“Then he was a good man.”
“He was.” My throat tightened. “He is.”
Rhain nodded once. “I’m sorry, Catalina.”
“Are you?”
“For him,” he said. Then, with a rueful smile, “Not for me. I’m trying to be a better man. Not a liar.”
I rolled my eyes.
Rhain let me have the evasion. For a moment, his smile stayed, softer now, private. Then it faded, more careful now. “There’s something else I brought you.”
He reached inside his coat and took out a photograph, then placed it on the table between us.
A photograph of his mother. Margot on the embankment at Frogner. Hair pinned. The laugh caught.
“My mother,” Rhain said. “Margot Lunde. Spring 1946. Six months before any of it. The man behind the camera was her cousin Henrik. She buried him in 1948 because the war that started over her took him too.”
“Before she met your father?”
His gaze stayed on the photograph. “And before she met the Ashenmere-aligned enforcer who claimed her first.”
I touched the edge of the photograph with two fingers and left it there.
“How did the war start?”
“The claim was public. Council-recorded. Formal. Two months later, my father scent-matched and pulled her from him. That action triggered the rival-clan war that shaped Norwegian policy for eighty years.”
“And what happened to her?”
“The official record says bond strain. Within four months of the claim.”
“The official record.”
His voice didn’t change. “That’s what’s on file.”
The corner of his mouth moved, the way it did when something was too grim to take head-on. “Bond strain. A cause of death no one can autopsy, on a date no one can argue with. Clean. My family was always better at records than at mourning.”
I looked at the photograph again. The camera had caught her before men with names and titles decided what her body meant.
“Rhain.”
“Yes.”
“What does ‘pulled her from him’ actually mean?”
He looked down at his hands. “A second claim,” he said. “Made over the top of a live one.”
I went still. “On top of.”
“At the same site.” His voice had gone very quiet. “The throat. Where the first dragon’s mark already was.”
“Another bite.”
“Yes. Driven over the first one and closed under it.”
“That’s possible?”
