Page 95 of Dominion’s Collar

"This is my case," she says. Not a request. A line in the sand.

"No one thinks otherwise," Remy says. "That's why I asked what you need. You built the case. We'll build the operation around it."

She looks at Luc. He nods, eyes still on his tablet. She looks at Cole. Cole is already waiting for her to start talking.

The fight she prepared for isn't happening. I watch her recalibrate. She expected to be sidelined. Instead, she's being brought inside the operation, her case treated as the foundation they're building on.

"I need a timeline on the wall," she says. "And someone who understands how Elysium's booking system actually worked."

Luc raises a hand. "Started that weeks ago. Let me bring everyone up to date."

She sets the box on the table and starts pulling files. Everyone watches her work for a beat before Remy says, "All right. Let's build this."

Natalie starts at the beginning. She pins Claire's timeline to the wall while everyone listens.

Claire joined Elysium. Claire began noticing irregularities in how incidents were handled. Claire confided in Vivienne.

"Here." Natalie taps a card on the timeline. "Cécile's statement. Claire told her that Gaudet knew Étienne's room assignment before she ever mentioned it to him."

Luc taps his tablet. "That tracks. Committee members with mediation roles had administrative access to the booking system. Gaudet's position gave him exactly that."

"Knowledge isn't access," Andy says. "Show me he used it."

"I can show you he could see every room assignment for every session," Luc says. "His credentials gave him read access to the scheduling queue. He didn't need to alter anything. He just needed to look."

"How many other people had that access?" Andy asks.

"Few enough to matter."

Andy nods once. I can see him building the case in his head, testing each piece the way a carpenter tests a joint before putting weight on it.

Natalie moves to the counter-investigation. The sources who went silent. The records that vanished. The misdirection toward Tomas.

Andy cuts in. "You're describing witness tampering, evidence destruction, and obstruction. That's prosecutable independent of the underlying crime."

"My sister's murder is not just an underlying crime," Natalie says.

"We understand that, Natalie," Remy says from the head of the table. "That's why we're all here, but building the case means taking it one step at a time."

Ezra speaks from behind his monitors. "The sedan from yesterday. The cameras only caught a partial on the plates, but I've got a match on the vehicle registration. Leased through a shell company." He pauses. Types. "Corporate chain goes back several layers. I'm still pulling it apart, but there are ties to entities associated with properties connected to Elysium."

Nobody speaks for a moment.

Sophie speaks up. "I've been cross-referencing Luc's membership records with the names in Natalie's files. The people Gaudet mentored at Elysium. Étienne was one of them. So was the member who later took responsibility for the submissive who disappeared." She glances at me. "The woman Sebastien tried to find after Elysium closed."

Luc looks up from his tablet. "Gaudet connected them?"

"Introduced them. Recommended the mentoring arrangement. Put people in each other's orbit." Sophie taps the screen in front of her. "He wasn't just nearby when things went wrong. He was often the person who connected the people involved."

One connection becomes several. Not proof by itself, but a pattern that hides in plain sight until someone with the right training pulls the thread.

I provide what I know about Gaudet's behavioral patterns. The tells I've tracked across years of watching him operate. How he positions himself in rooms. How he builds consensus.

Looking back now, with the pattern visible, I can identify moments when the friendliness shifted into something functional. Deployed rather than felt. I didn't read it then. I can't help but see it now.

Natalie listens to my contribution without looking at me. She takes notes. Then she asks a question so sharply calibrated it takes me a second to recognize the scalpel inside it.

"How many times did you watch him mediate a complaint and think that was resolved too fast without doing anything about it?"