Cordillera
Catalina
Davis was in the briefing room that always smelled like stale coffee. He was standing. He sat for routine disasters and stood for the ones he didn’t want to admit were disasters. All of which meant that the manila folder under his arm was going to ruin somebody’s week.
Probably mine.
I took the third chair from the left, the chair I’d been taking for six years. Clear sightline to the door, clear sightline to the projector, the vent humming above me loud enough to mask anything I scribbled in the margins.
Davis dropped the folder in front of me. “Seattle.”
“Yes.”
“Clan Ashenmere is hosting a state dinner tied to the rare earth negotiations. You read the prelim?”
I had, twice. “I read it.”
The vent hum filled the silence between us. He clicked the projector.
The compound filled the screen. Glass, steel, and old-growth timber, perched on the edge of Puget Sound. It looked like a fortress that had dressed up as an office building so people wouldn’t ask too many questions.
“Norwegians are leading the bloc on rare earth,” Davis said. “If we don’t crack that front, we’re paying whatever they want for neodymium for the next decade. Maybe two.”
I knew the economics. Every phone, missile guidance system, andelectric car battery on the planet needed materials the dragons were sitting on like smug, fire-breathing landlords. They had been sitting on them since before Davis’s great-grandfather was born. They were going to keep sitting on them. Patience was cheap when you measured your life in centuries.
He clicked again.
A face filled the screen. Blond. Sharp cheekbones. A smile calibrated to make diplomats forget their talking points and otherwise sensible people forget their underwear.
“Rhain Solberg. Son of Martin Solberg, the Norwegian clan leader. Seventy-five in human years.” Davis’s voice went flat. It did that when he was about to make me do something I wasn’t going to like. “Trained diplomat. Groomed for leadership from childhood. First time in six years he’ll be outside Norwegian territory in a setting we can access without starting a war.”
“Lucky us.”
“Your cover is State Department translator. Mandarin and Norwegian primary. Norwegian still current?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Primary objective, general intel on Ashenmere: security, shifting patterns, defense protocols, anything you can get without anyone noticing you’re getting it. Secondary.” He tapped the photo. Rhain Solberg’s smile filled the screen again, patient and practiced and frankly unnecessary. “Get close to him. However you need to. Make sure he talks. His father has spent thirty years building the most isolationist dragon regime since the Romanians went dark in ’74. If there’s a crack in that wall, it’s him. Questions?”
I had twelve. None he could answer.
“Your escort’s the clan enforcer.” Click. “Dominic Graves.”
I looked at the screen for longer than the photograph deserved.
It was a surveillance shot, taken from above and several stories away, an angle that made most people look diminished.
Dominic Graves didn’t diminish. Dark hair. Hard jaw. Hands loose at his sides in a way that didn’t read relaxed so much as temporarily unemployed.
His file had been four pages. I read it three times without marking a thing because there had been nothing useful to mark. He’d been an enforcer since he was old enough to walk into a fight, which for a dragon meant childhood. There were no known associates outside clan function, no relationship history, and no hobbies. Nothing soft enough to grab onto if I needed leverage.
Every paragraph of his psych profile circled the same fact from a different angle: a man trained so completely that everything outside the function had calcified into absence.
He was going to be the problem.
Not because he looked volatile. Because he looked like every volatile thing in him had been locked behind a door no one living should open.
“He’ll shadow you for the duration,” Davis said. “It’s standard for human visitors on clan territory. Don’t give him a reason to get curious.”
