Dominiccame back from his day of council meetings at six. He opened my apartment door and stopped with one hand still on the knob. For one full minute, he didn’t move.
The hall light cut across his face. It caught the hard line of his jaw. His hand tightened on the knob until the metal gave a soft click. He swallowed, hard.
I felt a heavy pressure move through the bond. Old and sharp and dragging claws along the inside of his skin.
I watched from the table and held still. He was wrestling with his dragon.
His gaze dragged over me, taking inventory, slow and precise. “Catalina.” My name came out rough, half voice.
“Dominic?” I returned, with the barest edge of a question.
He crossed the room.
He didn’t need to ask about Rhain. The heat and pressure of it had already reached him. Dominic had felt every degree and held himself steady through all of it. He had kept his feelings to himself. Kept his dragon calm. Given me Rhain without interference.
The line he had been holding had reached its end. Dominic’s eyes were slit-thin, the discipline in him pulled so tight it looked painful. His hand came to my jaw. The other settled at my waist.
For one breath, he held me there, and his gaze moved over me, slow and deliberate and barely leashed. My mouth. My throat. The places where Rhain’s scent lingered because I had allowed it to.
His thumb dragged along my jaw, neither angry nor gentle.
“Little spy,” he said, rough enough that my spine remembered before my brain did.
Then his mouth found mine.
My back hit the edge of the table. I caught the front of his shirt and held on as heat snapped between us, all the control he had spent the afternoon bleeding into the room finally coming back through his hands.
Dominic’s restraint didn’t ask whether I knew what I wanted. It knew I did. And it met me there hard enough to make the table complain behind me.
Everything opened under the kiss. Hot. So full of need it took my knees. His pulse came through mine. The mark at the left of my throat answered before I could process it, a sharp, molten pull that made thought useless and my body honest.
A moan slipped past my lips. Dominic heard it. His fingers pressed in at my waist.
Every place Rhain had been near. Every place Rhain hadn’t. Dominic followed the map of me with a dragon’s attention and a discipline he was holding by the last thread. He didn’t erase Rhain. He didn’t ask me to give anything back. He only made sure there was no part of me that forgot him. Still here. Still his.
He pulled back half an inch. I lifted my hand and brushed my fingertips over the mark at his shoulder, just beneath the open edge of his shirt. The reminder of my claim wasn’t subtle. Neither was his reaction.
His breath stopped for one beat. Pleasure moved through him, hot and controlled badly enough that I felt the edges of it against my own skin.
Good.
I left my fingers there. “Dominic.”
“Yes.” His voice was rough enough that I felt it more than heard it.
I kept my fingers on the mark at his shoulder. The heat of it pulsed beneath my touch. A reminder to both of us that he was mine. Even when the rest of the world insisted on behaving like a badly governed fire.
“What did the council say?”
That cooled him a degree. The pleasure folded inward and his focus sharpened. The dragon retreated just far enough to let the strategist step forward. “Solberg moved his timeline.”
“How far?”
“He is filing the emergency clan-discipline recall on Rhain at oh-six-hundred Pacific. Tomorrow.”
The words landed one at a time. Formal. Precise. Ugly.
“Eight hours.”
