He looked at me and lifted one eyebrow. It was the look an adult gives a child who has eaten the crayon and asked for notes on his handwriting.
“Spy.” One syllable. Flat. A correction, not an argument.
The translator.
The spy.
The woman I’d failed to get a good read on and Graves had apparently understood immediately.
I made my face do nothing. It had been trained for exactly this kind of humiliation.
The Ashenmere enforcer had clocked her at the dining table. Or in the corridor. Or in the half-second she crossed his airspace and his dragon decided to become inconvenient for everyone.
He hadn’t needed my dossiers.
He hadn’t needed her Georgetown record, the Oslo fellowship, or the tiny pronunciation shift in her Norwegian that tied her to Frogner instead of Bergen.
He’d smelled the lie.
Annoying of him.
At least he told me.
Graves didn’t offer information because it felt nice to share. He offered information because he’d already weighed the price of withholding it. Calling her a spy in front of me bought him nothing, which meant he’d read me too.
Scent-locked. Already invested. Already unlikely to hurt her without hurting some newly discovered part of myself. In the grim arithmetic of dragon biology, she was safe with me. I’d sooner harm myself.
“Right,” I said, with as much dignity as the syllable could hold. Not much, but some.
I glanced at the door behind him, then took my time coming back to his face. “I would prefer not to discover what you do when you find the second half of a problem at an inconvenient moment.”
Pressure moved down the corridor, old and hot and heavy enough that the lights seemed to dim, though they hadn’t.
My instincts made several suggestions. Most involved leaving. I put my hands up, kept them visible.
“Good,” he said. A single word. Assessment.
I had, apparently, passed the first and least interesting test.
Splendid. I liked my hands.
Graves looked at me. His eyes flicked, briefly, to my throat. A scentassessment.
The instinct in me, which had until that point been making a great many opinions known about the woman behind the door, now made a different opinion known about the man on the opposite wall.
He wasn’t a rival in the simple sense. A rival wanted what you wanted and intended to take it away. Graves wasn’t a man who intended to take anything from Catalina Cordero. He intended to stand between her and the world.
That made him dangerous in an entirely different way.
“Graves.”
“Solberg.”
The corridor cooled. Or I imagined it did. “This is going to be difficult.”
“Yes.”
“For both of us.”
