I’d been standing outside her door for nineteen minutes.
I’d walked human visitors through this compound for the better part of seventy years. Two hundred and thirty-one, by my last count. Diplomats, journalists, three U.S. presidents, one prime minister, and a French defense attaché who had tried to photograph the west vault with a camera hidden in his tie clip.
They walked in. I walked them around. I delivered them to dinner. I delivered them out the front door. I forgot their faces inside the hour.
My function had never required me to stand outside a visitor’s door and count the minutes. It had never required me to know the cadence of a woman’s breathing through a wall.
It had never put my body outside my mate’s room. This was a first.
Her name was on the inside of every breath I took.
Cordero.
Lamb.The universe had a sense of humor. I had never cared for it. She was not a lamb.
She had walked past me and had not looked up. She had clocked me at three steps out and did not alter her gait by a single increment. Her hands stayed loose. Her weight stayed even. She had the most controlled walk I had read from a human in seventy years of operational hallways.
Trained.
I had been doing this long enough to know what a trained walk looked like.
Cordero was not a State Department translator.
I worked through the rest of what the corridor had given me, because it was already a longer list than I was comfortable with.
Five-two. Maybe five-three with the shoes. Compact mass. Center of gravity low and well-managed. No visible weapon. Her right hand had cleared the strap of her bag at the shoulder before she crossed me, an unconscious clear that came from years of carrying something heavier than a notebook.
Then there was her scent.
Her scent had not behaved like other scents. It had moved across me like a hand across a wall in the dark, looking for the switch.
I had recognized her.
Seventy years of escorts, council meetings, and trade delegations, and I had let every human pass me without so much as a flicker. This woman had walked past at nine inches of clearance, and the older part of me had lifted its head and paid attention.
She was mine.
I rejected the sentence. I stood very still in the corridor and rejected it twenty or thirty times, and every time I rejected it the sentence came back at the same volume, calm and unimpressed.
Mine.
The bond was supposed to be impossible to ignore. I had always considered that a piece of ludicrous marketing by dragons who wanted an excuse to behave badly.
I had been ignoring it for nineteen minutes. I would continue to ignore it for the duration of her stay.
The door at the end of the corridor stayed closed.
She would be running her sweep. She would do it without hesitation and without fuss. She would find the optical pickup in the smoke detector. She would find the directional microphone behind the painting. She might find the pressure plate, which had been installed in human-visitor quarters six years ago after a journalist from Brussels proved more ambitious than intelligent.
The first two devices would tell us she was a professional.
The third would tell us how good.
The pressure-plate light on my wrist remained dark.
I listened.
Not to her. The room was built to prevent that. Thick door. Insulated frame. Human privacy, within the limits of clan hospitality, which were generous in language and narrow in practice.
