The dragon rose again, immediate and pleased, as if it had never left me at all. As if it had only withdrawn far enough to hear her choose.
“That,” I said quietly, “will work very well.”
“Good.”
The smile broke across my mouth before I could stop it. Brighter than the one in the corridor.
I let it through. The room had already survived one undisciplined moment from me. It could survive another.
Yuki addressed the chamber. “Catalina Cordero has chosen to give the reciprocal claim before council witness.”
Nine elders didn’t move.
“Lord Solberg. Do you accept?”
“I do.”
“Tilt your head,” Catalina said.
I tilted to the side that would mirror the claim I had just given her.
She stepped into me.
I had imagined, every night for two weeks, what her mouth would feel like at the curve of my shoulder with a full bond between us. The imagining had been fantasy. The actual heat of her against my skin was something my body recognized before my mind caught up.
I felt her lips first. Then her breath, then the flat of her tongue against the place her teeth would land.
The chamber, the elders, the political consequence, and my father’s emergency order all became items to be handled later, in another room, with my hands free.
She bit me and then held it like a thing she had decided to keep.
The bond went whole in the instant her teeth closed. Not the bright opening of the first claim. A second channel finding the first one and clicking into place behind it. Hers, then mine, then hers again. The two pulses ran together for the length of a breath, and my dragon, which had spent twenty-one days holding its position on a leash of my own making, didn’t lift its head to protest. It bowed.
When she eased back, my shoulder carried the new mark. Hers, opposite mine. Both given freely. Both witnessed. She let her forehead rest against me for one breath.
Across the room, behind Yuki, Graves didn’t move. The line of his jaw shifted once.
Yuki spoke for the record. “The reciprocal claim is received and witnessed.”
The eldest elder added the closing recitation and the chamber answered. The session adjourned at five-oh-six.
Reciprocal
Catalina
Dominic crossed the chamber to us and took one slow breath before he spoke. “I will stand outside your door for the next twenty-four hours.”
My chest tightened. “Dominic—”
“You and Solberg will take the day,” he said, not letting me interrupt. “The bond will require it. It will not settle without attention.”
He did not look away, and the words were formal enough to survive the chamber.
He was giving us privacy. More than that, he was putting himself between our door and the rest of the world.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said quietly.
“I do.”
