Chess #2
“I might,” he said, “better than you think.” Arrogant. Certain.
“That seems like a dangerous assumption.”
“I’m assuming nothing.”
My mouth went dry. “Lord Solberg—”
“Rhain.”
“This isn’t appropriate.”
He glanced once down the corridor. Not at the cameras. Not only at Dominic. At the space around us, as if the building itself had a vote. “You’d be surprised.”
I didn’t move. “Excuse me?”
“I think everyone here would understand.” The words were mild. The implication wasn’t.
My mind went, unwillingly, to the glances in the hallways. Emmaline’s closed mouth. The elders looking from Dominic to me and away. The strange etiquette of space and silence I had been trying to understand with half a rulebook and no glossary.
“That isn’t an answer,” I said.
“No.” His voice stayed light. “It’s a warning.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that you’re applying human rules to a room that stopped using them the moment you walked into it.”
Behind me, Dominic’s silence had weight.
“And what rules should I be applying?”
Rhain’s eyes moved over my face, careful now. Past teasing, past performing. “Catalina,” he said. “What do you know about claims?”
The question landed, and every clever answer in my mouth died on impact.
I had spent half the night reading classified files on proximity behavior, visible dragon response, territorial posture, scent markers, and every sterile phrase the agency had ever invented to avoid saying a dragon wanted someone badly enough that other dragons noticed.
I had learned very little that was useful and far too much that was suggestive.
Unfortunately, my other source of information was worse.
A bookshelf worth of shifter romance I would deny under oath. Werewolves. Claiming bites. Scent matches. Heat. Mates who found each other across crowded rooms and immediately lost all interest in things like boundaries, employment, and good judgment.
Every lurid, useless page of it surfaced at once in the corridor. Standing between two actual shifters.
I looked at Dominic before I meant to. Instinct, which was always embarrassing when it arrived before strategy. He met my eyes from the end of the corridor, hands at his sides, expression unreadable, and somehow the entire space between us felt occupied by him.
Then I realized Rhain was close. Just shy of touching distance. Close enough that the cold-green scent of him threaded beneath his cologne. Close enough that if I lifted my hand, I could touch the front of his coat.
I had been so busy tracking Dominic that I had missed Rhain closing the distance.
Stupid. Distracted.
I took one step back. Rhain let me. He didn’t look away. “Not enough,” I said.
“Then look it up.”
“I have.”
“Not in the human files.”
Even the heating had stopped clicking.
“The library?” I asked.
“The older sections.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you’re pointing me toward accurate information out of generosity?”
His smile returned faintly. “Mm.”
I rolled my eyes.
Rhain’s smile sharpened like he had been waiting for proof I was still irritable. Behind me, Dominic’s weight shifted. But Rhain’s faint smile stayed exactly where it was.
“The three of us,” Rhain said, “are already in a conversation you haven’t been given the language to understand.”
My throat went dry. “That sounds dramatic.”
“It is.” He held the look. “Unfortunately.”
He stepped aside then. Giving me the corridor, the choice, the escape route, and the very irritating knowledge that he knew I needed all three. “Go to the library, little lamb.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“No.”
I stared at him.
He gave me the smallest, most infuriating smile I had ever seen. “I like getting a rise out of you.”
“That isn’t a sound diplomatic strategy.”
“No,” he said. “It’s personal.”
I moved past him before I could decide whether I wanted to hit him, interrogate him, or ask him what exactly he thought I had gotten wrong.
I went to the library.
* * *
The balcony was at the end of the library on the eighth floor, and at one in the morning on Friday, it was the only place in the compound that wasn’t full of staff preparing for the state dinner.
I wasn’t supposed to be there.
The library closed at midnight to non-residents, which I was. The aide who had walked me back to my quarters after the late prep meeting had wished me goodnight.
Then I hadn’t gone to bed.
I had meant to look up claims. Rhain’s warning in the corridor had been sitting in the back of my mind all afternoon, precise and inconvenient.
The older sections.
Fine. Tomorrow, I would find the older sections. Tomorrow, I would pull whatever clan-approved mythological nonsense passed for public knowledge and compare it against the agency files.
Tonight, I had eighteen hours until the state dinner, six pages of translation notes to reconcile, three unresolved clauses to memorize, and exactly no patience left for dragons, claims, or men who delivered ominous research assignments with cheekbones.
So I took the back stairwell.
Four floors up. Through the dark library. Out to the balcony at twelve forty-seven, because what I wanted, more than answers, was one square foot of Ashenmere that didn’t have a person in it.
I knew Dominic had followed me.
I heard him in the stairwell on the third floor and stopped pretending not to by the fifth.
He didn’t close the distance. He didn’t announce himself.
He walked in his usual position behind me and let me take the back stairwell at one in the morning because the alternative was making me ask him for privacy.
Neither of us was going to survive that conversation tonight.
He stopped somewhere inside the library. I felt him stop. I didn’t turn around to confirm it.
The view from the balcony was ridiculous. The Sound at one a.m. was a long black surface with three ferry lights moving south. The sky was clear and thin, with the stars the Pacific coast produced when it wanted you to feel small and underdressed.
I stood at the railing in my jacket and watched the water. For forty seconds, I thought about nothing. A miracle.
The door behind me opened.
Dominic came out the way he entered every room: silent, economical, and with no visible doubt that he belonged there. He stopped two paces from the railing.
He didn’t look at the water. He looked at me.
“You followed me up.”
“I escorted you up.”
The railing was cold under my hand. “That’s not the word.”
“It is the word on the timesheet.”
I laughed softly despite myself. “Mr. Graves.”
“Catalina.” He hadn’t used my first name before. The four syllables came out in the proper Spanish cadence. Correct. Not a guess. He had been listening.
Yesterday at lunch, when I took the embassy call and slipped into Spanish for two sentences without thinking, he had been listening. He had picked up the cadence and brought it to an eighth-floor balcony at one in the morning like that was a normal thing for a man to do.
I turned back toward the railing. The water seemed safer than his face. “You haven’t slept since Sunday.”
“How do you know that?”
“The aide told me.”
“The aide talks too much.”
“The aide is a saint, and you’re the reason she’s having a long week.”
He exhaled. Barely. For Dominic, that was practically slapstick. He took two steps forward and stopped beside me at the railing. A foot of distance. Less than protocol. More than touch. Apparently where we lived now.
He looked out over the water. The light beneath the railing caught the line of his jaw. The cedar smell of him was closer. So was the heat coming off his body, steady and impossible to ignore, like standing too close to a stove and pretending the stove wasn’t the problem.
“Tell me about the dinner tomorrow,” I said.
His eyes stayed on the water. “What about it?”
“Your job. The biggest threat.”
He was quiet for one beat. “The European cultural attaché.”
I turned my head. That hadn’t been on my list of expected answers. “The man with the cologne?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He watches you when you are not speaking.” A clean sentence. No hesitation. No extra explanation to make it softer.
My skin prickled. That wasn’t what I had meant by threat, and he knew it.
I had noticed the attaché watching too. In my notes, he was a possible access point, possible nuisance, which was the professional way to write man whose gaze made my back teeth itch. Dominic had filed him somewhere else.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The water moved below us, black and indifferent.
“Tell me.”
“I would rather not.”
My grip tightened on the railing.
“Your turn,” he said.
“My turn?”
“What is making you anxious?”
I considered lying. I had ten or fifteen lies ready for this exact question. Good ones. Useful ones. None of them sounded right at one in the morning on a balcony with a man I was trying very hard not to look at.
“Doing my job badly because I’m distracted.”
“Mm—”
“Don’t.”
The set of his shoulders eased.
“And the dinner,” I said.
His amusement vanished. “Why?”
“Because everyone is watching everyone else, and half the room knows more than they’re saying.”
“That is every dinner.”
“Not for humans.”
“For humans too. You are simply less honest about it.”
I looked at him then.
His eyes were on me. The light didn’t reach them. They looked black in the dark, and there was something inside them older than the conversation we were having.
There was maybe a foot of distance between us at the railing. His eyes dropped to my mouth for less than a second. Every line of his body shifted forward. On another man, it would’ve been invisible. On Dominic, it was a confession. His weight moved toward me.
My body answered. A quarter inch. The smallest concession of weight I had ever made.
I had a mission. I had a boyfriend. I had a state dinner in eighteen hours.