Catalina’s eyes sharpened. She had been waiting since the training yard on her third day for a name to attach to the thing she had felt there. I had just given her one.
“Cael is yours.”
The word sat in the room. One of mine. I had stood watches beside Cael. I had corrected his footwork on the mat. The dragon in me had a simpler word for what Cael was.
“Yuki did not send him,” I said. I looked at Solberg. “Someone else did.”
Solberg’s face did not change, but something in his eyes went very still. “My father.”
“Or someone acting for him.”
Catalina looked at the letter in her lap. Then at Solberg. Then at me.
“What’s in the letter, Rhain?”
Solberg took the envelope from her and turned it over in his hands. The seal was still intact, dark wax pressed with the Solberg household crest. His thumb rested against it for one second too long.
Then he broke it.
The paper unfolded with a soft sound that seemed too ordinary for the way the room went still around it.
Catalina watched his face. Solberg read the first line. Then the second.
Whatever was in the letter, he had put his diplomat’s face over it before it reached the rest of him. He read to the bottom, then went back to the beginning and read it again. Finally, he lowered the page.
“My father sends his apologies,” he said. “For failing to tell me the truth about my mother.”
Solberg’s voice stayed even. “He has gathered that I know more than I did. More specifically, that I know about the rival bond.”
Catalina narrowed her eyes and looked from him to the letter. “How?”
“Because he is not stupid,” Solberg said. “And because last night I stopped behaving like a son who could still be managed by an omission.”
He handed her the page. Catalina did not take it immediately. “What does he want?”
“To explain.”
No one spoke.
Solberg’s mouth moved at one corner, but it was not a smile. “He regrets the silence. He regrets the pain caused by necessary decisions made under impossible circumstances. He regrets that I learned of my mother’s history from anyone but him.” He looked back down at the letter. “He does not regret anything specific.”
Catalina took the page then. Her eyes moved quickly over it, exhaustion sharpening, colder and more familiar. She was working again. The other alertness, the one I watched for, stayed down.
“Apology as access,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He wants you emotionally open and alone.”
Solberg’s silence answered before he did. “He wants me reachable,” he said.
I looked at the door. Cael’s pass at oh-eight-hundred settled into place beside the letter. Not proof in pieces anymore. Pattern. Catalina saw it at the same time I did.
“Cael maps the corridor,” she said. “The letter creates the reason for Rhain to move.”
“Or hesitate,” I said. “Either works.”
Solberg folded the letter along its original crease, precise enough to be violent. “My father does not need to be in the building to reach for me.”
