The senior trade rep nodded.
The senior trade rep didn’t realize he had just been fed a translation that was eighty percent his own brief and twenty percent Bjorn’s actual proposal, and that the twenty percent was the part that was going to matter at the dinner.
* * *
I caught Rhain in an empty corridor at three.
I wasn’t looking for him. I was on my way to the library to refresh my notes for the dinner, and he was on his way somewhere else. The corridor was empty between us in both directions for forty feet.
We both stopped at the same time.
Dominic was ever present as my shadow.
He saw Rhain at the same moment I did, took the wall on my side, and made it clear by his stillness that he wasn’t, today, going to interrupt anything that happened in this corridor unless I asked him to.
The diplomatic smile stayed on Rhain’s face.
Underneath the smile, his face was doing nothing. The eyes, the muscles around the mouth, all of it had gone briefly offline between rounding the bend and recovering.
I had walked in on him in the wrong instant. He looked tired, in a way no one normal would notice.
But the polish had thinned at the edges. The smile arrived half a beat later than usual. His shoulders sat lower beneath the dark wool of his coat.
He recovered. He gave me the public smile. Warm and easy and entirely constructed. “Catalina.”
“Rhain.”
I could hear the heating click.
“I was on my way to find Bjorn.”
“Mm.”
His eyes narrowed with faint amusement. “You’re all doing that now.”
“Doing what?”
“The sound.”
I tilted my head. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
The corridor carried our two voices and nothing else. Watched-quiet. No corridor in Ashenmere was ever empty. There were cameras in the corners, sensors in the seams, probably three forms of shifter hearing pointed in our direction from rooms I couldn’t see.
Dominic stood behind me like a weapon kept holstered. Rhain stood in front of me like one left politely on the table.
“Are you all right?” I asked. The question came out unauthorized.
Rhain didn’t answer immediately. “Yes.”
Theyeswasn’t the truth.
“Have you slept this week?”
“In pieces.”
“Mm.”
