By the third hour, I’d stopped noticing him as a separate person and started carrying him in the back of my head as a constant, the way I carried the sun in a window.
This was a problem.
The agency briefing had a name for it: prey-response habituation. The guidance was to break it every three hours by deliberately assessing the threat.
I made myself look at him.
He was standing at the window, angled to keep the door in view. He had a small dark mark on the side of his throat I hadn’t seen yesterday. A shaving cut. Wrong direction, wrong angle, in a hurry. He’d cut himself shaving.
The most dangerous man in the building had cut himself shaving.
I worked hard not to roll my eyes.
Threat assessed.
I went back to the document.
At one-seventeen, the air in the building changed. I felt it before I knew what it was. Pressure. Weight. A shift in the way the corridors carried sound. Emmalinelooked up from her laptop.
Dominic moved before either of us did. He was instantly alert.
I stood and went to the glass. Dominic stopped behind me.
I became aware of the heat of him at my back, the cedar under his skin, the exact distance between his chest and my shoulder blades. Not touching. Never touching. But close enough that my body, unhelpful little informant that it was, began drafting reports.
Three dragons were coming down out of the cloud cover over the bay. Bigger than the wedge formation I’d seen from the car on Sunday. Different, too. The under-wing color was wrong. Gold against pale gray, a Northern coloring, not the Ashenmere green-gold. They dropped in a tight diamond, each wingbeat moving the cloud around them like the sky had been forced to make room.
“Norwegians,” Dominic said behind me. His voice landed rough against the back of my neck.
The lead dragon was huge. The biggest of the three by half. Size came with age. The two flanking him were younger and faster.
The smaller of the two flankers peeled off.
It dropped fifty feet in two seconds, twisted in the air, and came back up in a tight spiral around the lead dragon’s left wing. A play-dive. A flourish. Showing off in front of an Ashenmere window full of staff and one human translator who was now being treated to a piece of dragon choreography with the unmistakable energy ofyes, I know you’re watching.
The wings caught the sun on the way back up. Pale gold. Under-scales flashing.
Beside me, Dominic let out a breath. Not a word. A syllable in the back of his throat.Of course, with the consonants stripped out. The sound a person made when an old problem returned at an inconvenient hour.
“Who’s that?”
“Rhain Solberg.”
“Right.”
The cloud reorganized itself around the climb.
“He always does this when he flies into someone else’s territory.”
“Lovely.”
“It is a political statement.”
“Of course it is.”
Rhain came out of the climb and settled back into formation. The whole arrival had taken less than a minute. The three dragons descended toward the seaward landing and disappeared from view.
Behind me, four staff members had gathered at the corridor windows on either side of the reading room. None of them spoke. None of them moved. They had been pulled to the glass by the same air-pressure shift I’d felt.
