I considered her. “Why.”
“Because the position requires a person who can read in two registers simultaneously and isn’t bound by either of them. Until you, the candidate pool was lacking.”
“And the work.”
“Will become real to you within sixty days. The first thirty days will be ceremonial. After that, you’ll have a desk.”
A laugh moved up my throat and stopped. Yuki hadn’t said it as a joke. She had given me a job offer.
“And agency leadership?”
“Will be informed in writing within the hour that you havetransitioned to clan-employment as a foreign liaison and that your future communications with U.S. agencies will pass through Ashenmere’s diplomatic channel.”
“My citizenship.”
“Retained. Per the treaty. Per the Compact. Per the precedent established for diplomatic personnel on long-term foreign assignment. You aren’t surrendering anything. You’re accepting a second institutional affiliation.”
“Davis loses operational access. In front of his own ambassador.”
The operative in me understood the value of that.
For ten years, she had been the part of me I trusted most. She counted exits, measured leverage, and treated trust like a controlled substance. She should have been pleased. This was clean. Public. Difficult to unwind.
But when I reached for the calculation, I found something else already there. Relief.
“I accept.”
Yuki gave the smallest of inclines. “Eight o’clock,” she said.
* * *
The courtyard was empty of staff. Yuki had cleared it. The cobble had been swept of leaves. The morning sun had reached the eastern wall but hadn’t yet come over the roofline; the south flagstones were still in shadow.
A dragon the size of a small house sat at the center of the courtyard. Dominic.
He had black scales along the spine, the dragon-side of him matte and unornamented, the long line of his throat darker than the underbelly. Only the membrane beneath his wings carried color, the green-gold every Ashenmere dragon wore, the same I had seen burning over the highway my first morning here. His head was lowered. He was watching the gate.
He turned when I came down the step and waited while I crossed the courtyard to him.
He lowered his head further and I stopped a foot from him. I put my hand at the line of his jaw, slow, careful, the way I would’ve put it on the smaller version of him.
His scales were warm. Smoother than I had expected. A buried pulse beneath the surface I felt through my palm rather than my fingers.
The claim at my throat rang. The dragon-side of him answered the bond at a depth the mark had never carried before. Older. Deeper. Larger than language. The bond was reading all of him now, not the careful, contained human shape he had worn for me for weeks.
I let the courtyard go dark for one count, then I opened my eyes. “Yuki said you’re to escort her in.”
A breath went through him. His head dipped once.Yes.
“And you’ll shift at the chamber threshold.”
The head dipped again. He had decided already.
I slid my hand up to the side of his face, to the place that would have been his cheekbone if he had been standing in front of me as a man. I let my palm rest there. He held perfectly still.
The bond carried his answer back through me, warm and steady and startlingly gentle. Affectionate. I had read a lot of reports in my life. Not one of them had prepared me for a dragon being affectionate.
“Be terrifying,” I said. “Then come find me.”
