The Second
Rhain
Iscent-locked on a translator in a receiving hall and lost the better part of ninety percent of the diplomatic strategy I’d spent three months building.
Not the ideal start to the week.
I kept my face. The face had been my entire training since I was twelve years old.
It had survived my father’s councils, three assassination attempts, one disastrous reception in Reykjavik, and the Duchess of Trondheim asking me, at seventeen, whether my father had taught me to smile like that or whether I had learned it from a mirror.
It wasn’t going to fail me now.
I shook Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere’s hand. I greeted the council. The translator from the State Department looked at me like she had me solved. I would remember that.
I kept moving even though the instinct under my skin was only interested in Catalina Cordero.
This was inconvenient.
I crossed the floor away from the translator without looking at her.
The not-looking was work.
I would’ve preferred never to look at anything else as long as I lived, which struck me as melodramatic, physiologically compromising, and absolutely true.
Bjorn was already at the bar with a glass of water in his hand. “Rhain.”
“Bjorn.”
“You saw that.”
“I did.”
He didn’t pretend not to know. He was old, and old shifters didn’t pretend. The calm eyes that had watched my father grow up were now watching me unravel.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I want to walk back across this room, claim her in front of the entire Ashenmere council, and start a war with the United States government.”
“That would be a choice.”
“The wrong choice.”
“It’s encouraging that you noticed.” He drank his water.
I didn’t have water. I should’ve had water. The handlers were going to get a memo about that.
“The Ashenmere enforcer,” I said.
Bjorn’s mouth didn’t move. His eyes did. “Yes.”
“He felt it too.”
“He felt something, though he has not declared it.”
“He isn’t going to declare to me, Bjorn.”
“No. But he hasn’t gone to his elders either.”
I glanced toward Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere. She was speaking to one of her councilors. Calm. Precise. Either she didn’t know, or she knew and was enjoying the private collapse of everyone’s planning.
With Yuki, both were possible.
“She doesn’t know,” Bjorn said.
“How can you possibly tell that from across the room?”
“Because Yuki would’ve ordered the room cleared by now.”
Unfortunately persuasive.
My mate was still standing at Yuki’s left shoulder. Catalina Cordero. The name had a rhythm I was already fond of, which was its own small evidence that I was in trouble.
She wasn’t looking at me. I felt the weight of her attention anyway.
Bjorn took another swallow of water. The glass returned to the bar without a sound. “Does the enforcer seem to know?”
“Yes.”
“Dritt.” Shit.
I didn’t need him to spell it out. The bond had chosen the same woman for the Ashenmere enforcer, and he wasn’t telling his clan.
The diplomatic situation we had spent three months engineering, patient leverage and careful concession and plausible deniability for everyone, was being detonated in real time by a woman who had answered me in my grandmother’s dialect and then looked at me as if I were the problem.
Which, to be fair, I intended to be. Eventually. When international relations were less combustible.
“Lord Solberg.” A handler appeared at my elbow. “The trade meeting begins in ten minutes.”
“Thank you.” I looked one more time across the hall.
The dispersing crowd had carried Catalina to a position near the far wall. She held a glass of water and listened to one of Yuki’s deputies, head tilted at a polite angle that was, I thought, mostly performance.
She turned her head and found me. She held the look longer than needed. No smile. No nod. She was taking inventory. So was I.
Then she looked away.
Bjorn huffed something at my elbow that was almost a laugh.
“Faen,” I said quietly. Damn.
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”
* * *
The meeting room had been chosen to make power look like neutrality. Ashenmere favored that sort of thing.
Glass on one side. Timber on another. Steel in the bones of the walls. A table long enough to place distance between parties and narrow enough to make everyone aware of who had reached for water, who had touched a pen, who had smiled at the wrong clause.
Yuki sat at the head. Bjorn took the seat across from her.
I sat to Bjorn’s right. Correct for the heir not leading the delegation. Incorrect for a dragon who could smell his mate three chairs away.
Catalina stood behind Yuki’s left shoulder.
The Ashenmere enforcer stood near the rear wall. Not directly behind Catalina. That would’ve been declaration. Not far enough away to be meaningless. His line to her was clear. His line to me was clearer.
Subtle as a drawn blade.
I placed my hands flat on the table and smiled at the deputy trade minister as if I weren’t in a room with three separate disasters.
The first twenty minutes went well. The benefit of rehearsal. A man could survive almost anything if the first twenty minutes had been practiced enough.
Bjorn opened with formal appreciation for Ashenmere hospitality.
Yuki accepted without warmth and without insult, which for Yuki was practically a bouquet.
The deputy trade minister laid out the revised supply commitments.
I answered a question about Norwegian export reliability.
Someone from Ashenmere asked about port scheduling. I answered that too.
Catalina translated when needed. She was better than her file had implied.
The file had said fluent. Fluent was a small, insufficient word.
Fluent meant comprehension. It didn’t cover her choosing between parallel meanings before the speaker had fully closed a sentence.
Nothing in it covered her softening a too-sharp phrase without dulling it, or moving a technical term across languages without losing the politics hidden inside it.
It didn’t cover the fact that every time she spoke Norwegian, some primitive part of me tried to stand up and take credit for language as a concept.
I drank water. The handlers had, blessedly, learned.
Yuki turned a page. “Lord Solberg, your delegation’s position on long-term reliability includes a proposed review every four years. Ashenmere requested six.”
Catalina translated the question into Norwegian. Her pronunciation was impeccable.
Horribly inconsiderate.
Bjorn glanced at me.
My portion.
I’d practiced this. I knew the answer. It had three parts: market volatility, extraction constraints, and political realities inside the Northern bloc. I’d drafted it myself and improved it twice. I could’ve recited it under sedation.
I looked at Yuki and tried not to look at Catalina.
My eyes went to Catalina anyway. They had their own diplomatic policy.
The enforcer’s head shifted by one degree.
I returned my attention to Yuki and delivered the first two parts of the answer correctly. The third came out wrong.
Elegantly wrong, which was worse than treaty-breaking wrong. Wrong enough to sound intentional. Wrong enough to require response.
Bjorn’s water glass paused halfway to his mouth.
Yuki’s expression didn’t change.
Catalina’s didn’t either. She translated exactly what I’d said. That was what a good translator did. That was also what a woman did when she wanted to see if you could clean up your own blood.
Yuki looked at me and the room waited.
I smiled. There were many kinds of smiles in diplomacy. This one admitted authorship.
“I should clarify,” I said.
Catalina translated. Her eyes held mine without softening.
I corrected the clause, tied it to port redundancy, and handed the revised phrasing to Bjorn as if I’d planned the concession all along. Bjorn accepted it smoothly because Bjorn had been cleaning up after the men in his family since before I was born and was very tired of all of us.
Yuki let the correction stand and the meeting moved on.
I didn’t look at Catalina for seven full minutes.
A personal achievement, given the circumstances.
At minute eight, one of the Ashenmere councilors asked whether the Norwegian side would accept an inspection provision tied to delivery delays.
Bjorn’s answer was no. My answer was also no. The answer that would move the room forward was no, offered in a way that sounded like yes had been seriously considered by reasonable men.
Catalina translated the question. I heard the phrasing she chose in Norwegian and understood, a beat before Bjorn answered, that she hadn’t translated the word inspection as the broad term. She’d chosen the narrower one. The one that implied documentation review, not physical entry.
She’d given us room.
Bjorn heard it too. He glanced at her. Then at Yuki. Then he answered in the space she had opened.
I watched Catalina from the corner of my eye. She was looking at her notes. She had just moved a negotiation and made it look like grammar.
The enforcer watched her too. His face gave nothing away, but his stillness sharpened.
So he’d noticed.
By the end of the hour, we had agreed to three framework revisions, postponed two points to the state dinner, and avoided the inspection fight with everyone’s dignity technically intact.
A success, by any external measure.
Internally, I’d spent sixty minutes trying not to challenge the Ashenmere enforcer, or ask Catalina Cordero whether she had any idea what a mess she was making of me.
I was tired. This was offensive. I’d flown across oceans with less effort.
The meeting concluded. Chairs moved. Papers gathered. Staff stood.
Catalina stepped back from Yuki’s shoulder. The enforcer moved before anyone else did, directly into the path between her and the dispersing delegates.
It was very nearly invisible. Excellent work, really. If I hadn’t been trying not to look at either of them for the better part of an hour, I might’ve missed it.
I didn’t miss it. Neither did Catalina. Her eyes went to his shoulder. Then to me.
Inventory again.
I found myself smiling.
That, too, was unwise.