Across the room, Dominic was glaring at the bag. I looked down at it. The top had been folded over twice, but warmth still radiated through the paper, carrying the unmistakable smell of butter and bread.
I opened the bag and inside was a croissant, golden and flaky and still warm enough to fog the paper. I broke off the end.
It was very good, and my small appreciative hum was unfortunately audible. Across the table, Rhain’s pen went still for exactly one second. The warmth in his face sharpened, pleased and faintly victorious. Hypothesis confirmed.
Somehow Dominic’s glare increased.
Wonderful. Now they both knew.
I tried to ignore the increasing warmth in my face. “Lord Solberg.”
“Still so formal.”
“Formality seems appropriate.”
His smile widened.
Behind me, Dominic went still, in the way only someone who had spent days tracking his breathing would catch.
Unfortunately, I had.
Rhain greeted the room and let the open warmth stay on his face. Bjorn, beside him, tilted his head but didn’t comment.
And Dominic, standing along the back wall in the enforcer’s position,looming, was the loudest thing in the room.
I noticed, slowly, that the council was rearranging itself around him. Not consciously. The Ashenmere elder who was speaking would, every fourth or fifth sentence, glance over her shoulder toward his position. The Japanese observer wouldn’t turn his head, but would turn his shoulder.
Yuki was the only person in the room who didn’t adjust.
Yuki had this man on her staff. Yuki had built whatever he was, decades ago, and everyone knew it. The respect with which the rest of the room handled him was hers, redirected. And now, inconveniently, some portion of that redirected respect kept landing near me.
The looks had started as staff glances in hallways. Then council glances. Then the silent calculation of dragons who saw Dominic standing too close to me and seemed to understand something I hadn’t been told.
So I had done what any reasonable person would do after being trapped in a dragon compound with inconsistent access to information and a man whose eyes had gone dragon more than once in my direction.
I searched the agency database.
Claim references kept appearing. Dragons were infuriatingly careful about the language. Agency files treated the subject as a risk category, which was at least honest, if not useful.
If the files were right, then the question was not whether Dominic was breaking protocol. The question was whether everyone else had already decided he had a reason.
A claim was not always a pair.
The academic sources used the wordnest. Pair-bonds were what humans had documented, because pair-bonds left two people standing publicly together long enough to photograph. The other formations were rarer, quieter, and, in the older texts, treated as the more stable arrangement.
Three was the number the texts kept circling. A nest of three washarder to break than a pair. The academics had stopped trying to find living examples to cite. And nest formations of any size beyond two had been steadily disappearing from the public record over the past century.
A separate problem. Not tonight’s. Fragments, not evidence.
I was dealing with a potential claim laid by Dominic. Maybe. Or paranoia with a classified-document budget.
Either way, the thought made my chest do something professionally embarrassing.
Which was inconvenient for several reasons, chief among them being that I had a boyfriend. A real one. In my real life. Nate. A nice man in my real apartment who loved me.
I took a sip of coffee.
I translated three formal exchanges in Norwegian and two in Mandarin and rendered Bjorn’s precise Norwegian phrasing on rare-earth allocations into a U.S. English that was correct in every word and devastating in the small set of words I chose to use.
