Post
Dominic
It was twenty-three forty-seven on Friday night, and I was standing in the corridor outside Catalina’s chamber, officially assigned as her enforcer and practically useless on the wrong side of the door.
I had broken almost every rule of my role tonight in front of a hundred and twenty witnesses.
A public claim without council pre-approval.
Mine on the public record. A bite at visible depth in front of the State Department’s senior trade representative.
And a grievance handed to Rhain Solberg that old law would recognize and instinct would not forgive.
He was going to come for me. I was going to let him.
But not yet. Each violation would have its own file by morning.
She came within an inch of putting me on my back in my own dining hall. I should not have admired that. I did anyway.
Three weeks of testimony, precedent, witness statements, medical review, and political containment dressed as due process.
At the end of it, I would either still be an Ashenmere enforcer, or I would not.
That did not hold my attention. The only question that mattered was whether my mate would still be alive, protected, and free enough to hate me properly when the reviews ended.
The line between us held steady, loud beneath the steadiness but controlled, and for that I was grateful. It gave me no words, no thoughts, no access to the privacy of her mind, which was more mercy than I deserved after what I had already taken from her tonight.
What it gave me instead was distance and condition. She was beyond the door, close enough to feel and still unreachable behind stone, locks, and council caution. She was awake, sharp, bright with thought, thinking hard enough that the bond seemed to hum under my ribs.
Her fury reached me first, hot and clean. Beneath it was shame. Beneath the shame, calculation. Cold, deliberate, and very much alive.
The calculation was the part that let me breathe. I was not enthusiastic about what Catalina might be planning, but the fact that she was planning mattered. Thought meant structure, and structure meant she had not collapsed into shock, fear, or a silence no bond could translate.
* * *
I left my post at midnight and had the deputy hold the corridor in my place, though stepping away from Catalina’s door did nothing to quiet the instinct under my skin.
If anything, standing on the wrong side of the lock had sharpened it until it began offering solutions I could not afford to consider.
Shift. Climb the wall. Put myself at her window again.
I had already done that once tonight.
Once could be explained, if not excused. It had been a public act. I would answer for it during the council’s first deliberation, where every person in that room would understand exactly what it meant for a dragon to go to the window of the woman he had claimed.
Doing it twice would become a declaration. It would be a claim repeated after warning, a statement made in full knowledge of the consequences, and more than the council could absorb while pretending this situation remained procedural.
So I left the corridor and went outside, where I stood in the courtyard for forty minutes in human form, looking up at Catalina’s dark window.
Through the bond, she had pulled back and gone stiller, but not quiet. Her emotions were banked rather than gone, the sharpest edge of her fury folded inward where it could become a blade if she chose.
The instinct in me did not care for procedure, consequence, or the political distinction between protection and possession.
It cared that she was behind glass, that there had been blood on her throat, that her hand had touched the window, and that she had walked away from me because I had given her every reason to do it.
Reason did not comfort that part of me, and I understood then that it would refuse comfort on certain subjects for the rest of my life.
I would have to learn to manage that.
I went to find Yuki. I took the long route through the compound, the one I had used for decades when I needed to think before I trusted myself to speak.
Before the dining hall, I had understood my role. I was Ashenmere’s enforcer. I acted when ordered, held position when required, and kept my instincts inside the lines the council called law.
I had done that since I was young.
Tonight, I had failed.
I had bitten Catalina Cordero because another man had kissed her cheek, because she had named a boyfriend on a balcony, and because every dragon instinct in me had treated those things as a threat.
That was not an excuse. It was evidence.
Yuki’s office light was on at ten minutes to one.
She was at her desk reading the formal complaint from the Norwegian delegation. Bjorn had filed it at twenty-three twenty on behalf of Lord Solberg, demanding immediate access to the claimed party for standard bond consultation.
Yuki looked up. She did not invite me to sit. “Dominic.”
“Yuki.”
“You went outside,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And shifted in compound airspace.”
“Yes.” I gave her nothing less than the truth.
Her thumb tapped the folded paper before she continued. “You climbed the building and conducted a perimeter flight.”
“I did.”
Yuki closed her eyes for one second. Not in anger. Exhaustion. “Every dragon in this compound understands the pull,” she said. “It isn’t preference. It’s sacred because it can rearrange a life faster than reason can object.”
I did not answer, because there was nothing useful to say.
“It’s also dangerous for the same reason.”
The complaint from the Norwegian delegation sat between us.
“You’re the most trusted and lethal enforcer I have,” she said. “And tonight you climbed my building like a newly shifted adolescent because your mate was in a room out of your reach.”
Yuki held the look a few seconds, then let her eyes drift shut and pressed two fingers to the center of her brow.
“I’m trying very hard not to find that endearing.”
She exhaled once, slow and controlled, and when she opened her eyes again, whatever mercy had briefly entered the room was gone.
“The council will constrain it anyway,” she said.
She enumerated the restrictions. Airspace. Perimeter flights. The wall. Her window. I would comply with all of it.
“She put her hand on the glass,” I said.
“I’m aware.”
“She was not afraid.”
Yuki looked at me for a long moment, and the patience in her face was worse than anger. “No,” she said. “I imagine that’s part of what makes this difficult for you.”
I said nothing.
Then she glanced down at the complaint. “Bjorn has always written beautifully when he’s angry.”
Her gaze lifted again, and I understood a moment before she spoke that the formal part of the conversation had ended. The complaint was still under her hand, the law still in the room. But Yuki was no longer asking as council chair.
“Tell me how you are.”
I considered several useful answers. The bond is stable. I can function. Solberg has not moved. She is alive. None answered the question. “I am well enough,” I said.
Yuki’s face did not soften. One reason I had served her for seventy years.
“You’ll function?”
“Yes.”
“Under direct council oversight for the foreseeable duration.”
“I will comply.”
The silence that followed was not empty.
“You don’t regret it,” she said. Not a question.
The statement contained the dining hall. The kiss. The word mine. The bite. The strike she had almost landed. The blood at her throat. The line I had opened between us without consent. The rival-clan precedent. The war not yet declared, but already being calculated in three foreign capitals.
“No,” I said.
She nodded, as if I had confirmed something she already knew. “That’s the answer I expected.”
“It is the truth.”
“I know.”
She pulled a different document toward her. The formal reassignment order had already been drafted.
“As of eight o’clock Saturday morning, your escort designation is no longer diplomatic,” Yuki said.
I did not move.
“It’s protective. Claimed-party protocol. You’ll be present everywhere she’s questioned and outside every door she sleeps behind, and you won’t enter her quarters without her invitation or council instruction.”
Escort of record. Protocol shadow. Contact point for every council deliberation involving the claim. I dipped my chin in acknowledgement.
“Solberg’s clan will request joint custody. The council will deliberate. In the interim, you’re her protection.”
Yuki let the reassignment order sit between us.
“You won’t push her further.” Her words didn’t rise in volume. They didn’t need to.
“I am not going to push her.”
“You took something from her in the dining hall,” she said. “She’s going to spend days deciding what to do with that.”
The phrasing was precise.
Not deciding what to do with me.
With what I did.
“She may choose to kill you, to use you, or to do something neither of us has seen before, which, given the evening, would be consistent,” Yuki said. “You won’t interfere with that decision or push toward the outcome you prefer. You’ll give space.”
I dipped my head again.
“You won’t attempt to apologize.”
My jaw set. Yuki waited until I had control of myself.
“An apology before she has chosen what happened to her means asking her to manage your remorse. You would be putting another burden in her hands and calling it respect.”
She continued, “And you will not try to demonstrate the bond’s depth. She already feels enough, and she doesn’t need you turning that into proof. The bond will do its own work without your assistance.”
I held still.
“You’ll stand outside her door,” Yuki said. “You’ll keep doing what you have been doing, and you’ll add nothing to it. No declarations, no displays, no attempts to make the bond easier for you by making it louder for her.”
She did not look away. “That’s your assignment.”
Yuki set both hands flat on the desk. “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe she’ll choose to kill you.
She walked the length of my council chamber with blood on her throat and corrected vocabulary before anyone could decide whether she was a victim or a liability.
Women who rely on violence rarely choose to debate terminology first.”
She returned the reassignment order to the folder and closed it with the same care she gave every dangerous thing. “She’ll use you if you make yourself useful enough and quiet enough to be worth the trouble.”
I turned the words over. They did not comfort me, but comfort was not the point. They oriented me, and that was more useful.
Yuki tipped her chin toward the door. The meeting was over.
I closed the door behind me on the way out.
I stationed myself in the corridor outside Catalina’s room and stayed there for the rest of the night.
The line between us did not give me her thoughts. It gave me distance, which was its own punishment with her behind those locks, and it gave me emotion in fragments I had no right to touch too closely.
For an hour, there was fury. Then exhaustion.
Eventually, the line quieted. She was not asleep, but the sharp, bright thinking in her softened. The fury did not leave so much as fold inward, and though the distance between us stayed the same, the bond eased at the edges, like a weapon lowered but not set down.
I matched my breathing to that quiet. The rhythm was not mine. It was the only thing I was permitted to keep.