Chess
Catalina
By Thursday afternoon, I had three things I was certain of.
One: Dominic Graves had been outside my door for four consecutive nights without sleeping.
The aide who brought my schedule at seven gave me a look that translated, across the cultural divide between humans and dragons, as please do something about this.
I didn’t know what she expected me to do. Invite him in? Sedate him? File a complaint with whatever department handled emotionally repressed enforcers with territorial insomnia?
I took the paper and pretended not to notice her noticing the man standing ten feet behind me. Dominic did the same.
Two: Rhain Solberg had decided to spend the rest of the week behaving as if we had been the closest of friends since nursery school.
He greeted me in corridors by my first name. He stopped to ask after my morning. He told me a small joke about the Norwegian deputy’s tie on Thursday and waited for me to laugh. He was delighted when I did. He used charm as both a weapon and a public service.
He sat across from me in the conference room and looked at me with open, fond attention. He had decided I was the most interesting person in the building and intended for everyone watching to understand it.
Three: the state dinner was tomorrow night and the Norwegian delegation was here to sabotage Yuki’s negotiating position with the U.S. Somebody at this table was going to do something they couldn’t take back.
* * *
Thursday’s council session ran from nine to noon. I translated and watched.
Yuki at the head of the table. Three Ashenmere elders to her right.
Two elders I hadn’t yet placed, who I now suspected were a quiet faction within her own clan.
The Norwegian delegation across, with Bjorn at its head.
Two Japanese observers from Clan Akane I hadn’t been told to expect.
The U.S. ambassador’s senior trade representative and his deputies.
And Rhain, my apparent best friend, across the table.
Rhain walked into the council suite at eight fifty-seven and stopped at my chair before taking his own.
He set a small paper bag beside my notebook. “Good morning, Catalina.” Then he gave me a wink that was, somehow, not cheesy.
Across the room, Dominic was glaring at the bag. I looked down at it. The top had been folded over twice, but warmth still radiated through the paper, carrying the unmistakable smell of butter and bread.
I opened the bag and inside was a croissant, golden and flaky and still warm enough to fog the paper. I broke off the end.
It was very good, and my small appreciative hum was unfortunately audible. Across the table, Rhain’s pen went still for exactly one second. The warmth in his face sharpened, pleased and faintly victorious. Hypothesis confirmed.
Somehow Dominic’s glare increased.
Wonderful. Now they both knew.
I tried to ignore the increasing warmth in my face. “Lord Solberg.”
“Still so formal.”
“Formality seems appropriate.”
His smile widened.
Behind me, Dominic went still, in the way only someone who had spent days tracking his breathing would catch.
Unfortunately, I had.
Rhain greeted the room and let the open warmth stay on his face. Bjorn, beside him, tilted his head but didn’t comment.
And Dominic, standing along the back wall in the enforcer’s position, looming, was the loudest thing in the room.
I noticed, slowly, that the council was rearranging itself around him. Not consciously. The Ashenmere elder who was speaking would, every fourth or fifth sentence, glance over her shoulder toward his position. The Japanese observer wouldn’t turn his head, but would turn his shoulder.
Yuki was the only person in the room who didn’t adjust.
Yuki had this man on her staff. Yuki had built whatever he was, decades ago, and everyone knew it. The respect with which the rest of the room handled him was hers, redirected. And now, inconveniently, some portion of that redirected respect kept landing near me.
The looks had started as staff glances in hallways. Then council glances. Then the silent calculation of dragons who saw Dominic standing too close to me and seemed to understand something I hadn’t been told.
So I had done what any reasonable person would do after being trapped in a dragon compound with inconsistent access to information and a man whose eyes had gone dragon more than once in my direction.
I searched the agency database.
Claim references kept appearing. Dragons were infuriatingly careful about the language. Agency files treated the subject as a risk category, which was at least honest, if not useful.
If the files were right, then the question was not whether Dominic was breaking protocol. The question was whether everyone else had already decided he had a reason.
A claim was not always a pair.
The academic sources used the word nest. Pair-bonds were what humans had documented, because pair-bonds left two people standing publicly together long enough to photograph. The other formations were rarer, quieter, and, in the older texts, treated as the more stable arrangement.
Three was the number the texts kept circling. A nest of three was harder to break than a pair. The academics had stopped trying to find living examples to cite. And nest formations of any size beyond two had been steadily disappearing from the public record over the past century.
A separate problem. Not tonight’s. Fragments, not evidence.
I was dealing with a potential claim laid by Dominic. Maybe. Or paranoia with a classified-document budget.
Either way, the thought made my chest do something professionally embarrassing.
Which was inconvenient for several reasons, chief among them being that I had a boyfriend. A real one. In my real life. Nate. A nice man in my real apartment who loved me.
I took a sip of coffee.
I translated three formal exchanges in Norwegian and two in Mandarin and rendered Bjorn’s precise Norwegian phrasing on rare-earth allocations into a U.S. English that was correct in every word and devastating in the small set of words I chose to use.
The senior trade rep nodded.
The senior trade rep didn’t realize he had just been fed a translation that was eighty percent his own brief and twenty percent Bjorn’s actual proposal, and that the twenty percent was the part that was going to matter at the dinner.
* * *
I caught Rhain in an empty corridor at three.
I wasn’t looking for him. I was on my way to the library to refresh my notes for the dinner, and he was on his way somewhere else. The corridor was empty between us in both directions for forty feet.
We both stopped at the same time.
Dominic was ever present as my shadow.
He saw Rhain at the same moment I did, took the wall on my side, and made it clear by his stillness that he wasn’t, today, going to interrupt anything that happened in this corridor unless I asked him to.
The diplomatic smile stayed on Rhain’s face.
Underneath the smile, his face was doing nothing. The eyes, the muscles around the mouth, all of it had gone briefly offline between rounding the bend and recovering.
I had walked in on him in the wrong instant. He looked tired, in a way no one normal would notice.
But the polish had thinned at the edges. The smile arrived half a beat later than usual. His shoulders sat lower beneath the dark wool of his coat.
He recovered. He gave me the public smile. Warm and easy and entirely constructed. “Catalina.”
“Rhain.”
I could hear the heating click.
“I was on my way to find Bjorn.”
“Mm.”
His eyes narrowed with faint amusement. “You’re all doing that now.”
“Doing what?”
“The sound.”
I tilted my head. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
The corridor carried our two voices and nothing else. Watched-quiet. No corridor in Ashenmere was ever empty. There were cameras in the corners, sensors in the seams, probably three forms of shifter hearing pointed in our direction from rooms I couldn’t see.
Dominic stood behind me like a weapon kept holstered. Rhain stood in front of me like one left politely on the table.
“Are you all right?” I asked. The question came out unauthorized.
Rhain didn’t answer immediately. “Yes.”
The yes wasn’t the truth.
“Have you slept this week?”
“In pieces.”
“Mm.”
A tiny rueful smile. “You’ve picked that up from Graves,” he said.
“It’s useful.”
“Most bad habits are.”
There was something softer under the amusement now, and that was worse than the charm. Charm I could read. Softness required different equipment.
His gaze moved once past my shoulder to Dominic. Then back to me. “You should go to the library, little lamb.”
The name landed wrong. He said it lightly, warmly, as if it belonged to some private language we both spoke.
“Don’t call me that.”
His real smile appeared then. Not the public one. “There you are.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was wondering how long it would take to get a rise out of you.”
Irritation rose in me fast. “Congratulations. A triumph of diplomacy.”
“No,” he said. “A personal indulgence.”
Behind me, Dominic seemed to have stopped breathing.
Rhain noticed but his eyes stayed on me.
“You enjoy irritating people?”
“Not people. You.”
That shouldn’t have irritated me so much.
This was, technically, the assignment. Capture Rhain’s attention.
Find out what he wanted, what his father wanted, and what Norway was planning to do when the rare-earth negotiations turned ugly.
I had been sent here to invite interest. Here he was, interested and trying to get a rise out of me.
“That seems unwise.”
“Most interesting things are.”
The library was waiting, and the corridor was open, and there were cameras in the corners and sensors in the walls and one dragon behind me who was becoming a structural hazard.
I didn’t move.
Rhain’s amusement softened at the edges. “I like you, Catalina.”
The sentence was simple. No flirtatious embroidery. No diplomatic maneuver. No clever ambiguity I could file under possible manipulation and analyze later with coffee and better judgment.
My pulse gave one hard, unprofessional knock. “You don’t know me.”