Page 103 of Dominion’s Collar

"You missed one," I say.

The words are quiet. Almost conversational.

Gaudet's eyes narrow. He's running the calculation. The transmitter he crushed. The phone he destroyed. What else could be recording.

"Ezra's backup recorder," I say. "You found the transmitter because we gave you one to find. The second one has been running since you invited me to sit down."

The composure cracks.

It's small. A twitch at the corner of his mouth. A shift in his weight that Cole pins before it becomes motion. Then his body jerks forward, a sudden lunge that goes nowhere because Cole absorbs the movement without effort.

Cole plants him back against the wall. "Stay there."

Gaudet stays. But the mask is gone. What's underneath is fury and desperation. The dawning understanding that everything he said in that room, every correction, every piece of perpetrator knowledge, is on a recording already in other people's hands.

I just ended his life as a free man. A true-crime author with a dead sister's photograph in her wallet and a team she trusts behind her.

I don't need to read his expression anymore. I've spent five years trying to understand the man who killed Claire. Understanding him was never the point. Finding him was.

Andy arrives before I've stopped counting the minutes, standing in the event space with my arms crossed and the raw ache of Gaudet's arm still printed on my throat. Gaudet stays in the corridor with Cole until the uniforms arrive. Remy gives Andy the short version, then the long one. Andy's face changes twice.

When they bring Gaudet through the panel in handcuffs, Andy is waiting. "Prosper Gaudet, you are under arrest for the assault and unlawful restraint of Natalie Chastain." The rest of the Miranda rights blur together. The murder charges will take longer. The grand jury, the forensics, the recordings, the witness testimony. But the assault happened in front of an operational team with recordings running, and Gaudet isn't walking away from this.

For now, that's enough. The rest is Andy's.

Sebastien has moved to the windows. He's standing where Gaudet sat during the interview, looking out at the street. The stillness radiating off him is wrong. It's the stillness of a man holding himself in place through sheer force of will, every line of his body braced against the impulse to cross the room. His jaw is set hard enough to cast a shadow along the bone.

He came through that wall for me. Put Gaudet on the floor for me. And now he's standing fifteen feet away because I told him I wasn't ready, and he heard me.

I'm furious with him. I'm not finished being furious with him. But my body doesn't care about my fury, and the man who just came through a wall isn't the man who kept Claire's death from me. He's the man who couldn't stay seated. That distinction matters.

I meet his eyes across the room. I don't soften. I don't offer anything. But I don't look away, either.

I walk out of the building into the New Orleans heat and pull Claire's photograph from my wallet. She's smiling in this picture, standing on the porch in Savannah with her hand on my shoulder. Before she came to this city. Before she found the world that fascinated her, and the man who used it to kill her.

"I finished it," I tell her.

The photograph goes back in my wallet. The wallet goes back in my bag. My hands are steady. That'll probably stop at some point, but for now they're steady and I'll take it.

Behind me, the building holds everyone I trusted with Claire's case. Ahead of me, the street, my car, and a decision I haven't made yet.

The phantom weight pulses at my throat. I press my fingers against the bare skin where the collar used to sit.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Natalie

The door to his townhouse is lighter than Dominion's. I notice everything differently when I stop composing what I'll say and just let myself arrive.

The streetcar rattles past on St. Charles as I stand on his front step. I called ahead. He said one word. 'Come.' Then he hung up, because Sebastien doesn't fill silence with reassurance and I didn't need him to.

A few days have passed since the warehouse on Tchoupitoulas. Days since Gaudet. Andy has the recordings, the evidence, and enough to take to a grand jury. Claire's case belongs to the justice system now. The only thing that belongs to me is the question I drove across town to answer.

He opens the door. Dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearms. Worn jeans. No shoes.

The worn jeans and bare feet on heart-pine floors do something to my composure that his leathers never managed. This is Sebastien without the club, without the booth, without the title. This is the man underneath Obsidian, standing in his own doorway, waiting to find out if I came to end this or to keep it.

He steps back. I walk past him into the hall. The twelve-foot ceilings swallow the sound of the door closing behind me.