Re
Catalina
Dominic came back from his day of council meetings at six. He opened my apartment door and stopped with one hand still on the knob. For one full minute, he didn’t move.
The hall light cut across his face. It caught the hard line of his jaw. His hand tightened on the knob until the metal gave a soft click. He swallowed, hard.
I felt a heavy pressure move through the bond. Old and sharp and dragging claws along the inside of his skin.
I watched from the table and held still. He was wrestling with his dragon.
His gaze dragged over me, taking inventory, slow and precise. “Catalina.” My name came out rough, half voice.
“Dominic?” I returned, with the barest edge of a question.
He crossed the room.
He didn’t need to ask about Rhain. The heat and pressure of it had already reached him. Dominic had felt every degree and held himself steady through all of it. He had kept his feelings to himself. Kept his dragon calm. Given me Rhain without interference.
The line he had been holding had reached its end. Dominic’s eyes were slit-thin, the discipline in him pulled so tight it looked painful. His hand came to my jaw. The other settled at my waist.
For one breath, he held me there, and his gaze moved over me, slow and deliberate and barely leashed. My mouth. My throat. The places where Rhain’s scent lingered because I had allowed it to.
His thumb dragged along my jaw, neither angry nor gentle.
“Little spy,” he said, rough enough that my spine remembered before my brain did.
Then his mouth found mine.
My back hit the edge of the table. I caught the front of his shirt and held on as heat snapped between us, all the control he had spent the afternoon bleeding into the room finally coming back through his hands.
Dominic’s restraint didn’t ask whether I knew what I wanted. It knew I did. And it met me there hard enough to make the table complain behind me.
Everything opened under the kiss. Hot. So full of need it took my knees. His pulse came through mine. The mark at the left of my throat answered before I could process it, a sharp, molten pull that made thought useless and my body honest.
A moan slipped past my lips. Dominic heard it. His fingers pressed in at my waist.
Every place Rhain had been near. Every place Rhain hadn’t.
Dominic followed the map of me with a dragon’s attention and a discipline he was holding by the last thread.
He didn’t erase Rhain. He didn’t ask me to give anything back.
He only made sure there was no part of me that forgot him. Still here. Still his.
He pulled back half an inch. I lifted my hand and brushed my fingertips over the mark at his shoulder, just beneath the open edge of his shirt. The reminder of my claim wasn’t subtle. Neither was his reaction.
His breath stopped for one beat. Pleasure moved through him, hot and controlled badly enough that I felt the edges of it against my own skin.
Good.
I left my fingers there. “Dominic.”
“Yes.” His voice was rough enough that I felt it more than heard it.
I kept my fingers on the mark at his shoulder. The heat of it pulsed beneath my touch. A reminder to both of us that he was mine. Even when the rest of the world insisted on behaving like a badly governed fire.
“What did the council say?”
That cooled him a degree. The pleasure folded inward and his focus sharpened. The dragon retreated just far enough to let the strategist step forward. “Solberg moved his timeline.”
“How far?”
“He is filing the emergency clan-discipline recall on Rhain at oh-six-hundred Pacific. Tomorrow.”
The words landed one at a time. Formal. Precise. Ugly.
“Eight hours.”
Dominic inclined his head. “Bjorn confirmed it to Yuki.”
Eight hours. Less, once logistics and signatures and men with polished shoes started calling kidnapping procedure.
I looked past Dominic toward the dark window, as if Norway might be visible from the apartment if I hated it hard enough.
“And after he files?”
“Rhain boards a Norwegian council aircraft within two hours of Martin’s signature.”
My stomach dropped. He gave me a breath to take it in.
“By lunch,” he continued, “he is in Troms?.”
“What does Yuki plan to do?”
“She is already moving.”
That should’ve reassured me. It didn’t.
“She authorized me to bring this to you tonight rather than morning,” he continued. “The rest is yours to decide.”
The rest. As if the rest weren’t a cliff edge dressed up as a choice.
“Dominic.”
“Yes?”
“What happens if I bring him in?”
Everything between us went still. Something in him locked into place with terrible care. “You mean into this,” he said.
“Yes.”
His eyes held mine. “Into our nest.”
I swallowed. “Into us.”
His answer didn’t come fast. Dominic thought through every word before he gave it to me. I could feel what he wasn’t saying: the possessive dragon part of him that had come through the door and scented Rhain on my skin.
“If you choose him,” he said at last, “he would bite you.”
My pulse moved under my skin.
“Not over my mark,” Dominic added. His voice stayed even, but the bond tightened around the words. “Beside it, or opposite it. Depending on the placement you choose.”
“The placement I choose.”
“Yes.” Dominic watched me take in the choice.
“You would also bite him,” he said.
“I would claim him back.”
“Yes.”
“The way I claimed you.”
“Not exactly.” His correction was gentle.
His hand stayed warm at my jaw, grounding me before the law could turn intimate things into paperwork and make me want to set something important on fire.
He said, “Norwegian custom is formal, especially for second bonds.”
“The first mate is present,” he continued, “or formally represented.”
My fingers stilled on his mark. “You.”
“Yes, to acknowledge the structure.” He had selected every sentence from a more dangerous pile. “To prevent a later challenge. To make clear the second bond is not theft, coercion, or a rival claim made through weakness in the first.”
I stared at him. “Romantic.”
“Dragon law rarely is.”
“No, it has all the sensuality of the DMV.”
This time, his mouth did move enough that something in my chest loosened for a breath before the rest of the problem came back.
I let out a breath. “And if we do it privately?”
“Then the bond would still be real.”
“But politically messy.”
“Yes.”
I searched his face. “How messy?”
Dominic’s expression didn’t change. “Messy enough for Martin Solberg to use it.”
“And you?” I asked.
The look held. “What about me?”
The deflection was so neat I almost admired it.
“How would you feel?”
I felt the question hit him. He sorted it on tactical-brief settings. Threat. Cost. Consequence. Acceptable loss. He weighed it as strategy because strategy gave him somewhere to stand that wasn’t quicksand.
“I would feel it,” he said.
I slanted a look at him. “That isn’t an answer.”
His mouth thinned. “No.”
Then silence. I did not rush to fill it. Let him work. Dominic Graves could take apart an ambush route in four seconds. He could survive the emotional version without my rescuing him from it.
“The dragon would object,” he said at last.
That, at least, was honest.
I waited.
“The man would not.”
I didn’t let him hide in that division. “And underneath both?”
He didn’t look away. A dragging, reluctant pressure broke through the bond.
He took a breath. “Pain,” he said.
My chest tightened.
“Jealousy.” His shoulders drew tight. He didn’t look away. I had asked for the truth.
“Fear,” he said, “that once there is another bond beside mine, you will discover mine was the first language you learned, and his is the one you dream in.”
Oh.
I reached for the bond without meaning to. Warm under the pain. Guarded. A large shape had lowered itself close to the ground and didn’t yet trust my hand.
“I know the fear is not a fact,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it?”
His mouth tightened. “Not yet.”
I reached up and put my hand against his face and he went still beneath my touch. “I chose you,” I said.
“I know.”
“No.”
His eyes sharpened.
“You know it as information,” I said. “I need you to hear it as a promise.”
The bond pulled tight between us. I held his look and didn’t let either of us escape into law, strategy, clan politics, or the very tempting option of kissing until nothing had edges.
“I chose you. I may choose him too. That doesn’t make you less mine.”
His breath left him slowly, and through the bond I felt the words reach him layer by layer. His dragon didn’t accept comfort on faith. It tested the shape of it, pressed against the edges, searched for the lie. There was none.
Under my ribs, something tightened first, then warmed with careful, aching increments. Dominic closed his eyes, and the pain in him reached me along the line. Jealousy, fear, want, and beneath all of it, the brutal discipline of a man trying not to turn love into possession.
When he opened his eyes, the pain was still there, but it had somewhere to stand now.
“If you choose him,” he said, voice rough, “I want to be there.”
“Okay.”
“Not to grant permission.”
“I’d assume not,” I said, arching a brow.
“To stand with you,” he said. The softness of it caught me off guard. Then he added, quieter, “And to stand with him.”
That surprised me.
“If he enters this nest,” Dominic said, “he enters correctly. Not through secrecy. Not through injury. Not through a gap I left because I was too proud to acknowledge him.”
I studied his face. “You respect him.”
“I do.”
“You like him?”
“That is a separate question.”
“Dominic.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I do not dislike him.”
I smiled despite myself. “That’s practically a sonnet from you.”
His hand curved at my waist. A small pressure. A quiet answer.
I asked, “What does entering the nest correctly mean to you?”
Dominic’s mouth settled. The corner that had moved went flat.
“It means you ask for him because you want Rhain. Not because the bond wants completion. Not because he is suffering. Not because I am willing to withstand it. Not because the council has backed you into a corner.”
“That’s a lot of not-becauses.”