Catalina was beyond the door. She had not slept a full night since Sunday, by my count. The chamber claim had put new exhaustion over the old. Physical. Political. Emotional. The body carried it until it found somewhere safe enough to set it down.
Solberg was with her.
The mark she had put on him in council pulled through the bond, drawn too tight. I felt Catalina straining under the two claims. She was one body in the middle holding both channels. The second channel was still too new to know how to settle. It reached, then pulled back. Pressed toward Solberg, then folded through Catalina again, bright and unsteady.
I kept my breathing even. My feet planted. My attention on the corridor. The bond at my throat stayed open enough that she could find me if she needed me and quiet enough that I did not become one more thing asking something from her. There were three of us in it now. Oneof us needed to be still. I could do still.
I stood outside the door and gave the new channel something steady to settle against.
* * *
The first traffic came at six-fifteen.
Female kitchen staff with a breakfast tray held in both hands. She had been told to leave it outside the door, and she did exactly that. Steady pace. Eyes on the tray, not on me. Not on the room behind me.
Good.
She set it six inches from the wall, handle facing out, then went back the way she had come without trying to make herself memorable.
Seven-ten brought a maintenance courier two corridors off his assigned route.
No reason to pass through the eastern wing. He passed through anyway. No slowing. No glance at me. None needed. The pass was the message.This corridor is being watched by more than you.
Yuki’s work. I marked it and let him go.
Seven-forty was the friendly version of the same warning. Hagen, in formal Ashenmere uniform, walking the upper-floor deliberation route. Assigned. Visible. Deliberate. He caught my eye, inclined his head, and continued.
I returned the nod. I did not move from the post.
At oh-eight-hundred, Cael crossed the end of my corridor, and the morning stopped being routine.
He moved like an enforcer on an ordinary pass and did not stop, did not hesitate, did not glance in my direction. Clean enough to be forgettable. Except the route was wrong.
Cael stood the western galleries at oh-eight-hundred. He was not assigned to the eastern wing, and he had no reason to be at the end of this corridor unless someone had told him to walk it.
I had read the dispatch board the night before on my way to the post. His name was not on the eastern list for the next forty-eight hours.Yuki had not sent him. Which left the question of who.
Cael had looked at Catalina in the training yard too long and too carefully. He had looked like a man taking a measurement. At the time, I had told Catalina he was marking her as under my escort. Which had been true but incomplete.
At the time, I had not known what else he was doing. He had given me no clean offense. No approach, challenge or mistake I could answer without making myself the problem. So I had continued to watch him.
Now, he walked an unassigned corridor outside the room of a confined foreign heir at a time when the corridor should have been clean. That was not a pass. That was reconnaissance.
At eight-fifteen, the bond shifted.
Catalina sat up. I felt her attention return before I heard anything through the door. The lift of it. The hard, quiet pull of a body dragging itself back into usefulness before it had been given permission to recover.
Solberg moved with her. They did not speak. The new channel carried enough. Catalina was climbing back toward operational alertness at a slow, stubborn pace. She had refused to rest.
My dragon did not care that Solberg had a claim now and that Catalina had chosen him. It understood proximity. Scent. Warmth. Possession. It understood another male with his hands on what was mine and offered the obvious solution: remove him.
I overruled it. Even breathing. Feet planted. Bond open. Quiet.
Catalina did not need another pull on the line. She needed a guard.
* * *
The Norwegian courier arrived at nine-oh-two in the formal Solberg household uniform, carrying a private letter. He came down the corridor and stopped three feet from me, trained to approach armed guards without giving them a reason to remember him poorly, and he did not look past my shoulder at the door.
