Catch
Dominic
I’d been standing outside her door for nineteen minutes.
I’d walked human visitors through this compound for the better part of seventy years.
Two hundred and thirty-one, by my last count.
Diplomats, journalists, three U.S. presidents, one prime minister, and a French defense attaché who had tried to photograph the west vault with a camera hidden in his tie clip.
They walked in. I walked them around. I delivered them to dinner. I delivered them out the front door. I forgot their faces inside the hour.
My function had never required me to stand outside a visitor’s door and count the minutes. It had never required me to know the cadence of a woman’s breathing through a wall.
It had never put my body outside my mate’s room. This was a first.
Her name was on the inside of every breath I took.
Cordero.
Lamb. The universe had a sense of humor. I had never cared for it. She was not a lamb.
She had walked past me and had not looked up. She had clocked me at three steps out and did not alter her gait by a single increment. Her hands stayed loose. Her weight stayed even. She had the most controlled walk I had read from a human in seventy years of operational hallways.
Trained.
I had been doing this long enough to know what a trained walk looked like.
Cordero was not a State Department translator.
I worked through the rest of what the corridor had given me, because it was already a longer list than I was comfortable with.
Five-two. Maybe five-three with the shoes. Compact mass. Center of gravity low and well-managed. No visible weapon. Her right hand had cleared the strap of her bag at the shoulder before she crossed me, an unconscious clear that came from years of carrying something heavier than a notebook.
Then there was her scent.
Her scent had not behaved like other scents. It had moved across me like a hand across a wall in the dark, looking for the switch.
I had recognized her.
Seventy years of escorts, council meetings, and trade delegations, and I had let every human pass me without so much as a flicker. This woman had walked past at nine inches of clearance, and the older part of me had lifted its head and paid attention.
She was mine.
I rejected the sentence. I stood very still in the corridor and rejected it twenty or thirty times, and every time I rejected it the sentence came back at the same volume, calm and unimpressed.
Mine.
The bond was supposed to be impossible to ignore. I had always considered that a piece of ludicrous marketing by dragons who wanted an excuse to behave badly.
I had been ignoring it for nineteen minutes. I would continue to ignore it for the duration of her stay.
The door at the end of the corridor stayed closed.
She would be running her sweep. She would do it without hesitation and without fuss.
She would find the optical pickup in the smoke detector.
She would find the directional microphone behind the painting.
She might find the pressure plate, which had been installed in human-visitor quarters six years ago after a journalist from Brussels proved more ambitious than intelligent.
The first two devices would tell us she was a professional.
The third would tell us how good.
The pressure-plate light on my wrist remained dark.
I listened.
Not to her. The room was built to prevent that. Thick door. Insulated frame. Human privacy, within the limits of clan hospitality, which were generous in language and narrow in practice.
I listened to the corridor.
The ventilation changed when a body moved inside the room. A human would not hear it. Most shifters would not bother.
I heard her cross from the entry into the bedroom. Efficient. No wasted pacing. No hesitation at the threshold. No theatrical outrage when she found the first device.
Good.
She found the smoke-detector pickup in under four minutes. The microphone behind the painting soon after. The pressure plate took longer, as it should have. Most professionals found the obvious devices first and mistook the room for clean.
Cordero did not.
She left everything in place.
Better.
She was not sweeping like a diplomat with security training. She expected rooms to lie.
State Department translator, my ass.
Whoever had sent her had built the cover too cleanly and too narrowly. That meant haste or disregard. Neither spoke well for the value they placed on bringing her home.
I did not like that. I disliked, more, that I did not like that.
A sound came from inside the room. Water. The shower. She had taken her work bag into the bathroom.
Clever.
I looked down the empty corridor and made my jaw unclench.
The shower ran, then shut off. For a while nothing reached me. Then the ventilation carried a murmur. Quiet. Controlled. She was on the phone.
I could not hear the words. The frame was built to prevent it. What reached me was cadence. Not the clipped, even register she had used on me in the corridor, but pitched lower and warmer. Personal. I should not have wondered who had earned that voice from her. I did anyway.
The bond pushed harder at me, blunt and relentless. She was behind the door. She was alone. She was in a room full of clan surveillance, and she did not know what my council would do with what they learned.
She also did not know that the dragon outside her door had already begun making a list of all the obstacles between her and the exit.
My little spy, the older part of me supplied.
I rejected the possessive before it could attach itself.
* * *
She opened the door an hour and four minutes after she had closed it.
I had moved by then. I moved on minute thirty-seven, when my extreme vigilance began to look like a pattern the cameras would flag for review. I took up a defensive position on the opposite wall. Three-quarter angle to her door, sightline to both ends of the corridor, the standard formation.
I could justify that one in my report.
Cordero came out in a different jacket. The shoes were the same. No perfume. She had recalibrated her face on the way through the door. A controlled face that gave nothing.
The urge to laugh arrived. I declined it.
“Dinner is downstairs,” I said. “At eighteen hundred. I will walk with you.”
Her gaze moved once down the corridor behind me, not enough to be obvious. Measuring exits. Distance. Whether I was standing between her and freedom by accident or design.
“I can find dinner.”
I had no doubt she could. That was not the point.
“I will walk with you.”
She looked back at me then. Properly. Briefly. “That wasn’t a question, was it?”
“No, Ms. Cordero.”
I worked very hard not to call her little spy. I had been within half a syllable of it. I had survived battlefields with less discipline.
A small pause. “Right.” Then she retreated into her room and closed the door.
For half a breath, she leaned against it. I heard the faint shift of her shoulder against the wood, the small, controlled exhale she did not want anyone else to have.
Then she straightened. Her footsteps crossed the room. The closet door opened.
I had nothing to do for the next ninety seconds so I ran the inventory.
Cordero had walked through the corridor briskly but not hurried. She had carried her work bag in her left hand. The watch was wrong for a translator. She had carried herself like a person who knew where every exit was in every room she entered.
She had also carried herself like a person who knew when she was being watched and had decided not to let it bother her.
Translator. Sure.
The door opened again.
She was magnificent.
I straightened off the wall.
We did not speak. I led her down the corridor, half a step ahead and to the right, sightline maintained, body angled to put me between her and the lobby. It was unnecessary. We were the full length of the approach from any threat she could possibly encounter inside a clan compound. I did it anyway.
She walked beside me without looking at me. I, who should have had more discipline than this, looked at her.
She tracked the corridor with her shoulders. They shifted before her head did, the primary sensor, the head a secondary instrument.
Deeply trained.
I was going to have to write this report carefully.
At the first intersection, she slowed by half a step. Not enough for most escorts to notice. Enough for me.
The corridor to the left led to the library and lower conference rooms. Straight ahead led to the dining hall. She did not look left. She did not need to. Her attention touched the turn and moved on.
I stopped.
She took one more step before she realized I was no longer beside her. Then she turned, smooth as a door closing. “Problem?”
“Dinner is this way.”
“I know.” The answer was too quick.
I let my gaze move to the corridor she had pretended not to study.
Her eyes came to mine. Dark. Patient. Entirely too interested. “Why did you stop?”
“Because you wanted to know whether I would.”
For the first time, something in her face changed. A small internal adjustment occurred, as if she had moved me from one category into another. I did not like how much I wanted to know what she was thinking.
“I was looking at the architecture,” she said.
“No, you were not.”
Her mouth softened at one corner. “Bold thing to say to a diplomatic guest.”
She did not sound offended. Offense would have been easy. Offense wanted apology, soothing, leverage. Cordero sounded as if she had set a small object on the floor between us and was waiting to see whether I would step on it.
“Accurate thing to say to one.”
Her eyes lightened by a fraction, then the lightening was gone. “Do all your guests get corrected in hallways?”
“Only the ones who test their escorts.”
She glanced, finally, toward the left-hand corridor. A concession. A small one. “Sounds inefficient.”
“It saves time later.” I resumed walking before the exchange became less defensible.
Her gaze flicked over my shoulder to the left-hand corridor and back. She had already marked the turn. She fell into step beside me.