Worship
Catalina
By day eight, the bond under my ribs had begun to settle from crisis into condition, and confinement had found its rhythm.
Breakfast at seven. Escorted library windows, where I kept searching for rival-clan bonds and kept finding the same carefully maintained absence. Council updates that said almost nothing with impressive formality. Dinner at six. Final check at nine.
Then the room sealed, and the night belonged to me.
Mostly.
I woke at one-forty-seven with my face hot, my mouth dry, and the ghost of a hand at the base of my throat.
The bond was supposed to be a low wire behind my sternum, not a telephone. It carried distance, direction, and strong emotion. Usually. Apparently sleep loosened the rules, because Dominic Graves having a wet dream didn’t stay politely on his side of the line.
A hand at my throat.
A mouth at my collarbone.
Heat.
Want.
The line fraying at the edges.
I sat up in the dark.
The room was silent. The window was black. The lock was still engaged, which meant nothing had entered the room except the heat his dream had left running through me.
Not mine.
Definitely not mine.
I put my fingers against the side of my throat. “Absolutely not,” I said to the room and to the bond. More so to the six-foot-three dragon enforcer asleep somewhere beneath me, dreaming with no subtlety at all.
I cursed in my head in three languages. Then I got out of bed and dressed.
Dark leggings. Soft long-sleeve shirt. Boots that didn’t echo. Hair up.
The lock on the door belonged to the council’s schedule. It wouldn’t open between nine p.m. and seven a.m. without authorization from the outside, which made the door useless.
The room, however, was old.
New buildings believed in sealed systems. Old buildings knew better. Old buildings had survived fires, floods, attacks, renovations planned by committees, and architects who understood that the official exit was rarely the one anyone used when things went wrong.
On day three, I had found a panel under the kitchen sink.
I had been lucky and bored.
The panel wasn’t flush with the others. The screws had been replaced more recently than the surrounding hardware.
The seam had a faint draft. Behind it was a narrow maintenance shaft, older than the current lock system and large enough for a small person who was motivated, flexible, and under-supervised.
I hadn’t used it, until now.
I slid the panel free.
Then I went down.
The shaft was tight, cold, and deeply uninterested in my dignity. It let out into a service corridor two floors below my quarters, behind a wall of storage shelving and a stack of towels that smelled faintly of cedar and bleach.
I paused there, listening. No footsteps, no voices.
The bond pulled east.
Imprecise. More like a compass needle had been set behind my sternum and someone had dragged a magnet beneath the floor.
I followed it.
Service corridor. Utility stair. Back passage behind the kitchen.
The east passage branched from there at a junction I had seen twice during my time as a translator. Left led toward the night-watch room and the pull of the bond. Right ran to the staff entrance near the seaward gate.
Three minutes to the exterior door. One keypad, memorized from the receiving line. Fifteen blocks south to the consulate.
A way out, if I were willing to pretend it was clean.
I went left.
I took the servants’ passage, where the walls were narrow, the lighting was bad, and no one important expected to look.
I was angry, not stupid.
The pull sharpened near an interior door I hadn’t seen before, tucked into a functional stretch of the compound designed for people who already knew where they were going.
My skin felt too tight.
I opened the door.
The room beyond was small and dim, probably a night-watch room: one chair, one desk, a bank of dark monitors, and a narrow window facing an internal courtyard I hadn’t seen from any approved route.
Dominic stood at the window.
He turned when I opened the door, not startled, not even close, which meant he had either heard me coming, felt me through the bond, or been born with the deeply irritating ability to look prepared for everything.
“You should not be here,” he said. “How did you get out, little spy?”
Irritation rose fast. I held it behind my teeth. He wanted the reaction; the name was designed for it, and I hadn’t crawled through a plumbing shaft at two in the morning to reward him.
“I’m not telling you.”
A long pause.
Something at his shoulder shifted, half a centimeter.
Infuriating man.
“No,” he said. “I imagine you are not.”
He wore a black sweater instead of a coat, no formal enforcer lines, no crisp institutional shape. The sweater changed him in a way I resented on principle. He looked less like Ashenmere’s enforcer tonight. He had been awake too long. Too much was happening inside his head.
I stayed at the door. “I had a dream a few minutes ago,” I said.
“Yes?”
“It was yours.”
His jaw shifted once. “I am sorry,” he said.
“You didn’t warn me.”
His shoulders set, the movement small and controlled. A man making himself report instead of react. “I did not know it would cross that clearly.”
“So that’s a thing?”
“Sometimes,” he hedged.
“Dominic,” I sighed.
“Bonded pairs can share dreams,” he said. “Not always. Not cleanly. Usually only fragments. Sensation. Emotion. Want, if it is strong enough.”
“Convenient.”
“No.” His voice stayed rough. “Dangerous.”
“Make it stop.”
“I cannot.” That landed badly and his face told me he knew it.
I held on to the doorframe. I needed both hands occupied. “I know what kind of dream it was.”
Every line of him locked.
Caught.
Useful.
“You don’t get to think about me that way,” I said. The words came out sharper than I meant them to.
Dominic didn’t look away. For one long second, I thought he might apologize, or lower his eyes, or offer me some careful piece of remorse I could reject on principle.
He didn’t.
“No,” he said.
I recommitted to the doorframe. “Excuse me?”
“I will not lie to you.”
“That wasn’t a request for honesty.”
“I know.”
The room seemed smaller than it had been a breath ago. He didn’t look proud. He didn’t look sorry, either. He looked steady.
“I do think about you that way,” he said.
The line between us went hot.
“You should stop.”
“I have tried.”
“Try harder,” I snapped.
“I do.”
His voice stayed level. “I try every day. Mostly I succeed.”
My throat went dry. “Dominic.”
“You live under my skin,” he said.
The sentence landed in my gut. It sounded dragged out of him, the polish missing.
“You are always thinking. Always standing half a step outside yourself, watching the room, watching the exits, watching me. But under that.” His jaw tightened. “Under that, you are in me. Your scent. Your voice. You look at me like I am a problem you intend to solve with a knife and a spreadsheet.”
I went still for a moment because there was too much to reject at once.
The intimacy.
The accuracy.
The fact that my body had reacted before I could build a useful argument against either.
I resented his words more than I resented the dream.
“You don’t get to make this romantic,” I said.
“I am not making it anything.”
“You just told me I live under your skin.”
“Yes.”
“That’s romantic.”
“It is accurate.”
“Dominic.”
He held the look a beat longer than was comfortable. “I know the difference,” he said.
Something behind his eyes released and I could see him suppressing a smile.
His good survival instincts, finally clocking in for their shift.
“You said I do not get to think about you that way,” he said. “I understand why you said it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
His breath stayed level. Barely.
I stepped farther into the room. “Because you claimed me in public without asking. Because I woke up with your dream in my body. Because I’m trapped in this building with your bond in my chest, and every person around me has an opinion about what I should do with you.”
Dominic held still through all of it. No defense. No correction. No careful legal distinction between claim and choice.
Just controlled stillness.
“Yes,” he said. “Because of all of that.”
His agreement sharpened the room.
For one second, I thought he would finally give me the easy thing. An apology. A retreat. Then both of us could pretend we had solved something.
He didn’t.
“But I cannot stop wanting you,” he said.
Then he continued, “I can leave this room now. Tell me to.”
He took one slow and controlled breath. “But I cannot make my body not know you.”
The air between us thinned.
I had come here furious, underslept, and still warm from a dream that hadn’t belonged to me. I should crawl back through the access shaft and add the entire interaction to the dragons-were-a-terrible-idea file.
Instead, I said, “Tell me about the dream.”
His pupils went vertical.
Fast.
“I worshiped you.” The words came out rough.
My pulse hit my collarbone. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only answer that does not make it smaller than it was.”
I swallowed. The movement felt too visible.
“You were angry in the dream,” he said. “You came to me anyway. You put your hands on me first. I kept waiting for you to step back.”
“Did I?”
“No.”
My breath went shallow.
He didn’t move.
“I wanted my mouth on every place I had not taken,” he said. “Your throat. Not the mark. Beside it. Below it. The soft places I have no right to know yet.”
Heat broke in me so quickly my knees forgot their job for one humiliating second.
I stayed upright through spite alone.
“I wanted to learn you slowly enough that the bond could not take credit for it,” he said. “I wanted to know what you sound like when you choose not to be quiet. I wanted your hands in my hair because you put them there. I wanted you above me, under me, and me around you.”
I was probably leaving fingerprints in the wood.
Evidence.
“You’re making it worse,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then stop.”
He immediately closed his mouth.