Claimed By Rival Dragons (The Dragon Compact #1)

Cordillera

Catalina

Davis was in the briefing room that always smelled like stale coffee. He was standing. He sat for routine disasters and stood for the ones he didn’t want to admit were disasters. All of which meant that the manila folder under his arm was going to ruin somebody’s week.

Probably mine.

I took the third chair from the left, the chair I’d been taking for six years. Clear sightline to the door, clear sightline to the projector, the vent humming above me loud enough to mask anything I scribbled in the margins.

Davis dropped the folder in front of me. “Seattle.”

“Yes.”

“Clan Ashenmere is hosting a state dinner tied to the rare earth negotiations. You read the prelim?”

I had, twice. “I read it.”

The vent hum filled the silence between us. He clicked the projector.

The compound filled the screen. Glass, steel, and old-growth timber, perched on the edge of Puget Sound. It looked like a fortress that had dressed up as an office building so people wouldn’t ask too many questions.

“Norwegians are leading the bloc on rare earth,” Davis said. “If we don’t crack that front, we’re paying whatever they want for neodymium for the next decade. Maybe two.”

I knew the economics. Every phone, missile guidance system, and electric car battery on the planet needed materials the dragons were sitting on like smug, fire-breathing landlords.

They had been sitting on them since before Davis’s great-grandfather was born.

They were going to keep sitting on them.

Patience was cheap when you measured your life in centuries.

He clicked again.

A face filled the screen. Blond. Sharp cheekbones. A smile calibrated to make diplomats forget their talking points and otherwise sensible people forget their underwear.

“Rhain Solberg. Son of Martin Solberg, the Norwegian clan leader. Seventy-five in human years.” Davis’s voice went flat.

It did that when he was about to make me do something I wasn’t going to like.

“Trained diplomat. Groomed for leadership from childhood. First time in six years he’ll be outside Norwegian territory in a setting we can access without starting a war. ”

“Lucky us.”

“Your cover is State Department translator. Mandarin and Norwegian primary. Norwegian still current?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Primary objective, general intel on Ashenmere: security, shifting patterns, defense protocols, anything you can get without anyone noticing you’re getting it.

Secondary.” He tapped the photo. Rhain Solberg’s smile filled the screen again, patient and practiced and frankly unnecessary.

“Get close to him. However you need to. Make sure he talks. His father has spent thirty years building the most isolationist dragon regime since the Romanians went dark in ’74.

If there’s a crack in that wall, it’s him. Questions?”

I had twelve. None he could answer.

“Your escort’s the clan enforcer.” Click. “Dominic Graves.”

I looked at the screen for longer than the photograph deserved.

It was a surveillance shot, taken from above and several stories away, an angle that made most people look diminished.

Dominic Graves didn’t diminish. Dark hair. Hard jaw. Hands loose at his sides in a way that didn’t read relaxed so much as temporarily unemployed.

His file had been four pages. I read it three times without marking a thing because there had been nothing useful to mark.

He’d been an enforcer since he was old enough to walk into a fight, which for a dragon meant childhood.

There were no known associates outside clan function, no relationship history, and no hobbies.

Nothing soft enough to grab onto if I needed leverage.

Every paragraph of his psych profile circled the same fact from a different angle: a man trained so completely that everything outside the function had calcified into absence.

He was going to be the problem.

Not because he looked volatile. Because he looked like every volatile thing in him had been locked behind a door no one living should open.

“He’ll shadow you for the duration,” Davis said. “It’s standard for human visitors on clan territory. Don’t give him a reason to get curious.”

“I don’t give anyone reasons, Davis.”

The corner of his mouth moved, which was as close as he came to expressing approval. “Cover details.”

He clicked through the rest of the folder.

Diplomatic credentials, embassy housing in the visitor wing, accredited language certifications dated three years too early to be the truth, a cleared travel history that erased the eighteen months I had spent in Macau.

The cover was tight. It was the same cover I had used in Troms? in ’23, albeit with a different last name and a different set of paperwork.

Davis liked covers that had been pressure-tested. He used the same family of legends across operations. It was cheaper than starting fresh.

“The embassy translator pool will read your name on the State Department roster Tuesday morning. They won’t have been briefed and will assume you transferred over from Mandarin support.”

“Got it.”

“Last thing: you don’t have an exfil contact in the building.”

I met his eyes. “Excuse me?”

“There’s no asset on the inside. No friendly face. The Norwegians caught our last one in ’21 and the Ashenmere council watched us pull him out. We haven’t put another in. You’ll be running cover for the duration with no fallback.”

That wasn’t in the prelim, which explained why he had been standing.

“And if it goes sideways?”

“You walk into the consulate in Seattle. Ask for the regional security officer. You say the word Cordillera. He’ll know what to do.”

“And if I can’t get to the consulate?”

He paused for three seconds, maybe four. “Then you don’t.”

I raised my brows.

He didn’t blink. He wasn’t, I noticed, apologizing for it. He was telling me, in the cadence we had built between us over six years, that the operation was important enough that the ordinary safety nets had been removed, and I was walking in knowing it.

“Understood.”

He let the word settle, then closed the folder. “Good.”

I picked up the folder and walked out.

* * *

My apartment was thirteen minutes from headquarters by any route that respected traffic laws.

Mine did not.

There were six ways home. The fastest required a left turn that was technically illegal between four and six p.m., which was simply a scheduling disagreement.

Eleven minutes and fifty-three seconds, door to door.

Today, I was Catalina Cordero: professional rule-bender, tactical optimist, and woman willing to save herself ninety seconds on principle.

I took the stairs, rounded the second-floor landing, reached for my keys, and then the smell found me. Garlic. Wine. Something herbed and slow-cooked.

He had been home for hours.

I stood outside my own door with the classified folder under my arm and breathed it in. A whole life, soft in all the places I wasn’t. A life that made me feel guilty for not wanting more of it.

“Hey.” Nate looked up from the stove, smiling easily as I walked in. He was wearing the gray shirt he had owned since grad school, with the fraying collar I had suggested throwing away twice and would probably suggest again. “Good timing. Twenty minutes.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.” He turned back to the pan. “How was it?”

I set the folder on the counter, label-side down.

“Fine. Routine.”

He nodded and didn’t push.

He had a gift for not pushing. He never asked the second question. I had been telling myself for four years that was respect. I had recently started wondering whether it was something else.

He poured me a glass of wine and I sat at the counter and watched him move around my kitchen with easy familiarity. At this point he knew where my saucepans lived better than I did.

“Seattle, right?” he said.

“Yep. I leave Wednesday for a week. Maybe two.”

“That’s longer than usual.”

“It’s a diplomatic thing. There are a lot of moving pieces.”

He nodded. He always nodded. He accepted the vague shape and the approximate duration and moved on without ever once asking the question that would make me have to actually lie to him.

I had loved that about him for four years. Lately, the relief had started to feel a little too much like loneliness.

Mama had been making this case for a year.

Mija. My mother’s voice surfaced, uninvited and perfectly timed, as always. Four years and no ring. You know what that means.

It means he’s taking his time, Mamá.

It means he’s comfortable. Men who are comfortable don’t change. You want a man who’s a little uncomfortable. A man who’s afraid of losing you.

I drank my wine.

“You get quiet before the big ones,” Nate said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was stirring something. He wasn’t pushing.

“I’m fine.”

“I know you are.” He glanced over his shoulder and smiled.

We ate at the counter. He told me about a server migration at work that had gone sideways in exactly the way he’d told them it would. I asked the right questions and laughed at the right beats and was, for an hour, just a woman eating dinner with a man who loved her.

It wasn’t hard. It had never been hard.

Nate was warm and funny and present in the generous, uncomplicated way he did everything. His interior matched his exterior. He had never once asked me to open a door I wanted closed.

Some nights, that felt like love. Some nights, it felt like proof he had never noticed the door.

After dinner, he kissed my temple on the way to the couch. “Come watch something when you’re ready.”

I listened to the television from the kitchen and opened the folder instead.

* * *

Martin Solberg wasn’t attending the dinner. He was sending his son.

You didn’t send your heir to a rival clan’s table for a routine trade meeting unless you were making a statement, and I had been in this job long enough to know that whether the statement was we trust you or we aren’t afraid of you depended entirely on which version of dragon politics you happened to believe in.