The Second #2
Bjorn caught my sleeve as the room began to empty. “Don’t,” he said.
“I haven’t yet decided what I’m not doing.”
“That’s the problem.”
I looked toward the door. Catalina was gone. The enforcer was gone with her.
I exhaled through my nose.
“Trade went well,” I said.
Bjorn looked at me. “Rhain.”
“Yes?”
“You made a disaster of a clause you wrote because a woman looked at you.”
“That’s an ungenerous summary.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
“I also recovered the clause.”
“You did.”
“So really, the system works.”
Bjorn stared at me for a moment and then closed his folder. “I’m too old for this.”
“I have been saying that since I was fourteen.”
He sighed.
* * *
I stood at the window of my assigned quarters for twenty minutes after the meeting.
The view was the seaward landing strip and the Sound beyond it. The late-afternoon light was doing something to the water that I was finding compelling, although I was finding most things compelling at present.
A chair. A lamp. The grain in the desk. The thought of her hand around mine.
All fascinating.
Deeply inconvenient.
I was running the math. I had seventy hours, give or take, until the state dinner. I had three months of diplomatic preparation predicated on the assumption that my father’s strategic priorities would be the only weight on my decisions. I now had a second weight.
A beautiful woman. A larger problem. I was trying not to visibly fall over.
The side of me that was all instinct was offering helpful suggestions. All of them involved walking down the corridor to her quarters and not coming back.
I declined.
I was patient. Shifters are. I could wait. I would wait. I’d waited seventy-five years for this afternoon and had no intention of letting any version of me complicate the next seventy-five.
I went to find the enforcer. I knew where he would be. Outside her door.
I took the long route through the corridors. He was going to be unhappy to see me, and I wanted to give him advance notice.
Ashenmere staff were well-trained. No one stared. No one blocked my path. No one asked where I was going. But their attention moved ahead of me all the same, passed from one body to the next in the small language of posture and timing.
By the time I reached the guest corridor, the enforcer knew I was coming.
Surprises made reasonable men unreasonable.
He was on the wall opposite her door, positioned to see both ends of the corridor.
His eyes came up. He went lethally still. He wanted to kill me.
“Solberg.”
“Graves.”
“Step back.”
“I’m not approaching.”
“Step back, Solberg.”
I stepped back. Two steps.
“I’m not here for her,” I said.
“Then you are not here.”
A lesser man might’ve smiled.
“I’m here for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you also scent-locked on the translator, and we’re now both in a situation neither of us planned for.”
He looked at me and lifted one eyebrow. It was the look an adult gives a child who has eaten the crayon and asked for notes on his handwriting.
“Spy.” One syllable. Flat. A correction, not an argument.
The translator.
The spy.
The woman I’d failed to get a good read on and Graves had apparently understood immediately.
I made my face do nothing. It had been trained for exactly this kind of humiliation.
The Ashenmere enforcer had clocked her at the dining table. Or in the corridor. Or in the half-second she crossed his airspace and his dragon decided to become inconvenient for everyone.
He hadn’t needed my dossiers.
He hadn’t needed her Georgetown record, the Oslo fellowship, or the tiny pronunciation shift in her Norwegian that tied her to Frogner instead of Bergen.
He’d smelled the lie.
Annoying of him.
At least he told me.
Graves didn’t offer information because it felt nice to share. He offered information because he’d already weighed the price of withholding it. Calling her a spy in front of me bought him nothing, which meant he’d read me too.
Scent-locked. Already invested. Already unlikely to hurt her without hurting some newly discovered part of myself. In the grim arithmetic of dragon biology, she was safe with me. I’d sooner harm myself.
“Right,” I said, with as much dignity as the syllable could hold. Not much, but some.
I glanced at the door behind him, then took my time coming back to his face. “I would prefer not to discover what you do when you find the second half of a problem at an inconvenient moment.”
Pressure moved down the corridor, old and hot and heavy enough that the lights seemed to dim, though they hadn’t.
My instincts made several suggestions. Most involved leaving. I put my hands up, kept them visible.
“Good,” he said. A single word. Assessment.
I had, apparently, passed the first and least interesting test.
Splendid. I liked my hands.
Graves looked at me. His eyes flicked, briefly, to my throat. A scent assessment.
The instinct in me, which had until that point been making a great many opinions known about the woman behind the door, now made a different opinion known about the man on the opposite wall.
He wasn’t a rival in the simple sense. A rival wanted what you wanted and intended to take it away. Graves wasn’t a man who intended to take anything from Catalina Cordero. He intended to stand between her and the world.
That made him dangerous in an entirely different way.
“Graves.”
“Solberg.”
The corridor cooled. Or I imagined it did. “This is going to be difficult.”
“Yes.”
“For both of us.”
“Yes.”
I considered him. He considered me back. It wasn’t a conversation so much as two territorial disasters attempting grammar.
“All right,” I said. “I won’t approach her in a way that forces your hand.”
His jaw moved.
“You won’t approach her in a way that forces mine,” I added. “We’ll discover what to do with this when we have more information than we currently have.”
“You expect me to take your word?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
Good. Honesty was refreshing. Also occasionally suicidal.
“I expect you to understand that I have no interest in frightening her, exposing her, or starting a clan conflict in a guest corridor before dinner.” I paused. “Especially not before dinner. These things should have standards.”
Nothing in his face moved. But the air loosened, barely.
“She is under my escort,” he said.
“Good.” The word meant more than it said.
“She is also my mate.” The corridor went still enough to hear the building breathe.
The truth. Impolite of it.
Graves took one step toward me. Only one. It was enough to make every old instinct in me bare its teeth. I didn’t move. We had both come too far to be stupid in a hallway.
The door behind him remained closed. Catalina was on the other side of it, likely unaware that two dragons were negotiating the shape of her future a dozen feet from where she might be removing her shoes.
I hoped she was removing her shoes. Then I immediately hoped something else.
Unhelpful of them both.
Graves looked at me. I looked back. At last, he gave a single grunt of acknowledgment. An admission that these were facts neither of us could kill.
I took it. “Goodnight, Graves.”
“Solberg.”
I backed away the way I had come. Slowly. Turning my back on him too quickly would’ve been insulting.
Also, some part of me didn’t want to stop looking at her door.
* * *
I lay on the bed in my assigned quarters at one in the morning and stared at the ceiling and ran through the situation one more time.
In two days, a state dinner. A room full of shifters from three clans.
The U.S. government’s senior trade representative.
My father’s agenda moving through every conversation.
And a small dark-haired woman in a translator’s wardrobe who would be standing at Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere’s left shoulder, likely unaware that she had two shifters who claimed her as their mate.
Two shifters from rival clans were going to be trying to behave themselves around the same woman in front of an audience of some hundred and twenty people.
We weren’t going to be able to behave ourselves. I was very confident on this point.
I closed my eyes against the day. I thought about the look she’d given me across the dispersing room. She’d taken my measure and I had felt it.
She’d walked into a room of dragons and she hadn’t been afraid. Not of anyone in that room. I suspected not even of Graves, though she had the sense to be irritated by him.
Fear would’ve made her sensible. But fear hadn’t been the first thing she offered the room. Attention had. Assessment.
A blade wrapped in manners.
My mate.
Mine.
God help all of us.