Page 83 of Dominion’s Collar

"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?"