Inventory
Catalina
He was already in the corridor when I opened my door at seven the next morning. I was beginning to wonder if he ever wasn’t.
“Mr. Graves.”
“Ms. Cordero. Tour of the compound is at oh-eight hundred. I thought you would want coffee first.” He held out a paper cup.
Refusing would’ve been theatrical, so I took it. I wanted it badly enough to resent him on principle.
It was the right temperature and right strength. Strong, hot, no room left for milk. It was exactly how I drank it, and exactly what I had told no one in this building.
At the first sip I made the small, involuntary hum I made when coffee was good and I was happy about it. I loved coffee with my whole unguarded heart and always had. It escaped before my professionalism could intercept it.
Dominic looked over. One eyebrow cocked.
Heat climbed my neck, the first blush I’d produced on assignment in years. I buried it the only way I had. “It’s fine,” I said, which fooled neither of us.
I didn’t ask whether Dominic had guessed, asked someone, or had decided overnight that my caffeine dependency was now part of his jurisdiction.
“Thank you.”
He nodded. He stayed on the wall. I drank the coffee in the doorway. He watched the corridor. I watched him watch the corridor.
He was wearing a different black coat.
“You are staring, Ms. Cordero.”
I took another sip of coffee and worked to keep my expression neutral and pleasant. Pleasant was useful. It made people underestimate the amount of information being collected behind it.
“I’m evaluating my escort.”
His eyes dropped to my mouth as I sipped, then returned to my eyes. “Of course.”
“Did you sleep well, Mr. Graves?”
“No.” A flat, immediate answer with no social padding.
I lowered the cup. “That was a polite question, by the way.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve said fine.”
His gaze went to the corridor, then back to me. “I prefer not to lie to you.”
* * *
The tour took two hours. He walked me through the public zones first. The lobby, the conference suites, the press room, the ceremonial dining hall, the library.
He named every space but didn’t narrate them.
He had given this tour a thousand times and wasn’t going to dress it up for the thousand-and-first.
“Library.”
I provided a small nod.
He moved on. “Conference Three,” he said. “Used for trade delegations.”
He waited the half-beat that meant next room. “This corridor is closed to visitors during shifting hours.”
The corridor looked like every other corridor: timber, steel, glass, expensive silence.
“What are shifting hours?”
“Variable.”
The vent above us cycled and went quiet again.
“That’s not a useful answer, Mr. Graves.”
“It is the answer.” He said it without looking at me, which was probably for the best because I couldn’t stop watching him.
I tried not to enjoy it. I failed.
“Ms. Cordero.” The way he said my name made me immediately want to deny whatever he had noticed.
“Yes?”
“You have been counting doors.”
I had been. Forty-seven so far. I had also been counting cameras, light fixtures, sightlines, vent grates, and the steel seams in the walls that I was fairly sure were structural reinforcement that didn’t appear in the architectural filings.
“It’s a habit.”
“A translator habit.”
“That’s right.”
He turned his head then. Slowly. Those almost-black eyes settled on me. My heart stuttered and sent heat sinking through me, which was a dramatic and frankly unhelpful interpretation of eye contact.
“Carry on counting,” he said. Then he turned and walked.
I followed him with the coffee going cold in my hand and heat in my body that was refusing to leave.
* * *
We turned a corner on the way to the training grounds, and I tripped.
My heel caught on a lifted seam in the carpet runner, and my body made the efficient decision to find the nearest stable object before my dignity could submit an alternative plan.
The nearest stable object was Dominic Graves’s forearm.
My hand landed six inches above his wrist. His coat cuff shifted under my palm. Bare skin met the heel of my hand.
He went rigid.
Older than offense, and sharper. Every line of him locked around the point of contact. The touch had registered as an event.
I remembered the briefing too late.
Dragons didn’t touch casually. They didn’t bump shoulders, shake hands, or brush past one another in crowded rooms. Touch meant permission, intimacy, challenge, threat. Sometimes all four, depending on who was stupid enough to initiate it.
My palm was still on his skin.
His pupils went vertical. My breath stopped. He moved. Not away. Closer.
Only half a step. Barely anything. Enough that the heat of him came up around me and the cedar scent under his coat turned suddenly overwhelming.
His gaze dropped to where my fingers rested against his forearm, and the muscle beneath my palm flexed once. Controlled. Deliberate. Like he was paying out restraint by the inch.
“Ms. Cordero,” he said. My name sounded different in his mouth at that distance. Rougher. Less professional.
My hand came off him too fast. The heat stayed in my palm. “Sorry.” The word sounded wrong in the corridor. Too small for whatever had just happened.
He looked at my hand for one more second. Then, with visible effort, at my face.
“Dragons don’t like touch,” I said, because apparently my mouth had decided to join the list of compromised systems.
“No.”
“I forgot.”
He looked at me, level. “I did not.”
There were several ways to interpret that.
He turned before I could answer. “Walk with me.”
The distance between us didn’t go back to what it was before. If anything, he walked half an inch closer.
* * *
The training grounds were on the seaward side of the compound, behind a set of doors that took two thumbprints and a retina to open.
“You do not have access to this section,” he said.
“Then why are you taking me through it?”
His weight shifted forward, sightline already on the doors. “I am not taking you through it. I am taking you past it.”
The doors opened as someone else exited. We walked past them. For the first time in my life, I saw a dragon mid-shift.
I had read every classified bulletin. I had watched every piece of grainy surveillance footage the agency had on file. I had thought I knew what the shift looked like. I had been wrong.
It wasn’t a transformation. It was a correction. The body of the dragon was the true body and the body of the human was the lie, and what I was watching at the far end of the training yard was the moment a body remembered what it was.
The shift took four seconds.
Four seconds of the human form going long and wide and impossible. The bones doing things bones couldn’t do. The skin going scaled and gold and dark in the same wash. The wings unfolded with a crack, remembering their creases.
The dragon looked at me. A hundred yards away. Mid-shift completed, wings half-tucked, head ten feet off the ground at the lowest. It looked at me across the yard for one long second.
I didn’t move.
Beside me, Dominic did. Not much. A shift of one boot. A turn of his shoulder. Barely movement at all unless you had spent the morning memorizing every inch of him like a professional idiot.
Suddenly more of him was between me and the yard than had been there a second before.
The dragon across the stone lowered its head.
Dominic’s hand opened at his side.
The yard went quieter.
Three shifters near the far wall stopped talking. A woman carrying a coil of rope looked over and then very carefully looked away. The dragon watching me blinked once, slow and deliberate, and angled its head aside.
“Do not stare, Ms. Cordero,” Dominic said quietly.
“I’m not staring,” I said. “I’m observing politely.”
“You are staring.”
I made myself look away before the enormous black thing across the yard decided my manners were a personal insult. Or before Dominic decided for it.
“Who’s that?”
“Cael. Junior enforcer.”
Cael lowered his head a fraction. Not a bow. More like a predator adjusting its view.
“He looks at people like that often?” I asked.
“No.” The answer was too quick.
“Why did he look at me like that?”
Dominic didn’t answer immediately. The silence held. I heard wind moving across the training yard and claws scraping against stone.
“He was identifying you.”
My throat went dry. “As what?”
Another pause. “As under my escort.”
“Right.”
The doors closed between us and the yard.
* * *
He took me to lunch.
I hadn’t asked for lunch. Dominic Graves had decided that I needed to eat. We sat at a small corner table in the staff dining room, which no other visitor was seated in. He had bypassed the visitors’ dining hall without commenting on it.
“Why this room?”
He took the seat facing the door. “Quieter.”
The kitchen pass clattered behind us. He didn’t look at it.
“Quieter than what?”
“The other one.”
I waited. He didn’t elaborate, because apparently dragons considered context optional.
I ordered a salad. He ordered nothing. The server took his lack of order without surprise.
“You don’t eat?”
“I will eat later.”
“Off camera?”
His eyes came up. For two full seconds, he looked at me as if deciding which version of the truth was least dangerous. “Yes.”
“Got it.” I picked up my fork.
I had learned something. So had he.
The salad was good. Crisp lettuce, fresh herbs, a vinaigrette someone in the kitchen had made by hand that morning. The bread came in a small basket I hadn’t asked for. The water was cold.
The room was three-quarters full of staff in compound uniform. The empty quarter was the section nearest our table.
The servers approached. They came in from the kitchen door, made the small body-correction humans made near shifters, slowed their pace by a quarter, set things down with both hands instead of one, and retreated at an angle that didn’t put their backs to him. None of it was conscious.
I ate slowly.
I had been told once, in a different kitchen in a different country, that you could read the rank of a man at a table by how the staff moved past him.
The man across from me wasn’t the highest-ranking shifter in this compound. Yuki was. He was the one the staff was most physically careful about, because rank here ran on a second axis, nothing to do with titles: who could kill on the council’s behalf at short notice.
The staff knew it.
“Mr. Graves.”
“Yes.”
I set my fork down. Squared it to the plate. “Permission to ask a personal question.”
“No.” Immediate. Flat. Almost impressive.
“Right.”
He didn’t smile. I thought I caught something behind his eyes. I might’ve imagined it.
“Eat,” he said.
* * *
He walked me back to my quarters at a quarter past one. The corridor outside my door was empty. He stopped two steps short of the door and turned to face me.
“Ms. Cordero.”
“Mr. Graves.”
“You may want to rest. The state dinner schedule begins tomorrow, and you will not have an empty afternoon for some time.”
“Noted.”
He didn’t move.
He was looking at the floor between us. Not at me. The line of his shoulders had a tension in it I hadn’t seen all day. A small concession of weight. He had been holding himself back by force. The force was beginning to wear on him.
“Mr. Graves.”
He looked up.
“Are we going to do this for two weeks?”
“Do what?”
I gestured between us. The gesture didn’t require translation.
He looked at me a beat longer than necessary. His face didn’t change. His voice did. “Go inside, little spy.”
I had been prepared for several answers. That wasn’t one of them.
The words landed too quickly to catch: the accusation first, then the intimacy of it, then the private little hook of his voice around little.
Absolutely not.
“What did you call me?”
His jaw shifted. “Go inside.”
“No, I don’t think I will. You called me—what did you just call me?”
“Inside.”
I stepped closer before I thought better of it.
His eyes dropped to the movement. Just once. A less paranoid woman might’ve missed it.
Unfortunately for both of us, I was professionally paranoid. “I’m not a spy, Mr. Graves.”
“Mm.”
“I’m a translator.”
“Mm.”
“Stop saying mm.”
This time, the corner of his mouth moved. Not enough to count. But enough to ruin my afternoon.
“Mm.”
I stared at him.
He stood on the same square foot of corridor he had occupied for the last three minutes, patient as stone, infuriating as a locked door, and waited.
“Ms. Cordero.”
“Yes?”
His gaze moved pointedly to my door.