Cordillera #2
The Norwegian council’s posture on rare-earth sales had been hardening for three years.
The State Department attributed the shift to Martin Solberg’s personal conservatism.
I attributed it to a quieter movement inside the Norwegian council, one that had less to do with Martin and more to do with three elders who had been getting older and more nervous in the same six years.
If Martin was sending Rhain out of Norwegian territory for the first time in six years, something had moved.
Either Martin had decided his son was finally ready to be exposed, one of the nervous elders had forced his hand, or Rhain had been sent to gather something from inside Ashenmere that no one else could reach.
All three were possible. None were comforting.
Dominic Graves’s photograph hadn’t gotten any less still in the last three hours. The jaw. The shoulders. The hands at his sides.
His psych profile said disciplined, and I read the word the way I had read it the first three times and heard a different one underneath.
Contained.
Built for one use and then used for so long the man inside had stopped being anyone’s business. Including his own.
I read his service record one more time.
The agency had pieced it together from public-record clan filings, embassy reporting, and three separate private intelligence sources who had never met each other.
He had been the Ashenmere enforcer for seventy years, which would’ve made him approximately ninety-five in human years.
He had personally killed eleven shifters in the line of duty.
The eleven kills were documented. The agency assumed the actual number was higher.
He had never married. He had never bonded. He had never, in the public record, taken a single piece of leave longer than seventy-two hours.
I tried to picture what a man did with seventy years of nothing but work. I couldn’t.
In the living room, the television laughed about something. Nate laughed softly with it.
I picked up my phone. I almost called my mother. I put it down.
I would call from Seattle. Somewhere underneath six years of training and the walls I had built from other people’s tells, Catalina Cordero still wanted to hear cuídate, mija before walking into a room full of dragons. Even if her mother thought she was just translating.
I needed to pack.
A translator’s wardrobe. Professional. Muted.
Nothing that competed for attention. Two pairs of low-heeled shoes that read as the wrong shoes but were, structurally, the right shoes for fast walking on stone floors.
A wool blazer. Three blouses in three different shades of the same neutral.
A formal dress for the state dinner, dark green, high collar to cover the spot where shifter etiquette suggested visiting humans should keep their throats covered.
The packing took five minutes. I had been doing it for six years.
I refreshed the dragon etiquette protocols.
Don’t touch.
Don’t stare during a shift.
Address elders with the formal honorific.
Address the enforcer with whatever title he prefers.
Don’t approach a mated pair without invitation.
Don’t comment on a claim mark.
Don’t ask about the bite.
The mated-pair protocol was the section the agency had spent the most time on, which told me everything I needed to know about what scared them.
Dragons bonded for life. According to the file, the bond was triggered by scent during the first close-proximity encounter.
Once it registered, it was irreversible from the dragon’s side; the human side stayed closed until the dragon bit them.
The bite went at the curve of the neck and shoulder.
A claiming wound. It opened a channel between the pair: sensation, presence, pulse.
An intimacy the agency clearly found more alarming than fire.
I should have been alarmed. Fascination got there first.
Most of my information came from paperbacks with embossed titles and men who’d lost their shirts to forces beyond their control.
Granted, my usual research materials leaned heavily werewolf, not dragon.
The novels had given claiming bites candlelight and destiny.
The agency gave them a footnote and a body count.
The agency’s data was almost entirely on pairs.
Multi-dragon bond formations existed in clan vocabulary, according to one line in the briefing, but the agency had no confirmed government record of one with a human.
The footnote ended there, which was exactly the bureaucratic shrug that got people killed.
The agency files on dragon-claimed humans were thin. The U.S. government had documented seventeen confirmed cases since 1947. Fifteen had ended with the human surviving and integrating into the clan. Two had ended with the human dying.
And the longevity, which the agency briefing had buried in a footnote because the implications were politically inconvenient.
A bonded human lived as long as their bonded dragon lived.
Pair-bonds added centuries to a human life.
Multi-bonds, in theory, extended further.
Any single surviving bonded dragon was enough to sustain the human.
By that math, the two recorded human deaths were anomalies.
I added the new protocols from the prelim.
Do not enter a room a shifter has already entered without acknowledging the shifter at the door.
Do not break eye contact with a shifter who has held eye contact with you, but don’t extend the hold beyond eight seconds.
Do not, under any circumstances, run.
The last one was new this year. The agency hadn’t explained why.
I looked at Dominic Graves’s photograph one more time. I was going to have to walk a circle around this man for two weeks and tread lightly.
Easy. People did harder things every day.
Probably.
I closed the bag with Dominic Graves’s photograph still open on the bed beside it.
Know the rules. Keep your distance. Don’t give him a reason.
The word Cordillera sat in the back of my throat. Foreign. Useful. Worth memorizing. Davis had said it once and I had heard it once and now it was mine for as long as I needed it, which would either be the next two weeks or the rest of my professional life.
I closed the file. I closed the bag. I went into the living room, where Nate had paused his show and was waiting for me.
I sat down beside him and leaned my head against his shoulder, and he pressed play.