“No lunch?”
His gaze moved slowly over my face. “There will be lunch.”
At the end of the corridor, a staff member turned the corner, saw us, and slowed. It was small. Almost nothing. A tiny break in pace, a quick lowering of the eyes, then a smooth redirection toward the opposite wall as she passed.
Interesting.
I drank the coffee and finished the croissant.
The council reading room was on the third floor.
Dominic walked beside me instead of half a step ahead.
New.
Or maybe it had started yesterday after the touch and I’d been too busy pretending I could still feel my palm to notice. His shoulder stayed near mine through the lift, down the third-floor corridor, past two Ashenmere aides who both looked at me, then at him, then looked away too quickly to be casual.
I took a sip of coffee and tried to make sense of behavioral patterns.
The council reading room had glass on three sides, dark wood on the fourth, a long oval table that seated twelve, and a smell of old paper and beeswax that the agency briefing materials hadn’t mentioned. The aide was a young Ashenmere woman named Emmaline whom I’d been introduced to in passing on Monday. She had a soft handshake. Her eye contact was brief.
“Ms.Cordero. Welcome. The materials are on the table. Councilreading room protocols ask that you not photograph any document and that you sign each section of the access ledger as you finish it.”
“Of course.”
“If you require a translation reference, I can pull dictionaries from the secondary archive.”
“Thank you.”
Emmaline’s gaze flicked to Dominic. He was standing just behind my right shoulder. Not touching me. Not blocking me. The space around me had become, apparently, part of him.
Emmaline’s mouth closed on whatever she’d been about to say. She sat at the small desk by the door, opened a laptop, and didn’t look at me again for the next three hours.
Dominic took a position in front of the window, where the glass let him watch the hallway reflection, the courtyard below, the entrance to the reading room, and me if he wanted to pretend he wasn’t looking.
Dragons, I was learning, were very committed to plausible deniability.
I read the trade delegation prelim materials. The English copy first. Then the Norwegian copy. Then a third copy in Mandarin that the Ashenmere council had circulated to allied clans and that contained, on close reading against the English, three phrasings that weren’t quite parallel translations.
Two of the three were innocuous.
The third was a six-word phrase aboutlong-term reliability of cross-clan supplythat the Mandarin had rendered with a Sichuanese inflection, the same inflection the Sichuanese-born Ashenmere deputy had used in the corridor. I now suspected it was a deliberate signal embedded by whoever had drafted the document for circulation to Beijing.
I noted it but didn’t mark it on the document.
I made my translator’s notes on the English-Norwegian discrepancies and ignored the third copy with a disciplined incompetence that had taken years to perfect.
I cross-referenced the seating chart Yuki’s office had circulated for the formal Tuesday session against my agency vetting briefs. Onename hadn’t been on the briefs: Morag Vale, four centuries old, former keeper of external accords, council voting member. Her chair on the diagram sat a half-degree off the central axis. A Norwegian protocol officer would’ve called the anglehonored absence.
I marked the chair and moved on.
By eleven, I had drunk two more coffees, taken six pages of useful notes on the delegation schedule, and not looked up from my screen once.
Dominic stood at the window the entire time.
I didn’t look at him directly, but tracked his weight across the polished floor by sound. He shifted twice in three hours, both times when an Ashenmere staff member walked past the door. Each time, his position changed to put himself between the door and me.
Subtle, but enough.
