Before
Rhain
The dinner was at seven. It was just past half six. Bjorn was waiting in the corridor and would walk down with me. Bjorn had walked into formal occasions with me my entire life and wasn’t going to start letting me walk alone tonight, of all nights.
I had told Bjorn that morning that I had it under control.
Bjorn had said yes, but meant I am going to keep watching anyway.
I opened the door. He was waiting and wasn’t alone.
Bjorn stood in the center of the corridor. Two of our enforcers waited several paces behind him, dressed for dinner, expressions bland, shoulders loose. Anders and Soren.
I paused. “That seems unnecessary.”
Bjorn had watched kings embarrass themselves and dragons set cities on fire. He had been equally unimpressed by both. He looked at me. “It isn’t.”
Anders adjusted his cuff.
Soren looked down the hallway as if the corridor architecture had become a matter of sudden private interest.
Subtle, all of them.
“You ate,” Bjorn said.
“I ate.”
“You ate enough.”
“I ate enough, Bjorn.”
His eyes moved over me, top to bottom, and came back. Jacket. Hands. Mouth. Throat. “You won’t do anything foolish tonight.”
“Of course not.”
“You won’t even if Graves does.”
The corridor seemed to wait with him.
“That,” I said, “is the part I’m less certain about.”
Bjorn gave the smallest nod. Not approval. Confirmation of risk. “Then you’ll let us be certain for you.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No,” he said, and his voice softened. “That’s why this is dangerous.”
That shut my mouth, which I resented.
Bjorn stepped to my left. Anders drifted half a pace behind my right shoulder. Soren took the rear. Not an escort. Publicly, they were the senior diplomatic party moving toward dinner.
Privately, they had built a box around me.
A very polite box.
I looked at Bjorn and he lifted one eyebrow.
I smiled.
It wasn’t my best work.
* * *
The dining room was full.
A hundred and twenty seats. Multiple clans and human governments.
The ambassadors. The councils. The deputies.
The press secretaries. The senior trade representatives.
The chief of staff to the U.S. president’s special envoy on supernatural relations, who wasn’t supposed to be on the guest list and was very much on the guest list.
I saw all of it from the doorway.
Then I saw her.
Catalina Cordero sat at the third table from the dais, in the translator’s seat behind the U.S.
ambassador’s principal. She wore a dark green dress, professional and clean and fitted without competing for attention.
Her hair was pulled back. Her notebook lay beside her plate.
Her water glass was untouched. She was speaking to the ambassador’s principal, her head at a polite angle, making herself useful while learning everything.
She didn’t look up. There was no need.
I had located her at the doorway and then refused to look at anything else for the next thirty seconds, which the diplomatic side of me handled by performing a series of formal greetings to people whose names I knew and whose faces I didn’t currently care about.
Bjorn touched my elbow once. Walk.
I walked.
Anders moved with me. Soren moved behind.
No one in the room would’ve noticed unless they knew exactly what to look for.
Every dragon in the room knew exactly what to look for.
I sat at the Norwegian delegation’s table. Bjorn took his seat at my left. Anders positioned himself two seats down, technically near the deputy minister, functionally placed to catch my arm if I forgot I owned one. Soren remained standing behind the delegation table with the other security staff.
The Ashenmere delegation sat at the long table along the inside wall. Yuki was at the head. Two elders to her right.
Graves stood three paces behind Yuki, against the wall.
He wasn’t looking at the room, monitoring threats. He was looking at Catalina. Protecting her above all else. I was, technically, supposed to be reassured by his presence.
By any professional measure, he was the most disciplined dragon in the building.
That was the part that worried me.
Disciplined men didn’t break often.
When they did, it tended to be remarkable.
* * *
The first hour went the way state dinners went.
Yuki gave the welcome remarks.
The U.S. ambassador’s principal gave the response.
There was a course of cold seafood.
Then there was a translation breakthrough on the evening’s first conversational subject. An exchange about Pacific shipping lanes that the Ashenmere delegation handled in English and the Norwegian delegation handled in Norwegian.
Catalina rendered Bjorn’s careful Norwegian opener about salmon access into a U.S.
English that gave the U.S. principal the impression he had won something he hadn’t, in fact, won, and then rendered the principal’s gracious acceptance back into a Norwegian that told Bjorn the U.S.
would later be discovering they hadn’t won it.
I nearly laughed at a state dinner, which would have been its own incident.
Bjorn, beside me, exhaled through his nose, which was the Bjorn equivalent of making a scene.
Anders leaned back in his chair as a server refilled his water. The movement placed his knee briefly against mine.
A reminder.
I moved my knee away.
For the next forty minutes, I behaved.
Mostly.
The salmon course came and went. The cocktail-hour transition began.
Tables broke up. Bodies redistributed across the room. The strict diplomatic geography softened into the working geography of an actual party, where deals were done and mistakes became useful.
Catalina rose from her seat.
She was approached almost before she finished arriving. I admired the efficiency.
Three conversations before most people would have managed one.
The Japanese observer, who said two sentences to her in Mandarin that I caught the edge of from twenty feet away.
One of Bjorn’s deputies, who said something in Norwegian and got an answer that made him smile.
And the Sichuanese deputy from the Ashenmere council, who had been quietly impressed by Catalina across a translation desk and put a hand on her elbow in a small show of affection.
Catalina was working the room. She was very good at it.
I started creating a mental list of every person who put a hand on her that night.
This wasn’t a reasonable use of diplomatic energy.
I rose.
Bjorn didn’t look at me.
Anders stood at the same time.
“Circuit,” I said quietly.
Bjorn’s eyes moved to Catalina, then back to the room, then to me. An audit.
I gave him my pleasant diplomatic face.
He was unmoved, naturally.
After a moment, he inclined his head. Permission, with supervision.
Excellent. I had become a state project.
I made my own circuit. I greeted the Ashenmere elders. I made small talk with the Japanese observer, whose presence in the room I would be discussing with Bjorn at length later. I performed the diplomatic theater of being unconcerned about the U.S. presence at the dinner.
I walked toward Catalina at a pace that would put me near her at exactly the moment she finished her conversation with the Sichuanese deputy.
Anders’s shadow stayed at my back, three paces behind and to the left. Soren had relocated near the eastern wall. The entire Norwegian delegation had become a net with tailoring.
She finished and turned. I was three steps away.
A European diplomat reached her first. The cultural attaché. The man with the awful cologne.
I knew him and didn’t like him. A French name and a habit of being too forward at dinners. He had been handsome long enough to confuse access with consent, and the confidence showed.
He leaned in, said something I couldn’t hear, and kissed her cheek.
A standard greeting. I knew this. The diplomatic part of my brain knew it with absolute clarity.
The dragon didn’t.
I saw another man’s mouth on Catalina’s skin, and the old jealousy moved before I had decided to.
I caught it. Barely.
The surge came hot through my chest, up my throat, into my hands. The room sharpened. Sound thinned.
Anders was at my shoulder before I took the step. Soren moved on the far side of the crowd, cutting off the direct line between me and the attaché without appearing to do anything of the sort. Bjorn remained by the Norwegian table, but his attention pinned me from twenty feet away.
The message was clear.
Don’t.
I closed the distance at a socially acceptable pace. “Catalina.”
“Lord Solberg.”
I didn’t touch her. I didn’t move within the protocol distance.
I stopped at the appropriate four feet and gave her the smile and the small warm bow, which was theater, all of it, so the cultural attaché would understand he hadn’t, in fact, just made a move on a person who was unaccompanied.
He understood, made his courtesies and moved on.
Smart man.
Catalina was looking at me.
She had put together the attaché’s mouth on her cheek. Then me, watching. Then Anders at my shoulder, Soren near the wall, and Bjorn at the table.
Her expression stayed neutral, but I could see the calculation settle behind her eyes. The entire Norwegian delegation had just quietly prevented a diplomatic incident over a kiss on the cheek.
Yes. We had. But I couldn’t let her see the reason.
Not tonight, not here, not like this.
I gave her the diplomatic smile and a small lift of one hand, palm down, the cadence Bjorn used to mean I have the room.
She read it. Her shoulders dropped. She turned her face a quarter inch toward Yuki. The translator’s signal: back at work.
A hand reached her from behind. Scarred knuckles. A palm at the back of her neck.
I felt it before the rest of the room did. I felt it because I had been tracking the enforcer across the dining hall for the last hour and a half, and I felt the moment he decided to move.
It took two seconds. Two seconds for Dominic Graves to cross twelve feet of dining-hall floor at a speed no human in the room would be able to map.
Then his hand was on the back of her neck and his mouth came down on hers.
Her breath caught. Shocked but pleased. Not refusal.