Ashenmere staff were trained not to react. It was one of Yuki’s more useful policies.
For a moment, there was only silence on the other side of the door. Then the tray settled on the floor with a careful, practiced quiet, and the aide’s footsteps moved away at the same measured pace they had yesterday.
By lunch, the kitchen would know. By dinner, the council wouldknow. Yuki had known the moment I entered the room.
Possibly before.
Yuki made administrative competence look like omniscience.
Catalina did not stir. I lay still beneath her and listened to the corridor empty.
The next forty-eight hours assembled themselves in my mind because I had spent seventy years letting consequence arrive before emotion. It was an old habit.
Useful.
Not always kind.
Yuki knew the morning after the first private completion of a claim was not a discretionary hour. Dragons revered the bond for a reason. The first morning was not politics, and not romance with better lighting.
It was settling.
A dragon who left the bed too soon after a mutual claim did not return to himself cleanly. The bond did not like abandonment dressed as discipline. Neither did the body. Neither, I suspected, would Catalina, though she would have several precise objections to anyone phrasing it that way.
Yuki knew this.
She would send a deputy with a written instruction. Likely noon. Later, if she was feeling generous. Yuki was rarely generous in ways that looked like generosity.
Yuki would summon me. The reprimand would be formal. The private claim was not illegal, only inconvenient: law liked witnesses, and Catalina had given the bond an answer the council could not file.
Solberg would already know. He had stayed away last night when he did not have to. I owed him for it and did not yet know how to pay.
Catalina would have an opinion when she woke. She kept opinions like weapons. Concealed until necessary. Well maintained.
I would ask.
I would listen.
I had spent seventy years executing plans written by other hands. Hers was the only plan I wanted to execute now.
That was how wars were started.
* * *
The light came up slowly. A pale line crossed the wall. Then the desk.
She slept through all of it.
Her breathing shifted once when the building settled around the morning heat. Her hand flexed against my ribs.
I stayed still.
The bite at her throat rested against my skin. The bite she had left on me burned beneath the edge of my shoulder.
Catalina had not bitten in ritual. She had bitten because the bond had finally given her an answer. The answer was the bite.
There would be bruising. Possibly scarring.
I hoped there would be scarring.
