Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sebastien
The collar sits on my desk where I placed it the night everything ended. The lock is still open. I haven't closed it. I haven't moved it. The scotch beside it is from last night, untouched.
Morning light from the back garden catches the ruby's facets and throws a red thread across the desk.
I was on Rapier's floor when she came through Dominion's door. I watched it on the security feeds, audio and all. Cole locking the deadbolt. Luc heading for the stairs. Her voice, shaking underneath the control.
I stayed where I was. She told Luc she didn't want to see me. Fair enough. We both withheld more than we should have. I knew the stakes but Claire never did.
Remy came up after the debrief. He stood in the doorway and gave me the short version: followed from a compromised meeting with Cécile. Dark sedan. She called Renata, not me. She told them everything. Claire, the investigation, the evidence she'd spent years building.
She gave it to Remy and Luc. The people I should've brought in when the pattern formed.
Then Remy sat down across from me and stopped being operational.
'She didn't ask about you,' he said. 'And you should've come to me before you went to Luc.'
I didn't argue with either point.
'You brought Rapier into an investigation without telling Rapier what the investigation was actually about.' His voice was level. Not angry. Worse than angry. Disappointed in a way that had nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with how he runs his company.
'Luc was pulling records without knowing a member of this club might be connected to a murder. Cole was running security without knowing who the threat was. You gave my team half the picture and let them operate blind.'
'I was protecting the investigation.'
'You were protecting yourself. There's a difference.' He stood. 'I'll drive her home. We'll talk tomorrow.'
He drove her home. Left a Rapier detail outside her apartment.
I went home to a scotch I couldn't drink and a silence I couldn't fill.
The woman who wore the collar is across town behind a deadbolt and a Rapier detail. The distance between that fact and the collar on my desk is the measurement of what my silence cost.
I shower. Dress. Leave the scotch where it is. Leave the collar where it is.
The streetcar rattles past on St. Charles as I lock the front door. It makes the same noise it makes every morning. That kind of continuity means nothing when everything else has shifted underneath you.
Dominion is quiet when I arrive. I take the stairs to the third floor.
Rapier's space looks the way Remy and Luc built it: clean, functional, serious. Screens on one wall. A planning table in the center. Comm equipment Ezra maintains with the focus of a man who considers technology a personal relationship.
Remy and Luc are already here. Cole is at the planning table with a tablet, reviewing the exterior camera footage from yesterday. Ezra has a laptop open beside a bank of monitors showing feeds I don't recognize.
The machine is warming up. The people running it are the people I've watched work for years without ever needing them to work on my behalf.
Margot is waiting for me in the hallway outside the operations room.
She doesn't raise her voice. That's never been how Margot works. She stands in front of me with her arms crossed and delivers the most thorough evisceration I've received from someone I respect enough to hold still for.
"You had fragments for years," she says. "I don't blame you for that. Fragments aren't actionable. But you had a pattern weeks ago, and you didn't tell me."
There's nothing to say to that. She's right.
"A man who may have done this has been walking through my club. Inside the club I rebuilt after it nearly didn't survive the last time someone used it as a hunting ground. And you knew. You sat in your booth and you watched my floor and you knew, and you brought Rapier in without telling me."
"Rapier's investigation was pulling Elysium records, not surveilling your floor." The distinction is technical. Her anger isn't. I uncross my arms and let them hang at my sides. "But you're right. I should have told you."
"You were sitting in my booth running a parallel investigation while a member I'm responsible for was being followed to my door.
" Her voice is quiet and carries the specific weight of a woman whose trust has been violated by someone she considers family.
"I don't care where the records came from.
You don't get to know what you knew without telling me. "
The calculation that prioritized caution over transparency was mine. And it was wrong.
"I should have told you when the pieces began to connect," I say. "I didn't. That's on me."
Margot holds my gaze long enough to make the point.
Then Remy appears in the hallway behind her. He doesn't interrupt. He stands where she can see him. The calm he carries is a brother's calm, specific to the woman in front of him.
"He didn't do this inside Dominion," Remy says. Quiet. Measured. "Gaudet operated at Elysium. Your system works, Margot. That's exactly why Gaudet had nothing actionable here."
The distinction matters. Margot had Rapier rebuild Dominion's protocols specifically to prevent what happened at Elysium.
The fact that Gaudet gave her system nothing to flag isn't a failure of the system.
It's confirmation that predators adapt, and this one adapted well enough to operate inside trust itself.
Margot looks at Remy. Then back at me. She uncrosses her arms as she turns to face Remy.
"Can you fix it? Can you shut him down? Can you prove what you think you know?" she asks.
Remy nods. "Yes."
She walks away. I let her go. Margot's anger is earned, and I'm not the man who explains himself twice.
Remy tilts his head toward the operations room. "She's on her way."
Natalie.
The operations room is full when I enter.
Luc at the table. Cole across from him. Ezra at his station.
Andy Broussard in a chair near the wall, off-duty, wearing the expression of a cop who understands he's here as a resource, not a badge.
Sophie near the door, arms crossed, reading the room with the old habits of a cop who left the French police force when Remy offered her a better job but still has all the instincts.
I take a position by the window. Not the center of the room. Not the planning table.
I'm here to provide what I know about Gaudet. Remy and Luc run the operation. Natalie runs the case.
She arrives with a box of files and the posture of a woman running on coffee and determination.
She doesn't look at me. The not-looking is deliberate. I note it with attention and without reaction, the same as every choice she makes.
Her throat is bare. The skin where the collar sat looks exposed in a way that has nothing to do with modesty. My hands remember the weight of that leather, the click of the lock, the pulse underneath it. The memory is physical and unwelcome and I let it pass through without reaching for it.
Remy meets her at the door. "What do you need?"
She stops. The box is heavy and her arms are braced for a fight she clearly rehearsed on the drive over. The fight where Rapier takes her files, thanks her for the information, and hands her a seat in the audience.
"This is my case," she says. Not a request. A line in the sand.
"No one thinks otherwise," Remy says. "That's why I asked what you need. You built the case. We'll build the operation around it."
She looks at Luc. He nods, eyes still on his tablet. She looks at Cole. Cole is already waiting for her to start talking.
The fight she prepared for isn't happening. I watch her recalibrate. She expected to be sidelined. Instead, she's being brought inside the operation, her case treated as the foundation they're building on.
"I need a timeline on the wall," she says. "And someone who understands how Elysium's booking system actually worked."
Luc raises a hand. "Started that weeks ago. Let me bring everyone up to date."
She sets the box on the table and starts pulling files. Everyone watches her work for a beat before Remy says, "All right. Let's build this."
Natalie starts at the beginning. She pins Claire's timeline to the wall while everyone listens.
Claire joined Elysium. Claire began noticing irregularities in how incidents were handled. Claire confided in Vivienne.
"Here." Natalie taps a card on the timeline. "Cécile's statement. Claire told her that Gaudet knew étienne's room assignment before she ever mentioned it to him."
Luc taps his tablet. "That tracks. Committee members with mediation roles had administrative access to the booking system. Gaudet's position gave him exactly that."
"Knowledge isn't access," Andy says. "Show me he used it."
"I can show you he could see every room assignment for every session," Luc says. "His credentials gave him read access to the scheduling queue. He didn't need to alter anything. He just needed to look."
"How many other people had that access?" Andy asks.
"Few enough to matter."
Andy nods once. I can see him building the case in his head, testing each piece the way a carpenter tests a joint before putting weight on it.
Natalie moves to the counter-investigation. The sources who went silent. The records that vanished. The misdirection toward Tomas.
Andy cuts in. "You're describing witness tampering, evidence destruction, and obstruction. That's prosecutable independent of the underlying crime."
"My sister's murder is not just an underlying crime," Natalie says.
"We understand that, Natalie," Remy says from the head of the table. "That's why we're all here, but building the case means taking it one step at a time."