Margot
Catalina
Ihad been awake since five.
By any operational measure, the assignment had failed in the dining hall. Leadership would call it an escalation, because escalation let everyone keep using the same terminology in unadulterated chaos.
In D.C., Davis had told me there would be no extraction team. No friendly faces inside if I was caught. No cavalry, no operational miracle, no one coming through a service door with a badge and a plan.
At the time, that had sounded like a warning. Now, sitting in a locked room with a dragon’s claim under my skin, it sounded more like a forecast.
I had a bite on the left of my throat, a line in my chest that hadn’t been there yesterday, and the memory, still freshly mine, of a forty-foot dragon climbing the side of the building in his natural form to press one dinner-plate-sized eye against my window.
The assignment hadn’t ended.
Fine.
The assignment had become a dumpster fire.
By six-thirty, I had spent ninety minutes thinking through the implications of having no possibility of leaving and no agency contact at all. No phone, no courier, no pre-arranged extraction phrase. For the first time since I had arrived at Ashenmere, every decision I made belonged only to me.
It was the opposite of comforting.
The bond ran quiet, banked to almost nothing.
Dominic was outside my door, separated from me by stone, locks, and whatever rules Yuki had put around him after the window incident. He wasn’t in the room and not close enough to be useful in any practical sense, but he was close enough for the bond to sit under my ribs like a dimmed current.
I could feel only the broadest shape of him through it: proximity, attention, and restraint.
Not calm. Chosen, and held, every second.
* * *
The lock disengaged at nine sharp, and Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere walked in with a single folder in one hand and a black phone in the other.
I had assumed it would be a deputy, and that I wouldn’t see Yuki again for three days at the earliest.
As it turned out, my assumptions about Yuki were useful mostly as a running inventory of things I had gotten wrong.
Yuki closed the door behind her and crossed to the small kitchen table calmly, as if entering a room she already controlled. She took one chair, leaving the other for me.
I considered making her ask.
Petty.
Tempting.
Not useful.
I sat across from her. Yuki placed the folder between us and set the phone beside it.
Her eyes moved to the phone. “You have no contact with your handler.”
I looked at the phone. Then at her. “That seems to be the current arrangement.”
“It doesn’t have to remain the arrangement.”
I needed to call Mama before she called the State Department switchboard and got someone who had never heard of me. The Catholic guilt was already loaded.
I didn’t reach for the phone.
Good for me.
Character growth, apparently, looked like not grabbing bait before breakfast.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A controlled channel.”
I looked from the phone to Yuki before asking the obvious next question. “Controlled by whom?”
“By me.”
“That wasn’t the comforting answer you may have intended.”
“It wasn’t intended to comfort you.” She rested one hand lightly on the folder, as if we had finished with the object on the table and arrived at the reason she had brought it.
“Your handler will try to reach you,” she said. “He won’t be able to unless we allow it. When he does, his instruction will be simple.”
“You seem confident.”
“I am. He’ll tell you to exploit the bond.”
My body locked before I could stop it.
“Your handler’s name is James Davis,” she said. “He’s forty-six, works out of Langley, and holds authority over operations in three regional districts. His grandmother was Mexican.”
A detail that precise was a message. Ashenmere hadn’t built a profile. They had built several: Davis, the assignment, the embassy staff, and likely every person who had breathed near my clearance file.
Including me.
“Efficient,” I said.
“Necessary.”
The phone sat between us, small and black and patient enough to be insulting.
I looked at it for another second before I looked back at Yuki. “Are you about to ask me to defect?”
“No.” No hesitation. No performance of moral conflict. That made the answer cleaner, not safer.
“Then what?”
“I’m asking you to decide whether you would like him to believe you’re still operating alone.”
I said nothing.
Yuki’s gaze didn’t move. “Davis will ask you to turn the bond into access. He’ll want emotional leverage, private information, vulnerabilities, anything that lets him pressure Ashenmere or the Norwegian delegation through you.”
The phone sat between us. Patient as ever.
“And you’re offering?”
“A controlled channel and a choice. You can let Davis believe he’s directing you, or you can decide what he receives.”
“As your double agent.”
“As yourself.”
“That’s a very pretty distinction.”
“It’s also the only one that matters.”
I looked at the phone again.
If I said no, Davis stayed blind and the council kept deliberating without me. If I said yes, Davis got access to me again, but only through a channel Yuki controlled. Not freedom. Not safety.
“What happens if I say no?”
“Then the phone leaves with me. Davis remains blind. The council continues deliberations without your cooperation.”
“And if I say yes?”
“Then Davis receives what you choose to send him. The council receives what you choose to let us see.” She paused before she added, “And you stop being the only person in this room without a communications channel.”
A good line.
“You would monitor it,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Edit it?”
“No.” Her hand hadn’t moved from the folder.
“Block it?”
“If it risks immediate war, yes.”
I took one breath. “At least you’re honest.”
“I have found it saves time when dealing with women.”
I didn’t smile though the temptation was there.
“You may take your time, Catalina.” She rose and took the phone. “The folder is for you.”
I looked at it.
“Read it when I leave.”
“And the phone?”
“The phone is for after you decide what you want Davis to believe.”
She crossed to the door then paused with her hand on the handle.
“Dominic didn’t consult me before the dining hall.”
I looked up. “I assumed.”
“In seventy years of service, Dominic Graves hasn’t taken a non-operational action without consulting me.” She didn’t turn around. “Last night was the first.”
The line beneath my sternum gave one small, hard pull. I worked to ignore it.
Yuki’s voice stayed level. “I’m telling you this because I want you to understand the discipline you’re reading in him is real. He isn’t a man who breaks easily.” A pause. “He broke for you.”
I didn’t answer.
She left and the locks re-engaged.
The folder contained a black and white photograph. A young woman in a tailored coat stood in front of a fjord beside a man in a leather one. On the back, in pencil: Martin Solberg and Margot Lunde. Troms?, 1958.
* * *
Confinement had a schedule.
The deputy had walked me through it before Yuki arrived, with brisk neutrality, as if explaining meal service instead of captivity.
Breakfast came at seven in my quarters. The lock disengaged, an aide brought in a tray, and the lock re-engaged before the coffee had time to cool.
From nine to ten, I had escorted access to the public-zone library: one enforcer, one approved route, no seaward grounds, no unscheduled corridors, and no pretending anyone believed this was freedom.
At eleven, I was allowed into a conference suite with approved books, monitored notes, and a deputy stationed inside the door.
Lunch arrived at one, back in my quarters, followed by a second library window at three.
At five, a deputy escorted me to a small conference room and read one paragraph about the joint custody deliberations, then answered none of my questions.
Dinner came at six. Final council update at nine. Then quarters again, lock engaged, nothing until breakfast.
The bond spent that first day adjusting and the second day stabilizing.
By the third, it had stopped feeling like an event.
It was simply a line drawn taut to wherever Dominic was in the compound, a steady channel of emotion, usually quiet, sometimes hot, once or twice sharp enough that I looked up from a book before remembering I didn’t actually want to know what had caused it.
He was holding the signal down. I could tell that much. Controlled.
Careful.
Almost polite.
Which was annoying, because I preferred him easier to hate.
* * *
The next day, I followed the breadcrumbs Yuki had left for me in the photograph.
The library I had access to produced a dissertation from the 1950s on the intersection of bonded mates and dragon politics.
Margot Lunde appeared once. One paragraph, buried between two more flattering case studies, stated that she had died of bond strain four months after entering a rival-clan bond.
Oh, goody. My future had citations.
The author moved quickly past her death into the diplomatic resolution that followed, which was described as quiet, successful, and commercially stabilizing. Naturally, he had been more interested in the trade implications than in the woman.
I pulled what I could from the library’s other indexes.
A treaty-law digest from 1970 managed not to mention rival-clan bonds directly while spending twenty pages discussing the Norwegian-American war that had apparently followed Margot’s case.
An 1898 study on cross-clan diplomacy cataloged nineteen pair-bonds across three centuries, all handled through formal allegiance transfer: one mate legally joined the other’s clan, and the bond stopped being a conflict between rival houses.
And a 1962 footnote referred to Margot’s case sideways, as the matter of forty-seven.
The pattern was the absence.
Margot Lunde was the first recorded human caught in a rival-clan bond.
The first.
And, until me, the only.
I closed the dissertation and sat with what it meant. The library held three centuries of careful absence. Margot had walked into it. She hadn’t walked out.
* * *