“Because Yuki would’ve ordered the room cleared by now.”
Unfortunately persuasive.
My mate was still standing at Yuki’s left shoulder. Catalina Cordero. The name had a rhythm I was already fond of, which was its own small evidence that I was in trouble.
She wasn’t looking at me. I felt the weight of her attention anyway.
Bjorn took another swallow of water. The glass returned to the bar without a sound. “Does the enforcer seem to know?”
“Yes.”
“Dritt.”Shit.
I didn’t need him to spell it out. The bond had chosen the same woman for the Ashenmere enforcer, and he wasn’t telling his clan. The diplomatic situation we had spent three months engineering, patient leverage and careful concession and plausible deniability for everyone, was being detonated in real time by a woman who had answered me in my grandmother’s dialect and then looked at me as if I were the problem.
Which, to be fair, I intended to be. Eventually. When international relations were less combustible.
“Lord Solberg.” A handler appeared at my elbow. “The trade meeting begins in ten minutes.”
“Thank you.” I looked one more time across the hall.
The dispersing crowd had carried Catalina to a position near the far wall. She held a glass of water and listened to one of Yuki’s deputies, head tilted at a polite angle that was, I thought, mostly performance.
She turned her head and found me. She held the look longer than needed. No smile. No nod. She was taking inventory. So was I.
Then she looked away.
Bjorn huffed something at my elbow that was almost a laugh.
“Faen,” I said quietly.Damn.
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”
* * *
The meeting room had been chosen to make power look like neutrality. Ashenmere favored that sort of thing.
Glass on one side. Timber on another. Steel in the bones of the walls. A table long enough to place distance between parties andnarrow enough to make everyone aware of who had reached for water, who had touched a pen, who had smiled at the wrong clause.
Yuki sat at the head. Bjorn took the seat across from her.
I sat to Bjorn’s right. Correct for the heir not leading the delegation. Incorrect for a dragon who could smell his mate three chairs away.
Catalina stood behind Yuki’s left shoulder.
The Ashenmere enforcer stood near the rear wall. Not directly behind Catalina. That would’ve been declaration. Not far enough away to be meaningless. His line to her was clear. His line to me was clearer.
Subtle as a drawn blade.
I placed my hands flat on the table and smiled at the deputy trade minister as if I weren’t in a room with three separate disasters.
The first twenty minutes went well. The benefit of rehearsal. A man could survive almost anything if the first twenty minutes had been practiced enough.
Bjorn opened with formal appreciation for Ashenmere hospitality. Yuki accepted without warmth and without insult, which for Yuki was practically a bouquet. The deputy trade minister laid out the revised supply commitments. I answered a question about Norwegian export reliability. Someone from Ashenmere asked about port scheduling. I answered that too.
Catalina translated when needed. She was better than her file had implied.
The file had saidfluent. Fluent was a small, insufficient word. Fluent meant comprehension. It didn’t cover her choosing between parallel meanings before the speaker had fully closed a sentence. Nothing in it covered her softening a too-sharp phrase without dulling it, or moving a technical term across languages without losing the politics hidden inside it.
