Asset #4
My pulse moved under Dominic’s mark. The bond in my chest stayed steady. Dominic. Below us. Holding the line he had been holding all day, choosing not to pull.
Rhain followed my hand. My fingers had drifted to the edge of the claim I still didn’t know how to carry.
I looked at Rhain. His mouth. The fraction of breath he was holding because he had said he wouldn’t move tonight unless I asked.
“Rhain,” I said, standing.
“Yes.”
“Come around the table.”
A breath left him that I hadn’t heard him take.
Then he was moving. Chair back. One step. Two. The table between us gone like it had offended him personally.
The heat of him reached me before his hands did.
For one suspended second, his face was unguarded. Joy. Want. Pain. All of it there, bright and reckless.
His hand came up to the side of my throat where Dominic’s mark sat.
His thumb settled at the hinge of my jaw. The pad of his index finger came to rest half an inch beneath the bite scar.
He didn’t look away from me.
The mark was in his palm now. Dominic’s claim. My answer. The proof of what Rhain had missed and what he was choosing not to punish me for.
His fingers flexed once. Possessive.
“Kjaere,” he said, and my name sounded like relief.
Then he bent. And I rose.
His mouth found mine with the heat from earlier still alive beneath it, but now there was more under the want. The kiss was glad and furious and grateful to be allowed, all at once.
His hand stayed at my throat, not gripping, not claiming, just holding the place where every choice in the room had left a mark.
He kissed me like he wanted to know all of it.
Like he had no interest in pretending Dominic hadn’t been there first, and no intention of letting that be the only truth that mattered.
My fingers caught in his coat.
A rough sound left him against my mouth, and I felt it at the base of my spine.
There was nothing cold in him. Nothing distant. Rhain with the careful hands. The bright joy gone hungry.
A man who had spent the last hour offering patience and then taking it back with his mouth.
So I deepened it, kissing slower. He opened my mouth under his.
Rhain made another sound against my mouth.
Then a word, in Norwegian, so quiet I almost missed it.
“Min.” Mine.
He said it for himself. A confession smuggled into a language he assumed I wouldn’t parse in this state. The joke of it. The hopeless tenderness of him offering me a claim he didn’t dare make in English. It nearly took my knees out from under me.
I bit his lower lip. Lightly. Once. Just to let him know I’d heard him.
His breath broke. He brought his forehead to mine. He stayed there with his eyes closed and his thumb still moving at my jaw.
His mouth was a quarter inch from mine.
He was holding it together by training. I could feel the seam.
I wanted to put my fingers in it.
“Catalina.”
“Yes.”
His forehead rested against mine for one breath longer than necessary. “I have to leave this room.”
Then he let go.
He stepped back and set his coat straight with two small adjustments, the gesture precise enough to be ridiculous after the way he had just kissed me.
At the door, he looked back.
The heaviness was still there. It hadn’t left his face entirely. But Rhain, apparently, had no intention of letting tragedy have the last word when flirtation remained available.
“Your virtue is safe,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“No,” he said. “That’s why I’m being impressive.”
Then he winked and left.
I heard him exhale once on the other side of the wood.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
The photograph was still on the table. Margot in Frogner. Hair pinned. Laughter still on her mouth. Alive.
I wasn’t Margot. Margot had been isolated before she understood what was happening. She had been told to wait while men with seals and titles decided which version of her would survive on paper. I knew better.
I picked up the photograph and put it inside the desk drawer.
Then I opened the phone.
I drafted carefully.
Three sentences in the bureaucratic cadence Davis had trained into me. Status report on the council vote. Status report on the medical-clearance follow-up. One small operational reference three lines from the bottom, framed as ambient context.
A detail an analyst included when she wanted a supervisor to track it without admitting it mattered.
Per the Tuesday council briefing, the eldest elder confirmed the dual-bond question won’t be re-opened before Day 30.
The eldest elder had confirmed no such thing. There had been no Tuesday council briefing on the bond. There would be no Day 30 review. This would be the canary.
If anyone in Davis’s chain repeated it back to me, I would know the sentence had moved. If it appeared in a directive, I would know Davis had read it. If a deputy mentioned Day 30 in a room where no one should’ve known the phrase, I would know the line ran through the compound.
Not proof yet, but a path.
I read the draft twice. Then I sent it. The phone chimed once. Done.
Margot had waited while the record learned how to bury her. I had no intention of giving mine the same courtesy.