Past Tense
Catalina
Diplomatic protocol required the compound to provide an embassy contact line during protective confinement. Ashenmere had complied with exact obedience that made me trust it not at all.
The line was unmonitored by humans.
In theory, it was private.
I called Nate at three-twelve the next afternoon from the embassy line in the seventh-floor access alcove, very aware that every shifter within four hundred feet could probably hear enough to make privacy fictional.
Compound monitoring on one end. NSA filtering on the other. The breakup would land on Davis’s desk within hours. He wouldn’t miss the timing.
The transcript was the point. I was firing a distress flare.
It was three-twelve in Seattle.
Six-twelve in Washington.
Nate picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?” He sounded tired. The kind that came from long days, reheated coffee, and checking a phone too often without wanting to admit you were checking it.
“Hey,” I said.
The line went quiet.
One beat.
Two.
Then his voice changed. “Cat?”
Recognition first.
Then worry. “Are you okay?”
I looked at the phone.
Embassy line. Official number. No context. No warning.
Of course he thought something had happened.
Something had.
Just not the kind of something he could help with.
“Nate.”
“What’s wrong?”
I let my eyes close. The alcove around me felt too small.
“Nate. We need to talk.”
The silence on the line was immediate. Everyone knew what came after those words.
I pushed through and continued, “I’m sorry but I can’t keep doing this.”
“What?” A breath he tried to cut off and couldn’t.
“Us, Nate.” I made myself say it slower, because he needed to actually hear it. “I can’t keep doing us. I’m not coming home. I’m not coming back.”
“Jesus.” The word came out cracked.
A long silence.
When he spoke again, his voice had changed. He sounded careful. He was stepping around broken glass without knowing where it was. “Cat. Tell me you aren’t breaking up on the phone. Come home, we’ll talk about it.”
I pressed my fingers against the edge of the table. “I am.”
“Cat.” His voice cracked on my name. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”
“Yes.” The honesty came out before I could clean it up.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Not the kind you can fix.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“I know.”
“Are you hurt?”
My fingers had moved to the mark at the left of my throat without permission. I took them away. “Not in the way you mean.”
“Jesus, Cat.”
“Nate—”
“No. Don’t do that.” His breath came hard through the receiver. “Don’t use the voice where you make it sound organized.”
Nate had known me for four years. He knew several of my worst tricks. Being loved was inconvenient that way.
“I can’t explain all of it.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.”
A pause.
“That’s bad.”
“Yes.”
I heard movement on his end. A chair scraping. “Just tell me what you can.”
I swallowed. “I’m staying in Seattle.”
“Because of the job?”
“No.”
The silence changed.
“Oh.”
“Nate—”
“There’s someone.”
I didn’t answer fast.
He laughed once. His body needed somewhere to put the hit. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is that why you’re not coming home?”
“It’s part of it.”
“Part of it.”
“Yes.”
“Cat, what the hell does that mean?”
“It means this is more complicated than I can explain on this line.”
“That sounds like something from work.”
“It is.”
“And the someone?”
My throat tightened. “Also complicated.”
“Of course he is.”
“Nate.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m—” He stopped. Breathed. Tried again. “I’m sorry. That was cheap.”
“You’re allowed cheap.”
“I don’t want to be cheap.”
I wanted cheap. A cruel shot would’ve given me something easier to hold.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Do you love him?”
I thought of Dominic standing outside my door. Coffee at the right temperature. A dragon’s eye against glass. His mouth stopping when I told him to stop. His refusal to lie and his talent for saying the exact wrong true thing at the worst possible moment.
I thought of Rhain in an olive coat, telling me his mother’s name as if he were placing a knife on the table handle-first.
“I don’t know what to call it yet,” I said.
“That’s not no.” I heard a shaky inhale through the receiver.
The sucker punch landing all the way.
“Okay,” he said.
It wasn’t okay. We both knew that.
“I didn’t plan this,” I said, because apparently I had chosen the least useful sentence first.
“I believe you.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I believe that too.” His voice stayed gentle.
“But I did.”
The line held for one breath.
“Yeah,” he said. “You did.”
My eyes burned. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know that too.” There was no accusation in his voice. No performance. Just hurt, trying very hard to remain decent.
The quiet that followed wasn’t empty.
It was four years of dinners, trips, and half-made plans. A flea-market table. His sweaters on the back of my chair. My books on his nightstand. His patience. My distance. The hundreds of small ways we had both pretended a relationship could survive on kindness and logistics.
“I think I knew,” he said finally.
My throat tightened. “You did?”
“Not today. Not this call.” His voice went rough. “This feels like getting hit by a car, actually.”
A laugh almost broke out of me at the horribleness of it all. I pressed my fingers to my mouth until it passed. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for a second.”
I stopped.
Good for me.
“I knew eventually,” he said. “Or I was afraid eventually. I don’t know. You’ve been somewhere else for a long time, Cat. Before this assignment. I kept thinking if I waited, you’d come back.”
“Nate.”
“And maybe that was unfair to both of us.”
I closed my eyes.
The room was dark except for the light over the table.
The embassy phone was warm against my ear.
“I do love you,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I do. It just isn’t enough.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
It was a clean cut. No drama, no accusation. Just the blade going in exactly where it belonged.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
I looked around the room. A locked door. Thick windows. The embassy phone. And a dragon somewhere below me, holding the line, furious, and mine. I hadn’t decided what to call it yet.
“No,” I said.
The honesty surprised us both. Then I corrected it. “Not in the way you mean. I’m not in immediate danger. But this is bigger than I told you. I’m staying in Seattle. I can’t tell you the rest.”
“Can I do anything?”
“No.”
“I hate that answer.”
“I know.”
I heard him breathe in, hold it, let it go.
Then, very softly, “Be happy, Cat. If you can. I would like that for you.”
My eyes burned harder. “I’ll try.”
“Good.”
I heard him exhale. Then, after a moment, the sound of a mug touching wood.
His table, probably. The flea-market table I had bought for his apartment on a Saturday in September three years ago and sanded badly on the balcony while Nate told me it had character.
It hadn’t had character. It had splinters.
“Take care, Cat.”
“You too.”
I hung up.
The phone sat on the cradle and I sat at the desk for a count of ten.
Davis would read the transcript at six the next morning. He would pull the call. He would mark it. He wouldn’t mistake the timing. He would read it as compromised, embedded by choice, or both.
The man would conclude I had switched teams. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
* * *
The phone sat on the table.
For one second, nothing happened. Then the line under my ribs spiked so hard I had to put a hand on the table to steady myself.
Heat came first. Then possession, sharp. It almost had teeth. Then motion.
Dominic was coming.
I pushed back from the table and left the access alcove before the phone screen had fully gone dark.
The seventh-floor corridor was empty. I walked fast, not running because running would bring deputies, and I had already had enough witnesses for one lifetime.
At first, the line steadied. Dominic had felt me move and caught himself. I could feel the effort of it, the heat pulled tight, the motion checked, the possession forced down toward restraint.
I reached the stairwell and started down. Halfway to my floor, I felt Dominic’s calm slip by degrees.
Heat bled through first, deep and heavy. Then the dragon underneath him, furious and territorial and trying very hard to remember the difference between coming to me and coming for me.
My hand tightened on the rail. “Don’t,” I said under my breath.
The bond answered with another hot pull. He was still trying. I could feel him trying, and I could feel him failing.
By the time I reached my corridor, the lock on my suite was still engaged. Good. I got there first.
He had access he hadn’t used once without permission. He used it now.
The lock disengaged from the outside and the door opened. Dominic stood in the corridor.
Black coat. Black sweater. Eyes vertical. No expression. “Catalina.”
“Dominic.”
His gaze moved over me once, fast and precise. Face. Throat. Mouth.
The line between us went hotter.
Mine. The word didn’t arrive in my head. It arrived in my body, primitive and dragon-shaped.
“May I come in?” he asked.
Every inch of him looked like a creature holding itself back from crossing the threshold and taking the room by force, and he had still asked.
“Yes.”
He stepped inside. The door closed behind him. The lock engaged from the inside.
He didn’t move closer immediately.
Good. Maybe both of us had learned one or two things in the last three weeks.
His gaze stayed on my mouth for one more second before he forced it back to my eyes. “You said you love him,” he said.
“I did.”
His hands stayed at his sides. Open and still. Forcibly relaxed.
The line between us pressed at me, hot and possessive. The bond translated what his mouth wouldn’t.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
“Did you mean it?”
“Yes.”
I felt the word hit him. A hard, clean impact through the bond.
Deeper than pain. Claim meeting history. Dragon hating the chronology. A man had existed before him.
His jaw shifted.
“I meant it the way I have meant it for four years,” I sighed. “I love a man who loved me politely from a distance and never really knew me.”
Dominic’s eyes, not human enough to pretend, didn’t leave mine. “And now?”