Page 92 of Dominion’s Collar

"You lied to me." Her voice is level, but the hurt underneath it is specific. "Every night at this bar. Every conversation. You were working me."

"At first." I hold her gaze. "It stopped being that."

"When?"

"A while ago. And I should've told you then."

Renata heads back to the bar, dries a glass and sets it on the rack with more force than the glass requires. She turns and pins me with her eyes. "You owe me an explanation. A real one. Maybe not tonight, but you owe me."

"I know."

She looks at me for a long beat. "I'm angry at you. I want that on the record. But I'm also glad you called me and not someone else." She pauses. "Don't make me regret that."

Luc returns with a tablet showing exterior camera footage. The dark sedan is visible in three frames, parked across the street, then pulling away after I entered the building. The plates are partially obscured.

"We'll run what we have," Luc says. "Ezra's on it." He glances toward the mezzanine. “Margot’s going to be delightful for the rest of the week."

Remy doesn't look up from his phone. "When isn't she?"

The exchange lasts two seconds and changes nothing about the situation. But the frequency shifts. These people have done this before. Probably not this, exactly, but enough versions of crisis that they've learned to breathe inside one.

Ezra, who I know from Dominion as dry commentary and club folklore, is apparently also the person Rapier calls when a partial plate needs to become a name. Everyone around me is doing the thing they're built to do. I sit with a Negroni I can't taste and wait for someone to tell me what happens next.

Remy drives me home. A Rapier detail parks across the street from my apartment. Remy walks the apartment himself before he leaves: closets, windows, the deadbolt. He doesn't ask. He just does it, and I let him, because the woman who would've argued about it an hour ago is too tired to pretend she doesn't need this.

"I want someone inside," he says. "By the door."

"No."

He turns and looks at me. The assessment is quick and thorough, the look of a man deciding whether to push.

"The detail outside. The deadbolt. That's what I agreed to." I hold his gaze. "I need to be alone tonight, Remy."

He doesn't like it. I can see the calculation behind his eyes: what Luc would say, what Sebastien would want. But he nods.

"Lock the deadbolt behind me. Anything feels wrong, you call. We're across the street all night. You don't leave this apartment without an escort. Clear?"

I know an order when I hear one. This one makes sense. "Clear."

Rapier's arrangement, delivered through Remy's execution. I'm being protected by the organization I spent every visit keeping at arm's length.

My apartment is the same. Claire's photograph. The case files. The legal pad where I wrote Sebastien's fragments this morning, which feels like it happened to a different woman in a different lifetime.

I pull Sebastien's information off the legal pad and pin it to the wall beside my own work. His observations on the left. My investigative timeline on the right. Vivienne's account. Cécile's clue. The booking system confirmation. The counter-investigation data points.

The handwriting on the legal pad is mine, but the words are Sebastien's. Pinning them to the wall means his voice is in my apartment now. The voice that said 'kneel' and meant it. The voice that said 'your sister' and meant that too.

Together, they form something neither of us built alone. The access. The pattern. A man who may have used the trust of an entire community to conceal what happened to a woman who'd begun asking the right questions.

Claire's face looks down at me from the photograph, and for the first time in five years, the case I've been building has a spine.

My phone is on the table beside Claire's photograph. I reach for it. My thumb finds Sebastien's name and passes it. Twice in one day. A habit I'll have to get used to.

Vivienne first. She answers on the third ring, and I tell her what happened. The shortened version. She listens without interrupting. When I finish, she says, "Be careful. He's smarter than you think, and he's been doing this longer."

"I know."

"No. You don't. Be careful anyway."