Before #2
The sound that came up in me wasn’t small. It wanted to be a roar.
I clamped my teeth on it with every year of training my father had paid for and every older lesson Bjorn had beaten into me for free.
I didn’t let it out. I didn’t move.
Anders’s hand closed around my wrist.
Hard.
Soren had crossed the room and stood to my right now, body angled between me and the shortest path to Graves.
Bjorn was already moving.
The Norwegian delegation closed around me, smooth and total.
No one shoved. No one grabbed my shoulders. No one made a scene. They simply removed every line of movement I might’ve taken.
Professional. Loyal. Infuriating.
Necessary.
He pulled back. “Mine.”
The word landed in dry grass. Everyone heard the word, the cadence, and the public-record finality of it. Yuki, three paces away, was locked in the stillness.
Dominic’s mouth dropped to Catalina’s throat.
The bite.
I closed my eyes. Briefly. A diplomat’s allowance.
Cowardice had to be rationed on formal occasions.
I opened them.
She came on the bite.
There was no more elegant way to understand it from across the room. Her shoulders went forward. Her hands came up to his coat. Her breath caught, then fractured in a way everyone could see, hear, and now never, for the rest of time, un-hear.
I couldn’t feel what she felt, but sight was its own hell.
A hundred and twenty people watched the woman the United States government had dressed as a translator lose herself for one public, irreversible second on the teeth of the Ashenmere enforcer.
Anders’s grip tightened. Soren said something in Old Norse under his breath. A curse polite enough for company.
Bjorn reached my side.
He didn’t speak at first. I read the order in the pressure of his hand at my elbow, in the line of Anders at my wrist, in Soren blocking the forward path.
Stay. Don’t shift. Don’t make this worse.
I worked through the list of things I was choosing not to do.
Not crossing the room.
Not pulling Bjorn off my shoulder.
Not catching Anders’s hand at my wrist and breaking it back at the joint.
The sound that had built behind my teeth wasn’t coming out.
My hands weren’t opening.
Each refusal made an entry in a ledger.
I had been patient for two weeks. I was working to earn the right to court Catalina Cordero properly. The Ashenmere enforcer had put his teeth in her publicly, and taken liberties he wasn’t owed.
A heroically stupid liberty to take, given what she was to me.
Then Catalina’s brain caught up.
Her fist came up toward Graves’s throat with the precision of professional combat training. His free hand caught it at the last possible moment. The block was the only reason she didn’t land the strike.
She had been fast enough, with the bond pouring into her and her own body still coming back to itself, to almost put the enforcer of Clan Ashenmere on his back in the middle of his own dining hall.
The room had just watched a State Department translator nearly drop the most dangerous dragon in Seattle. In doing so, they had put together that perhaps she wasn’t what she said.
Bjorn, beside me, said one word in Norwegian. “Faen.” Damn.
It was less comment than benediction.
The eldest Ashenmere elder rose at the head of the table. She was four hundred years old. She didn’t raise her voice. She spoke a single phrase in Old Wyrm, which I understood approximately one syllable of, and then she repeated it in English for the humans.
“Rival-clan bond.” The words landed in the room like glass cracking.
I didn’t move. Moving toward Catalina, toward Graves, toward any of it, would’ve detonated the second half of the public record this room was now writing.
I stayed where my delegation had put me.
Anders released my wrist by degrees, once he believed I was still embracing rationality. Soren remained close. He could intercept a bad decision. Bjorn’s hand stayed on my elbow.
My face stayed the way it had been arranged all evening.
Which was impressive. Also fraudulent.
Across the floor, Catalina stood very still. The neckline of her dress was ripped. There was blood at her throat. A narrow line of it, dark against the green dress. Her hands were at her sides now.
Dominic stood in front of her, looking at her with an expression I had never seen on his face in the seven decades I had known him.
Not triumph. He had gotten what the dragon wanted, and understood, too late, what it had taken from the woman.
Catalina spoke.
I couldn’t hear her from twenty feet across a stunned dining hall, but I read her mouth.
You don’t get to do that. A pause. You don’t get to take that from me.
Graves didn’t answer. He looked at her. He hadn’t let go of her neck.
My control thinned to a thread. The delegation felt it.
Anders stepped closer again. Soren’s shoulder came into my peripheral vision. Bjorn’s hand tightened, not enough to bruise, enough to remind.
“Rhain,” Bjorn said quietly.
The use of my name wasn’t comfort. It was a leash.
“I know,” I said. I kept my voice pleasant.
The Ashenmere council moved toward Yuki. The Norwegian delegation closed around me and Bjorn. The U.S. ambassador’s principal stood up looking like he hadn’t been briefed for any of this and was going to ask, in approximately ninety seconds, what the hell had just happened.
The cultural attaché was nowhere to be seen.
Excellent survival instincts, suddenly.
Bjorn pulled me back two steps. I went because he had me, and because Anders and Soren had arranged themselves so that the only direction available without making a scene was backward.
“She’s being moved,” Bjorn said, quiet.
“Yes.”
“We won’t interfere.”
“No.”
“Not because we don’t want to.”
I looked at him then. His face was still. The same stillness he had carried into councils and funerals and the room where my mother had died.
“Because if we interfere now,” he said, “we make her the battlefield.”
I hated him for the sentence.
I needed it.
Catalina was being escorted by two Ashenmere deputies up the steps and out the back. Dominic followed three paces behind the deputies in the enforcer’s position, head not turned. Yuki walked three paces behind Dominic. The Ashenmere council followed three paces behind Yuki.
The procession was perfectly formal.
The procession was for the audience that didn’t understand yet that it had just been made to witness the political detonation of the year.
* * *
Bjorn closed the door behind us.
Anders took the position beside it. Soren went to the window. Giving me the courtesy of privacy while making sure I couldn’t reach the balcony and decide I had wings before sense.
The politeness of Norwegian containment remained, as ever, one of our most irritating national gifts.
Bjorn set his glass of water down on the desk with careful precision. He looked at Anders and Soren. A dismissal without language.
Anders hesitated. I didn’t blame him.
Bjorn’s gaze sharpened.
That solved the hesitation.
They left. The door closed.
Only then did Bjorn turn fully toward me.
Bjorn watched me until I sat.
There are moments in a dragon’s life when sitting is an act of civilization.
This was one.
“You stayed in your skin,” he said.
I looked at my hands. Human hands. No claws, no scales, no blood under the nails. “Barely.”
“That counts.” Coming from Bjorn, that was practically a parade.
“I wanted to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“I still do.”
“I know.” He poured a second glass of water from the pitcher on the desk and pushed it across to me. “What do you want to do?”
The question sat between us for longer than it should have.
I could’ve given him the diplomatic answer. There were several available. Wait. Assess. Contact my father. Demand clarification from Yuki. Open a quiet channel to the U.S. delegation before they did something enterprising and fatal.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I put my elbows on my knees. I put my face in my hands for the first time since I was twelve years old.
“I still want to walk down the corridor and kill him.”
Bjorn didn’t react. He had asked for truth. One shouldn’t flinch when it arrives wearing boots.
After a moment, he said, “And what are you going to do?”
“Wait.”
He set the empty glass back on the desk. Aligned the bottom to a seam in the wood. “For what?”
“Whatever she wants.”