Page 89 of Dominion’s Collar

"Hey." Her voice is easy, warm, the sound of an afternoon with nothing urgent attached. "What's up?"

"I need to come to you." My voice is steady, but something underneath it isn't, and Renata hears it immediately. I can tell because the warmth doesn't leave her voice. It just sharpens.

"Where are you?"

"Magazine. Past Canal, heading away from my place."

"Come to Dominion. I'm here early for setup." A beat. "Natalie. Are you safe?"

"I think so. I'm not sure. I think I'm being followed."

The pause is half a second. "How far out are you?"

"Ten minutes."

"I'll have the door open. Don't stop."

She hangs up. No questions about who or why. No interrogation about what I've done to earn a tail. Renata heard the frequency in my voice and responded the way a friend responds. Get here. We'll sort it out after.

I drive. Magazine to St. Charles, and the streetcar tracks hum under my tires. The sedan is still behind me. Two cars back now.

The driver isn't aggressive, isn't making any move that would feel overtly threatening. Just present. Steady. Closer than before. The patience of someone doing a job.

Probably not Gaudet himself. If the pattern holds, if the coached refusals and scrubbed records and gift-wrapped misdirection mean what I think they mean, he'd use someone else. Keep his own hands clean. Let the system do the work.

I turn onto the block where Dominion sits behind its unremarkable facade. The building gives nothing away from the street, just another converted warehouse among other old commercial buildings repurposed for people with money. Tall windows, weathered masonry, a recessed entrance easy to miss if you don't know it's there. I find a spot on the street and kill the engine.

My hands are shaking. The true crime writer has become the material. I'd find that funny if I could get outside it far enough to laugh. I'm convinced someone started following me after Cécile failed to show. The only person I could think to call is a bartender who became my friend while I was using her for access.

The door is open. Renata is there, and she takes one look at my face and steps back to let me through. I walk into Dominion under my own power because that's the only way I walk into anything. The door swings shut behind me with a weight that says nothing follows you in here.

The safest place in New Orleans, and I had to lie to every person in it to work my way inside.

The interior of Dominion before it opens is different from the space I know. Lights up, furniture being arranged, the ambient intimacy stripped down to logistics. But the security infrastructure is the same. The cameras. The discreet checkpoints. The systems that Rapier Strategic built after the crisis that nearly destroyed this place.

Cole appears from the direction of the stairs, and the man in front of me isn't the one I know from the bar. The easy charm has vanished. The smile with it. What's in front of me is reading the situation before I've opened my mouth. Scanning me for injury. Taking apart my posture and breathing for information, all of it happening behind a gaze that's gone clinical.

"What happened?" he says. No greeting. No warmth. The words are an instrument for extracting information.

"I think I was being followed. Dark sedan, tinted windows. It's been on me since the Marigny." I hear myself assembling the report with a clarity that surprises me. The investigator is still functional. Good.

Cole moves past me toward the door. The deadbolt engages under his hand. The sound is small and absolute.

Cole pulls his phone and makes a call that lasts long enough for two sentences. I hear him say "main entrance" and "now" and nothing else. He turns back to me.

"Luc's on his way down. You're going to tell us everything. Starting with why someone would be tailing you."

This is the part I've been dreading since the door closed. Because why someone would be tailing me requires Claire. It requires the investigation. It requires the truth I've been hiding from every person in this building except the one who already pulled it out of me.

His jaw tightens. "Start at the beginning."

It's not a question. It's a summary delivered with the efficiency of a man calculating what my negligence may have cost his people.

"My name really is Natalie Chastain. I didn’t lie about that," I say. Cole's expression doesn't change. He already knows my name. "I'm Claire Bergeron's sister. Claire died at Elysium five years ago. Her death was ruled an accident. I don't believe it was. I came to Dominion to find out who killed her."

The words land in the empty lounge and just sit there. Renata, behind me, goes quiet. The particular quiet of a woman recalibrating everything she knows about someone she considered a friend.

Cole's expression shifts. Not anger. Something colder. "You've been running an investigation inside this club. Without telling Margot. Without telling security. And you were concerned enough about a car behind you that you called Renata."