Bite
Catalina
Ihad been working the room for the last twenty-eight minutes when the air changed behind me.
I knew the feel of it by now. Three times this week: the receiving hall, at lunch, on the balcony. Each time, Dominic Graves.
I was talking to the Sichuanese deputy. She rested one hand lightly on my elbow while telling me about her daughter at university in Tokyo, and I nodded at the correct intervals, holding my water glass, looking like a woman who belonged.
When the conversation ended, the European cultural attaché reached me first. He was the one who had kissed my cheek. A standard greeting, by every diplomatic measure. Still, the kiss had landed wrong on every instinct I had, and I hadn’t yet finished processing why.
Rhain started to slowly cross the room towards me. He didn’t land close enough to start a conversation. Just enough to change the shape of the space around us and make the attaché uncomfortable.
Rhain made people notice without ever asking them to. One step, one shift of weight, one polite look, and suddenly the man with the cologne remembered he had somewhere else to be.
Helpful.
Dragons did very little by accident. Touch had rules. Distance had rules. Who stood where, who moved first, who gave way in a corridor. All of it meant something, even when no one had bothered to give the human a glossary.
Rhain had been generous all week in ways I kept trying to file under manners. Coffee before I asked. Norwegian corrections before I could stumble in front of the wrong elder. Chairs, sightlines, exits.
Small, careful things that looked polite until they started arranging the room around me.
And then there was his warning. Catalina. What do you know about claims?
Not enough, I had told him.
I had thought he meant Dominic. That had been the obvious answer. Dominic’s presence filling a corridor. Dominic at my door. Dominic looking at me like the rest of the world had become background noise.
But Rhain moved between me and the attaché with the same quiet precision dragons used for everything that mattered.
Which left me with two possibilities.
One: Rhain was working me the same way I was working him. Attention, access, protection as leverage. A little warmth here, a little rescue there, until I started mistaking strategy for safety.
Textbook asset work. Annoying, but respectable.
Two: it was more than that, and I may have been doing my job too well.
I didn’t have enough information yet to make the call.
Which meant I needed to keep both theories alive.
The Norwegian delegation shifted around him.
Anders at his shoulder. Soren by the wall. Bjorn at the table.
Nobody had drifted there by accident.
Rhain gave me the smallest palm-down gesture.
I’ve got the room.
A promise that he had the sightlines, the exits, the men with too much cologne, and the Norwegian delegation positioned exactly where he wanted them.
I believed him.
For approximately three seconds.
Then the skin at the back of my neck lifted.
The Sichuanese deputy was several feet away. Her eyes moved past my shoulder. Her face made the adjustment I had been watching dragons make all week.
Very quietly, in Mandarin, she said to me, “Take care of yourself.”
I turned my head a quarter inch.
A hand wrapped around the back of my neck. Scarred at the knuckles. Hot against my skin.
I didn’t move.
I had been trained for fifty-three different scenarios involving compromised positions in foreign territory. This wasn’t one of them.
Dominic turned me to face him. Gently.
The hand at my neck didn’t press. The body in front of me didn’t crowd. He turned me with gentle certainty.
His pupils were vertical. He wasn’t even trying to bring them back to round.
He kissed me.
His mouth was hot. The taste was cedar and metal and him. Lips first. Then teeth at the inside of my lower lip, sharp. A sound came out of me before I could stop it. Then his tongue past the seam, slow, taking, the heat of it against the heat of mine.
His other hand came to my hip and pulled me against him. The line of his body landed at every point. Chest to chest, hip to hip, him hard against my belly through two layers of fabric. I felt the shape of him exactly. I felt my body answer. Heat rose in me fast and deep.
My mouth softened under his as my body began yielding to the kiss.
Then he spoke against my lips.
“Mine.”
Announced for the room.
The half-second of want hardened into intent.
A claim.
A claim made for me, made of me, and made without asking and without warning.
His mouth dropped to the left of my throat and he bit.
His teeth sank into the curve where my neck met my shoulder. The skin gave. Pain and pleasure arrived in the same instant, both so sharp I couldn’t tell them apart. A wave broke from the point of contact so hard the room disappeared.
Him and his heat.
There was nothing else. No floor. No glass. No council. No cameras. No ambassador. There was heat at the bite and heat in my chest and his teeth in my skin, and the rest of the world fell away.
I felt his pulse arrive inside me.
The whole of him dropped into the space behind my sternum like a second gravity locking into place.
I felt the shape of his shoulders under my hands. I hadn’t noticed my hands moving.
I felt the line of his jaw against my temple as my face turned into him.
I felt his free hand at my hip. Hot. Steady.
I felt the heat between my thighs. Soaked. Soaking. My body had gone wet at the first scrape of his teeth and was still going wetter with every degree the wave climbed.
The wave finished climbing.
A white-hot pulse pulled tight through my body, all of it drawn to the place his teeth held me open. My breath broke. My fingers locked in his coat. My knees went loose, and his hand at my hip became the only reason I stayed upright.
His bite sent a blinding orgasm through me in front of a hundred and twenty people.
In the middle of a state dinner.
The orgasm took me with a force that didn’t feel like mine.
It moved on his rhythm, not mine, pulled out of me by the bite and the heat and the impossible second heartbeat now pounding behind my sternum.
I clenched around nothing and the wave doubled back on itself and pulled a second sound out of me, smaller, broken, a sound I would’ve given the rest of my life not to make in this room.
My body went forward into him.
Not a step.
I climbed.
Dominic’s mouth stayed on the mark. His jaw flexed against my skin. The sound I made was small and broken. It wasn’t quiet.
The whole room had gone silent. There was no privacy left to hide in. No shadow. No closed door. No merciful failure of memory. There was only his teeth in my neck, his pulse in my chest, my hands in his coat, and my body giving him everything.
Pleasure fell away in sharp, glittering pieces, and the word rose through what was left of me.
Claim.
I had read it a thousand times as fantasy and once too many times as policy. On the page, it was something I chose when I wanted it and set down when I didn’t. In the briefing files, it was a clinical category: permanent bond formation, visible throat mark, jurisdictional complications.
A beautiful little lie in one place. A bureaucratic warning label in another. This was neither.
This was the same word with the distance stripped out of it, in a room full of witnesses, with my throat under his mouth and my body already speaking before anyone thought to ask.
Breath came back first, thin and ragged.
Then sound. A chair scraping. Someone’s glass touching wood. A held breath from somewhere across the room.
Then him. Still there. Teeth at the bite. Pulse under my skin. Hand at my hip. Heat everywhere he touched me. My fingers were still twisted in his coat like I had put them there on purpose. Like I had chosen this.
I hadn’t.
The room arrived all at once. A hundred and twenty faces.
The U.S. ambassador’s senior trade representative.
The Norwegian delegation. Yuki at the head of the table.
Three council elders. Two Japanese observers.
A press secretary. An ambassador’s assistant.
The lighting. The cameras. The European cultural attaché who had kissed my cheek.
I had come on Dominic’s teeth in front of all of them. My hands were still on his shoulders. My body had been climbing him for one full second of public-record time, and I hadn’t stopped it.
I hadn’t consented to any of this. I had been claimed in public by a dragon who had decided I was his, and my own body had thanked him in front of the United States ambassador.
I had read pages on the claim, the bite, the fated pull, and not a single one had warned me that a claiming came with an orgasm and that my own body would answer the theft as if it had been waiting its whole life to do it.
The shame arrived first. The fury arrived a quarter second behind it. The training arrived behind that. Of the three, only the training was something I knew how to use.
My fist came up at the precise angle I had been drilled on for years, aimed at the soft cartilage of his throat with every ounce of power my five-foot-two frame could generate.
He blocked it at the last inch.
He was fast.
I was almost fast enough.
My brain connected and I realized where I was. I didn’t loose the second strike. A second strike would’ve made a different kind of public record. Somewhere inside the bond, the fury, and the collapse of the next four years of my career, the training kept moving.
So I stood very still, though my body still desperately wanted to move toward him. I worked to override it.
Cordillera.
The consulate was fifteen blocks. The line was four syllables to a regional security officer. The exit existed.
Not now. The dismissal came in agency cadence.
The bite mark on my throat was warm. Bleeding. Dominic’s teeth had gone in clean.
I wouldn’t look at it. I wouldn’t touch it. Touching it might pull the wave back up, and I had a council, a U.S. ambassador, and ten cameras to walk past in the next minute. I wasn’t going to come publicly for a second time tonight.
His hand was still at my neck. I made myself meet his still-slitted eyes. “You don’t get to do that.”
The briefing had used the word unprecedented twice. I had read it in D.C. and assumed it was a corner case.
I said the next sentence flat. For my own ears first. For the room’s second. For his last. “You don’t get to take that from me.”
He looked at me. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t flinch.
The new pulse in my chest ran at his rhythm, which was a fact I couldn’t yet do anything with except note.
Looking at him, I could see he didn’t regret a thing. He had spent the week building toward this and had decided it was time.
“You aren’t sorry.”
“No.” A single syllable. Bare of defense, softening, or of any lie.
I did appreciate the honesty. Still, I seethed, “I could kill you for that.”
His face didn’t change. His hand stayed at my neck. The new pulse in my chest ran one half-beat behind his.
“You could try.”
Across the floor, someone moved toward Rhain.
The Norwegian delegation had closed around him. Nothing like the politician-and-aide formation humans used after an incident. They were containing a fire and not letting the room smell smoke.
Bjorn at his left. Anders at his wrist. Soren angled between him and the cleanest path to Dominic. Rhain stood inside the containment with his hands at his sides. White-knuckled. His eyes had gone dragon.
The eldest elder of the Ashenmere council rose at the head of the long table. She was four hundred years old. She didn’t raise her voice. She spoke a phrase in Old Wyrm. Then she repeated it in English for the humans. “Rival-clan bond.”
The words landed. Nobody in the room moved.
Faces changed. Postures shifted. The Norwegian delegation closed tighter around Rhain. The Ashenmere elders moved toward their own leadership with coordinated urgency, trained for a crisis they had hoped would never come.
I stood in the middle of it with blood on the mark and a stranger’s heartbeat in my chest, surrounded by ancient creatures whose faces showed me something I recognized.
Fear.
They were afraid of me. What had happened to me had just changed the rules.
* * *
They brought me to a third-floor room.
A soundproofed council chamber, the deputy explained quietly. They were going to convene immediately. They would ask me to remain in the antechamber. There was water. There was a chair. They wouldn’t be long.
The deputy left.
I sat and closed my eyes for thirty seconds and let myself feel the things I had been not-feeling. The bond in my chest where there was now a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
The bite that had stopped bleeding. The blood had dried in a narrow line down to my collarbone.
I wouldn’t wipe it. I had decided that on the dining-hall floor. The blood was evidence.
He had taken something from me in front of an audience. Not only the bite. The private question I had spent all day obsessing over.
The balcony. His hand in my hair. The way I had leaned in before I remembered Nate, the mission, and every reason I hadn’t to want Dominic Graves.
I had been trying to decide what the kiss meant.
Dominic might’ve been running on whatever old and dangerous thing had been moving under his skin all week. But I had been running on attraction, adrenaline, and hormones.
I had a boyfriend. I had a job. I had a mission. And somewhere in the middle of all three, I had started to like him.
Dominic had dragged that private, inconvenient truth into the light in front of a hundred and twenty people.
My hands curled against my thighs. I wanted to hit him again. Worse: part of me wanted to touch the mark. I did neither.
I opened my eyes and straightened in the chair.
My cover was destroyed. Davis would know in twenty minutes. There was no flowchart for what had just happened.
The eldest elder had said rival-clan bond.
Rival clan. Not just Dominic. Rhain.
My mind returned, sharply and unwillingly, to the corridor outside the library. I had thought Rhain was warning me about Dominic.
Rhain had been warning me about all three of us. The three of us, he had said, were already in a conversation I hadn’t been given the language to understand.
The elder had known. Yuki had known enough to go still. Bjorn had known enough to put bodies around Rhain.
And Rhain. Rhain had known enough to stay where he was while every instinct in him must have been trying to cross to me.
The Norwegian delegation had formed a box around Rhain. I had assumed it was to keep him out of trouble. It had been to keep him from crossing the floor before Dominic got there.
Rival-clan bond.
Shit.