“Two weeks of lobbying. He needs twelve votes. He has eight. He’ll find the other four.” He came back to the table and squared the photograph against its edge. “The third one is the one that works on me.”
“Personal.”
“Yes.” He took a breath he didn’t perform. “He’ll write me a letter. Not a threat. Not a summons. A formal apology for something he did to me when I was younger. Real or invented. He has done it twice. Once when I was twenty-six. Once when I was thirty-one. Both letters arrived three weeks after the offense. Both letters worked.”
“Worked how.”
“I wanted to accept them.” Quiet, that one. “The apology will arrive while the politics are unfolding, and accepting it’ll reopen the channel he uses for recall. Not the order.”
“So he manages you.”
“He has managed two cousins this way already. The eighty-nine recall. The eleven recall. Both men still on the record believing they chose what they’re now executing for him.” He sat back down. “Neither of them did.”
I watched him. “You’ve been preparing for this.”
“For thirty years.”
“And now?”
His gaze came back to mine. “I haven’t, until now, had a reason to refuse him that was as unambiguous as you.”
“And if Ashenmere defends you publicly,” I said, “what does that do to you?”
He went still. Carefully. “Through you.”
“Through me. Through the public claim. If I’m on the Ashenmere clan ledger and you and I are bonded, Ashenmere defends both of us. Martin can’t move on you without going through Ashenmere first.”
Rhain set his hands on the table. “You have been told the legal-center framework.”
“By Dominic. This morning.”
“Then you know what it does to me politically.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“Catalina.”
“I want you to tell me.”
He had been planning to spare me the calculation. “Politically, I become the Norwegian heir whose bond was preserved by Ashenmere because Norway failed or refused to do it first. My father reads that as betrayal. The council reads it as loss of control.”
His knuckle came down on the wood and stayed there. “Functionally, I become a Norwegian liability under Pacific shelter.”
I pressed, “But the bond would hold.”
“Yes.”
“And the alternative is your father pulls you away.”
“Yes.”
“So the trade is your political life for the bond.”
“Yes.”
I watched him. “What would your father do, specifically?”
Rhain considered the question as if he was deciding how plainly to give it to me.
