Page 42 of Dominion’s Collar

The rope marks have faded. The memory of them hasn't. Every time I flex my wrists, the ghost of the column tie pulses along the tendons. My body responds to the echo with a low heat that has nothing to do with research or strategy.

The analytical part of my brain has been running since I woke up, trying to reduce what happened in that private room to components I can manage. The binding. The denial. The moment he leaned in and murmured against my neck, and every defense I'd built went quiet.

'Stop.'

That's what he said. Not a command. An invitation. And the worst part isn't that it worked. The worst part is that I can't reconstruct the version of myself that existed before it did. The woman who walked out knows the distance is a fiction she was telling herself.

I did stop. That's the problem.

I asked him, afterward, whether I should be doing something for him. Reciprocity. My research covered the protocols. Mentally consulting a bibliography while wrapped in a man's blanket with his rope marks on my wrists is exactly the kind of detail I'd mock in someone else's memoir.

Sitting there while he watched me with that contained stillness felt like an imbalance I should address.

'That'll come another time. Tonight was about your experience.'

His voice was still in the lower register, the one that bypasses my analytical defenses and lands somewhere my preparation can't reach. The answer left me no room to treat the evening as a transaction. Transactions I understand. This wasn't one.

The coffee is getting cold.

I can't shake the feeling that Claire would understand exactly what happened last night. Not the investigation, not the tactical positioning. The surrender. The specific, devastating moment when I stopped trying to stay ahead of him and let the outcome belong to someone else.

I keep pressing my thumb against the inside of my wrist where the column tie sat, tracing the line that isn't visible anymore but that my skin remembers.

I shove the thought aside and open my laptop.

The monitoring alerts I set up after the forum threads disappeared are waiting in my inbox. Three notifications, timestamped across the early hours of the morning. The first two are routine: pages I'm tracking that haven't changed. The third isn't routine.

An archived thread I'd flagged for Cécile Doucet's username is gone. Not the thread itself. The user. Every comment Cécile posted to the discussion has been scrubbed. Her username returns no results. I check a second forum. Same. A third. The pattern is unmistakable.

Someone isn't deleting threads anymore. They're deleting the person. Every trace of Cécile's participation in Elysium-adjacent conversations is being erased from the internet. Her digital footprint is being methodically removed, platform by platform.

The forum threads that disappeared were information. This is identity. If the same person or group is behind Cécile's silence and the disappearing posts, they're no longer erasing information. They're erasing the person who provided it.

That's what I saw on my phone last night. The first alert pinged during aftercare, and the shift from subspace to something sharper was fast enough that Sebastien noticed. I saw him notice.

He asked if everything was all right. I said I was checking the time. The distance between that lie and the truth was wider than any rope could hold.

The concealment is getting heavier. I'm hiding the investigation from Sebastien, hiding Claire from Dominion, and hiding the evidence destruction from everyone. Every visit is double-edged. I'm hunting, and I don't know yet whether whatever I'm hunting has noticed me.

I close the laptop and spend the next two days rebuilding what I can from screenshots and cached pages. By the time the next Dominion visit arrives, I've stabilized the investigation. The digital losses are documented. The remaining sources are backed up in three locations. The fear has converted to something more useful.

Dominion's routine is becoming automatic. The lounge. The dresser's hands on my corset laces, pulling the boning tight until my posture isn't a choice anymore. Three weeks ago, the dress code felt like a costume. Now I catch myself adjusting the corset with the absent competence of a woman who's forgotten she's supposed to find this uncomfortable. My therapist would have a field day if I had one. My thesis advisor, which I did have, would have had several.

The hallway where Sebastien waits, the collar in his hands, the click that settles everything into position. The ruby against my throat. He sends me to the bar. I order from Renata. He joins me after he's changed, leathers and that particular stillness that fills whatever space he enters.

The visible evidence from the private room is gone, but Sebastien reads me with a precision that makes hiding useless and lying dangerous. He doesn't mention the scene. He doesn't need to. The way he watches me says he's still tracking the aftereffects, and the tracking feels more intimate than anything that happened in the private room.

"You're staring," I tell him.

"I'm observing."

"There's a difference?"

"Staring is unfocused." He lifts the scotch without drinking. "I'm very focused."

The warmth that spreads through my abdomen has nothing to do with the Negroni. I look away first, which is the wrong move in whatever game we're playing, and the half-smile he doesn't quite suppress tells me he knows it.

He takes the scotch to his booth. The withdrawal is deliberate, the same way everything about him is deliberate. He gives me space to work the room because that's what the arrangement requires, and because Sebastien understands that watching from across the room is its own form of possession.