I listened to the corridor.
The ventilation changed when a body moved inside the room. A human would not hear it. Most shifters would not bother.
I heard her cross from the entry into the bedroom. Efficient. No wasted pacing. No hesitation at the threshold. No theatrical outrage when she found the first device.
Good.
She found the smoke-detector pickup in under four minutes. The microphone behind the painting soon after. The pressure plate took longer, as it should have. Most professionals found the obvious devices first and mistook the room for clean.
Cordero did not.
She left everything in place.
Better.
She was not sweeping like a diplomat with security training. She expected rooms to lie.
State Department translator, my ass.
Whoever had sent her had built the cover too cleanly and too narrowly. That meant haste or disregard. Neither spoke well for the value they placed on bringing her home.
I did not like that. I disliked, more, that I did not like that.
A sound came from inside the room. Water. The shower. She had taken her work bag into the bathroom.
Clever.
I looked down the empty corridor and made my jaw unclench.
The shower ran, then shut off. For a while nothing reached me.Then the ventilation carried a murmur. Quiet. Controlled. She was on the phone.
I could not hear the words. The frame was built to prevent it. What reached me was cadence. Not the clipped, even register she had used on me in the corridor, but pitched lower and warmer. Personal. I should not have wondered who had earned that voice from her. I did anyway.
The bond pushed harder at me, blunt and relentless. She was behind the door. She was alone. She was in a room full of clan surveillance, and she did not know what my council would do with what they learned.
She also did not know that the dragon outside her door had already begun making a list of all the obstacles between her and the exit.
My little spy,the older part of me supplied.
I rejected the possessive before it could attach itself.
* * *
She opened the door an hour and four minutes after she had closed it.
I had moved by then. I moved on minute thirty-seven, when my extreme vigilance began to look like a pattern the cameras would flag for review. I took up a defensive position on the opposite wall. Three-quarter angle to her door, sightline to both ends of the corridor, the standard formation.
I could justify that one in my report.
Cordero came out in a different jacket. The shoes were the same. No perfume. She had recalibrated her face on the way through the door. A controlled face that gave nothing.
The urge to laugh arrived. I declined it.
“Dinner is downstairs,” I said. “At eighteen hundred. I will walk with you.”
Her gaze moved once down the corridor behind me, not enough to be obvious. Measuring exits. Distance. Whether I was standing between her and freedom by accident or design.
“I can find dinner.”
