, I heard her mention to one of the other submissives that she had a sister who wrote about killers for a living. I heard her laugh; she said it like a joke. I didn't connect it until I was staring at your name on a legal pad next to hers."
Natalie's jaw tightens. I can see her fitting this fragment into a timeline she's spent five years building. Claire was alive. Claire laughed. And I was close enough to hear it and too far away to understand what it meant.
"Why didn't you tell me that night?"
"I told myself I needed to verify. That acting on a pattern I wasn't certain about could endanger your investigation. That if I was wrong, I'd have destroyed the dynamic for nothing."
"And if you were right?"
"Then I should have told you immediately. I knew that. I didn't."
The silence that follows isn't the angry kind. It's the kind that comes when someone is calculating whether the man standing in front of them is redeemable or merely sorry.
"Was the collar part of it?" Her voice goes flat. "Once you knew. Did you keep the consideration agreement because it gave you access to what I was doing?"
"No." The word comes out hard enough to fill the room. "The collar was never about your investigation. Not before I knew. Not after."
"Then what was it about?"
"You."
She watches me for a long time. I let her look. Whatever she's searching for, she deserves to find it or fail to find it on her own terms.
"I need to know this part was real," she says. "Not what you told me. Not what you hid. This."
Her hand moves between us. The gesture encompasses the room, the collar, every scene we've shared. "If what I felt from you was another lie, tell me now."
"It wasn't."
"Then don't decide for me again. You took my choice away once. You don't take it again by telling me what I can or can't handle."
Everything in me is saying I've lost the right to touch her. That accepting what she's offering after what I just told her would be another version of the thing I despise.
She reads my hesitation and her eyes harden. "That's you making the decision again."
Refusing her now would mean my guilt matters more than her choice. I've already decided for her once. The result of that decision is standing in front of me with dry eyes and a collar she hasn't removed.
"Kneel," I say.
She kneels.