Epilogue
Catalina
The next summer.
I was shocked to learn Ashenmere had a bridal suite.
It had not been used as one in forty-three years.
In that time, the room had been an embassy guest suite, an administrative office, council records overflow, a meditation room for an elder who had since died, and, most recently, storage for the wing’s holiday linens.
Yuki insisted we use it. Her staff cleared it in nine days; Ashenmere had been storing an unreasonable number of table runners.
Now it had a window overlooking the south courtyard, a small fireplace I still did not know how to operate, a vanity mirror polished to the cruelest possible clarity, and a tea service Mama had been drinking since six-thirty in the morning.
Mama had arrived the day before.
She had stayed in our quarters. She had met Rhain and Dominic. She had inspected them both with wary precision, a woman evaluating bridges before allowing her daughter to cross.
Then she had told me, in Spanish, that I was not sleeping enough and that my tea was too weak. It was the closest she came to saying she approved of them.
This morning, she had been in the bridal suite by six-thirty because the dress did not, in her opinion, hang correctly at the shoulder.
I let her work.
In all the months since she found out I was bound to two dragons, she had not tried to talk me out of it. In all those months, I had not tried to make her understand it.
The careful work she was doing at my shoulder was the closest thing my mother and I had to a shared language.
“Mija.”
“Mama.”
“This sleeve.”
“Yes, Mama.”
She turned me toward the mirror. I had not seen myself in the dress until that moment.
The dress was simple. Ivory silk, long sleeves, a boatneck collar that left both bond marks visible.
I had suggested covering them.
Dominic had looked at me with such immediate horror that, for one glorious second, I thought he might actually breathe fire.
The mirror showed me a woman who no longer had to divide her life into compartments.
I had not understood, until I saw myself in the dress, how much of my face had been built around hiding. Around translating myself before anyone else could misread me. Around being useful, contained, and hard to reach.
The woman in the mirror looked happy and whole.
She looked like someone who could be seen by the people who loved her and survive it.
The operative in me had quieted in the year since the chamber. She had not disappeared. I did not trust people who disappeared useful parts of themselves. She had simply taken a job with better lighting.
On Ashenmere’s organizational chart, I was now the foreign liaison for North American matters. Yuki had given me a window, two staff, an embassy phone she monitored personally, and a budget I was still learning to spend without feeling like I was committing a federal crime.
The work was mostly reading documents in two languages and writing memos in a third.
It had not been a quiet year.
My first ceremonial assignment had been a minor-dragon wedding in Tacoma that October.
Yuki had not sent me because the wedding was important.
She sent me because the rite involved an American national marrying into a clan family on U.S.
soil, and protocol required Ashenmere to send a liaison officer who was also an American national.
I sat at the back, took nine pages of notes, and did not cause an international incident, which Yuki later described as “a promising start.”
In the hallway after the reception, the bride’s mother asked if I was the woman from the State Department news.
“I was,” I said.
She looked me over for a moment. “You look happier now,” she said. Then she walked away before I could decide what to do with that.
Mama called that night, between home-care visits, to ask whether I had eaten. The call lasted forty-six minutes. We talked about a recipe, which was how my mother said the things she did not know how to say directly.
She had accepted my life.
Mama adjusted the shoulder again. “Sí. Ahora sí.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
She looked at me in the mirror.
She did not say anything for a long count.
Then she said, in English, “The Norwegian one is very polite.”
“Yes.”
“Too polite.”
“Also yes.”
“But he watches you when you are not looking.”
I met her eyes in the mirror.
“And the other one,” she said. “He says almost nothing.”
“No.”
“But he listens.”
My throat tightened before I could stop it. “Yes.”
Mama turned me away from the mirror and faced me herself.
“Mija,” she said quietly. “Te ves descansada.”
The last time my mother had told me I looked rested, I had been young enough to believe rest was something that simply happened to people.
“Yes, Mama,” I said. “I am.”
She touched the sleeve once more, though there was nothing left to fix.
“Por fin.” Finally.
She kissed me, once, at my temple where my mother had been kissing me since I was four, and didn’t say anything else.
She turned me back to the mirror and went out to wait in the corridor with the other guests.
* * *
Yuki stood at the center of the courtyard in council formal, holding the small leather binder that contained the marriage rite she had written herself.
I walked in between my two mates.
The rite was brief. Yuki had insisted on brief. When she handed me the draft the week before, she said ceremonies only got longer when the people performing them were trying to convince themselves of something.
In her view, we were not trying to convince anyone today. We already knew.
Yuki closed the binder.
I kissed Dominic. Then I kissed Rhain.
Somewhere during the second kiss, the part of the courtyard I had been most worried about all day stopped behaving.
My family had flown up from Houston the night before. I had seated my four siblings three rows back and told them that this was a clan ceremony, not a house party. They had agreed.
They had lied.
Matt was on his feet first, whooping loudly enough to bounce off the south wall and startle a bird out of the trees. Daniel was half a second behind him. Reyna out-cheered both of them. Anthony put two fingers in his mouth and produced a whistle several elders would be discussing for years.
My family had come a long way to make noise for me. They were not going to apologize to a single dragon for the volume.
At the front, Mama smiled. She had waited a long time to hear it.
And then, by some small miracle, Rhain and Dominic managed the physical gesture they had been threatening to attempt since November.
Rhain’s open palm landed between Dominic’s shoulder blades. Brief. Careful. Brother-coded enough to make several elders look down at their programs. Dominic’s hand came to Rhain’s shoulder a second later.
It lasted two seconds and there was no collapse of civilization.
A few older Ashenmere elders registered the exchange with a half-smile. They had spent a year watching the two males evolve from carefully not killing each other to dangerously close to family.
The reception ran to midnight.
Mama danced with Dominic. This was, by my count, the single most surprising thing I had ever seen.
She stepped on his foot twice and laughed at him both times. Dominic accepted it solemnly. He was conducting delicate diplomacy and willing to sacrifice one foot to the cause.
She danced with Rhain next. She talked to him in Spanish for the entire dance. Rhain had not spoken Spanish since he learned it in school in 1968. Mama did not care. She talked. He nodded. She talked more. At the end, he laughed.
When the dance was over, she came back to me at the reception table and said one sentence.
“Sigues siendo mi hija.”
You’re still my daughter.
* * *
By the time the door closed behind us, the wedding was over.
My siblings were still celebrating somewhere downstairs and Mama had hugged all three of us twice and issued enough instructions to survive a natural disaster.
For the first time all day, there was no one else in the room.
Just us.
We did not make it to the bedroom with any dignity intact.
For two days we had belonged to other people.
To the rite, to the council, to a courtyard full of elders and a reception full of family, to every camera and every piece of choreography Yuki had written.
For two days I had been looked at. Now the door was shut, the corridor behind us was empty, and the only people left in the world were the two men taking the last of my patience apart with their hands.
None of us wanted to wait.
My dress was half undone before we cleared the corridor, Rhain’s fingers at the laces and Dominic’s coat already gone, three sets of hands moving faster than they were moving well.
I got Rhain’s shirt open and put my mouth to his chest because it was there and because I had wanted to all day and had not been allowed.
Rhain backed me the last steps to the suite door and put me against it.
There was nothing measured left in him. His mouth opened mine, his hand came up under my jaw, and he kissed me. I felt the dragon in it, in the press of him, in the rough sound he made against my lips. My hands were in his hair. The door was cold against my bare shoulders and I did not care.
Then his hands slid under my thighs and he lifted me like I weighed nothing. I wrapped my legs around him, and he carried me off the door and into the room.
He set me on my feet in the lamplight, turned me by the hips, and put my back against Dominic.
Dominic was already there. Already waiting, already bare to the waist, his chest hot against my shoulder blades. When my back met his front I felt the whole hard length of him against the base of my spine, ready, patient in a way the rest of him was not.
I pushed back against him without deciding to.
His breath went out slow against my hair. One arm came across my collarbone and held me to him. His mouth found the left of my throat, where his claim had lived for a year, where his teeth had made me his in a crowded dining hall in front of his whole clan.
He set his teeth to the mark and bit down.
I came.