Catch #3
I had reached her chair before Leland managed to finish pushing his own back from the table. His hand was still half-lifted, his mouth arranged around an offer he would no longer be making.
Cordero had noticed.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at Leland, then at me. “Do you ever get tired of appearing exactly where people are about to step?”
“No.”
She took a breath shorter than the last one. “That sounds exhausting.”
“Not for me.”
We left the dining room. For the first two corridors, she behaved. On the third, she did not.
The guest wing turned right. The left corridor led to the gardens and the lower exterior doors which were locked at night and monitored. A human would not know that from looking.
Cordero looked anyway. She did not turn her head. She did not slow. Her gaze touched the reflection in the glass panel beside a wall sconce and used it to measure the corridor behind us. Then she took the left.
I let her have three steps. “Ms. Cordero.”
She stopped. “Yes?”
“Your quarters are this way.”
She looked down the corridor she had chosen. “Are they?” The question was mild. The interest under it was not.
I let my gaze move to the darkened corridor behind her. Garden access. Lower exterior doors. Two cameras, three locks, pressure grid under the third row of stone. She had chosen well.
“Yes.”
“Big place.”
“You counted every turn from your room on the way here.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“That must make your job easier.”
“No.” The word came out amused.
She did not look away. Two seconds. Three. The skin at her throat gave her away, soft and fast. I looked away first. I had not survived this long by walking willingly toward open flame.
“This corridor is restricted after dark,” I said.
“Good to know.”
“You already knew.”
“I suspected.”
“You were testing the boundary.”
She glanced once toward the garden doors, then back to me. “I’m a translator. We’re very precise about definitions.”
“No,” I said. “You are precise about where definitions fail.”
Something behind her eyes caught the joke. The same controlled trace of warmth she had let me see earlier. I was beginning to understand that Cordero did not smile by accident. She deployed warm glances the way some people deployed knives.
We turned back toward the guest wing. At her door, she stopped and faced me. “Do you stand here all night?”
“No.” A lie.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. She knew it was a lie.
I should not have enjoyed that either.
“Good night, Mr. Graves.”
“Good night, Ms. Cordero.”
She opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it between us. I stood outside her door for nineteen more minutes for no reason I was permitted to put in writing. Then I went to find Yuki.
* * *
I knocked, then opened the door.
Yuki acknowledged me without looking up. “Report.”
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. Her desk was covered in trade documents, dinner placements, and three sealed messages from the coastal clans. She had arranged them in precise stacks. Yuki trusted paper more than people. Usually, she was right.
“The translator is not a translator.”
Yuki did not look surprised. Yuki rarely looked surprised. “Confidence?”
“Ninety-five percent.”
She turned a page. The rasp of paper. “Capability?”
“Trained. Six-plus years. Probably more.”
“Threat to us?” There was the question.
I made my mouth move around the sentence required. “Unclear. Watch and report.”
Yuki turned a page. “You’ll continue as her escort.”
“Yes.”
“And you won’t provoke her.”
I looked at her. Yuki kept reading. “I have not provoked her yet.”
“No. You corrected her in three corridors, disciplined a guard for walking too close to her, and escorted her from dinner quickly enough that Leland nearly offered his arm to an empty chair.”
I said nothing. Silence was not an admission. With Yuki, it was not a defense either.
She looked up then. Her pale gaze holding mine. “Dominic.”
“Yes.”
“She’s a human intelligence operative in our compound on the week of a state dinner.”
“Yes.”
“That makes her dangerous.”
“Yes.”
She set her pen down. “It doesn’t make her yours to manage.”
The mate-bond rose in me so sharply that for a moment the room became simpler. Desk. Door. Yuki. Distance to Cordero. Threats. Paths.
I put it down.
Yuki saw. “Anything else?” she asked quietly.
I considered telling her the truth.
I caught her scent in the corridor and she’s my mate.
I considered the consequences. I considered Cordero, in the room at the end of the corridor, who at that exact moment was probably standing at her bathroom mirror taking off mascara and not knowing any of this.
“No.”
Yuki watched me. Then she nodded. “Go.”
I closed the door behind me and walked back to her corridor.
I checked both ends and the service stair.
I checked the camera angle over the west turn, which had been drifting for three weeks and still needed repair.
I checked the lock on the garden access door because Cordero had looked at it once from the far end of the corridor and I did not trust the amount of interest she had managed to hide.
Then I returned to her door.
I stood outside it for the rest of the night, and for the first time in seventy years of doing this work, I did not catch myself counting the minutes.