A man who quietly reversed the direction of his intelligence flow, and was caught doing it in a way he could not deny, did not get prosecuted. He got reassigned. Then managed. Then reduced. Then he disappeared.
I found I could live with that.
Yuki closed the binder. “The matter is recorded. The council stands adjourned.”
Epilogue
Catalina
The next summer.
I was shocked to learn Ashenmere had a bridal suite. It had not been used as one in forty-three years. In that time, the room had been an embassy guest suite, an administrative office, council records overflow, a meditation room for an elder who had since died, and, most recently, storage for the wing’s holiday linens.
Yuki insisted we use it. Her staff cleared it in nine days; Ashenmere had been storing an unreasonable number of table runners.
Now it had a window overlooking the south courtyard, a small fireplace I still did not know how to operate, a vanity mirror polished to the cruelest possible clarity, and a tea service Mama had been drinking since six-thirty in the morning.
Mama had arrived the day before.
She had stayed in our quarters. She had met Rhain and Dominic. She had inspected them both with wary precision, a woman evaluating bridges before allowing her daughter to cross.
Then she had told me, in Spanish, that I was not sleeping enough and that my tea was too weak. It was the closest she came to saying she approved of them.
This morning, she had been in the bridal suite by six-thirty because the dress did not, in her opinion, hang correctly at the shoulder.
I let her work.
In all the months since she found out I was bound to two dragons, she had not tried to talk me out of it. In all those months, I had not tried to make her understand it.
The careful work she was doing at my shoulder was the closest thing my mother and I had to a shared language.
“Mija.”
“Mama.”
“This sleeve.”
“Yes, Mama.”
She turned me toward the mirror. I had not seen myself in the dress until that moment.
The dress was simple. Ivory silk, long sleeves, a boatneck collar that left both bond marks visible.
I had suggested covering them.
Dominic had looked at me with such immediate horror that, for one glorious second, I thought he might actually breathe fire.
The mirror showed me a woman who no longer had to divide her life into compartments.
I had not understood, until I saw myself in the dress, how much of my face had been built around hiding. Around translating myself before anyone else could misread me. Around being useful, contained, and hard to reach.
The woman in the mirror looked happy and whole.
She looked like someone who could be seen by the people who loved her and survive it.
The operative in me had quieted in the year since the chamber. She had not disappeared. I did not trust people who disappeared useful parts of themselves. She had simply taken a job with better lighting.
On Ashenmere’s organizational chart, I was now the foreign liaison for North American matters. Yuki had given me a window, two staff, an embassy phone she monitored personally, and a budget I was still learning to spend without feeling like I was committing a federal crime.
