Soon
Catalina
The council granted Rhain’s first access window the following morning. He was given three hours.
Unsupervised, technically.
The council had argued about the technically for three days. Rhain’s delegation had argued back. It had eventually been granted on the condition that unsupervised didn’t include access to my quarters.
Dragon law loved a distinction.
I respected that.
Rhain arrived at ten on Saturday morning wearing an olive coat that made him look younger. My heart gave one bright, traitorous thud. Apparently some part of me had been waiting for him.
“Catalina.”
“Rhain.”
His eyes moved over my face, then the mark at the left of my throat, then back to my eyes. He noticed the sleep I hadn’t been getting. “You’re well?”
“It depends on your definition.”
He smiled lightly, then inclined his head toward the corridor. “Walk with me.”
I walked with him.
The public corridors had been cleared for the access window. Two enforcers followed at the mandated distance. Dominic wasn’t one of them.
The bond told me he was below us, prowling and very aware. Every step I took beside Rhain moved across the line under my ribs like a finger drawn over a bruise.
I didn’t mention it. Rhain did. “He can feel this.”
“Yes.”
“How clearly?”
“Not clearly enough to hear us. Clearly enough to hate it.”
Rhain’s eyes crinkled in small delight.
He walked with his hands in his coat pockets. Trained-household casual. He had been taught not to fidget by an entire family.
Rhain fell silent beside me.
His shoulders pulled back once, then settled. His jaw tightened and released. He kept his gaze ahead for three more steps, like he was choosing the exact place to put the next sentence.
When he finally turned back to me, the polish was still there. But the ease wasn’t. “Catalina.”
“Yes.”
“I need to tell you something about my father, and I need you to understand that I’m not telling you to maneuver you.”
I nodded once and let him have the silence.
“He believes the bond is a form of war. A thing dragons survive, not a thing dragons live inside. He has built our clan’s politics on that belief for years.”
“And you?”
“I believe he’s wrong,” he said simply.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because my father wants me to use the bond for his gain,” he said. “I won’t. But I would rather you see all the moving parts.”
A nice sentence.
“And the part you care about?”
His gaze held mine. “The council granting me more than three hours with you.”
“You expect them to grant more.”
“I expect to make them.”
There he was. Polished. Certain.
He let the silence stretch for three steps, then changed the ground beneath us with one softer question. “Would you tell me about your boyfriend?”
I stopped walking.
Rhain stopped one step later. He had caught the temperature change.
“My boyfriend,” I said carefully.
“Yes.” His hands stayed in his coat pockets. “It was in the Ashenmere file.”
My life, apparently, had become light reading for ancient political households.
“You read the file on me,” I said.
Rhain inclined his head once. “What Ashenmere had assembled.”
Neat answer. Careful answer. Not a denial.
I looked at him a second longer than was comfortable, and he let me see that he understood the problem. He had walked into this conversation with my life already summarized for him.
“I’m not asking because I think the bond erases him,” he said. “I’m asking because if he matters to you, then he matters to the situation.”
That was better than it had any right to be.
Still.
“Not my ex,” I said.
Rhain’s answer came immediately. “No.”
“Not the man I had.”
“No,” he said, steady now. “Your boyfriend.”
I gave that a beat. Long enough to decide he meant it, and to make sure he knew I was deciding.
“Good. Because if you had used that tense, we were about to have a very short discussion.”
He didn’t look away. “You told Graves the same thing.”
“I did.”
“And did he listen?”
“Eventually.”
The corner of Rhain’s mouth turned slightly down. “Then I’ll try to arrive there faster.”
“Ambitious.”
“Necessary,” he said.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he gave me the smallest nod. We started walking again.
“My boyfriend’s name is Nate,” I said. “He’s wonderful.
He’s a software developer in Washington.
He makes very good coffee and very bad decisions about wool sweaters.
We have been together for four years, which feels like a lifetime, and he has never once asked the questions about my work that make me lie unnecessarily. We’re a good match.”
Rhain said nothing.
Smart man.
I continued. “My mother, who thinks I’m a State Department translator, has been waiting for me to get engaged to Nate for three years and has started making passive-aggressive Catholic comments about fertility windows.”
“She sounds formidable,” Rhain said.
“She is.”
He walked a few steps in silence, as if deciding whether the next question had earned the right to be asked.
“Do you love him?”
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
I looked ahead. The corridor stretched long and empty in front of us.
“Yes,” I said.
I didn’t feel the need to expand. Whether what I had with Nate was enough wasn’t a question I was ready to answer with dragons watching me.
Rhain accepted the answer without pressing. We walked several more steps in silence, and I thought, briefly, that he might leave it there.
He didn’t.
“My mother’s name was Margot,” he said.
I stopped walking.
This time, he didn’t. He continued two paces, then paused beside a window and looked out at the courtyard, as if the sentence had required movement to survive being spoken.
He hadn’t dropped the information. He had placed it on the floor between us and stepped past it.
“Margot,” I said.
“Yes.”
The name sat between us for a breath before the rest of the file opened in my head.
“Margot Lunde.”
Rhain’s gaze stayed on the courtyard. “Yes.”
“Troms?. 1947.”
“Yes.”
“Except your mother couldn’t have died in 1947,” I said. “You were born in 1951.”
He didn’t answer immediately. His silence wasn’t evasion. It was older than that.
“No,” he said at last. “She couldn’t have.”
“So the official record is a lie.”
“Yes.” His hands remained in his coat pockets. “I don’t know what they did to her after the official date. The records are sealed. My father has never told me. Bjorn won’t say.”
I walked to stand beside him at the window.
“You’re the son of the woman Morag was talking about.”
His face didn’t change. “Yes.”
“That’s a great deal of information to hand me.”
“I know.”
“Why do it?”
This time, he looked at me. “Because I would like you to make decisions with actual information.”
I let out a breath through my nose. “That’s becoming a theme.”
“As it should.”
“Did Yuki tell you Morag came to see me?”
“No,” he said. “Bjorn did.”
“Of course he did.”
Rhain huffed a quiet laugh, though there was very little humor in it.
“Bjorn tells me most things,” he said. “Usually things I don’t want to hear.”
“Useful man.”
“The best ones are often unbearable.”
I looked at him.
The light from the window caught the side of his face. For the first time, he looked less like the man from the receiving hall and more like someone dressing an inherited wound for public viewing.
“Rhain.”
“Yes.”
“How did she die?”
The quiet went long. I wondered if he would refuse. “Slowly, I believe.”
I had expected something easier to digest. A date. A cause. A politically polished version of bond strain with footnotes. Not that.
“My father called it tragedy,” Rhain said. “It built his entire political career.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
We walked again after that. For several minutes neither of us spoke.
The corridor was wide enough for the enforcers behind us to stay at their assigned distance, and narrow enough that Rhain’s coat sleeve brushed mine once on a turn. He didn’t move away from it. Neither did I.
The brush was accidental. My body reacted like a schoolgirl with a hallway crush.
I kept my eyes forward. He politely did the same.
Rhain’s manners made a woman want to behave badly just to see what he would do with the evidence.
Heat had built in me across the walk. Slow. Dangerous because it felt almost ordinary. Proximity. Truth. The clean line of his profile when he looked out the window. The care he had taken handing me ugly information without asking me to make him feel noble for it.
For a few steps, I let myself stay there.
Then Rhain’s shoulders settled, and the silence turned back toward the political minefield we were pretending not to walk through.
“My father believes the only way to survive a bond is to control every condition around it. Every person. Every movement.”
I turned my head toward him by an inch.
“And you?” I asked, my voice soft.
He took a moment before answering, his gaze still on mine.
“I think control is how people justify not facing their fear.”
We walked back without filling the silence. The enforcers kept their distance, their footsteps politely behind us while Rhain’s stayed beside mine. His footstep had been finding the same rhythm as mine for some time, and at some point I had stopped correcting for it.
By the time we reached the door of my suite, it was past one. His three hours were over. He should’ve left, and I should’ve opened the door.
Neither of us moved.
The wall sconce caught the line of his shoulder and the edge of his jaw, turning him half gold, half shadow. He was breathing slowly, but not calmly. The diplomat in him had receded. Whatever looked back at me was older, hungrier, and far more careful.
The last six inches between us felt deliberate.
I could feel the heat coming off him in the small space between our bodies. He was tall enough that I had to tilt my chin up to keep his eyes. My pulse was already doing something I didn’t want him to notice. My hands stayed at my sides on principle.
His hand came up slowly. I could’ve stepped back.
I didn’t.
His fingers settled at the side of my jaw, his thumb resting at my cheekbone with no press, no claim, only contact. My skin warmed beneath his hand.