Not crossing the room.
Not pulling Bjorn off my shoulder.
Not catching Anders’s hand at my wrist and breaking it back at the joint.
The sound that had built behind my teeth wasn’t coming out.
My hands weren’t opening.
Each refusal made an entry in a ledger.
I had been patient for two weeks. I was working to earn the right to court Catalina Cordero properly. The Ashenmere enforcer had put his teeth in her publicly, and taken liberties he wasn’t owed.
A heroically stupid liberty to take, given what she was to me.
Then Catalina’s brain caught up.
Her fist came up toward Graves’s throat with the precision of professional combat training. His free hand caught it at the last possible moment. The block was the only reason she didn’t land the strike.
She had been fast enough, with the bond pouring into her and her own body still coming back to itself, to almost put the enforcer of Clan Ashenmere on his back in the middle of his own dining hall.
The room had just watched a State Department translator nearly drop the most dangerous dragon in Seattle. In doing so, they had put together that perhaps she wasn’t what she said.
Bjorn, beside me, said one word in Norwegian. “Faen.”Damn.
It was less comment than benediction.
The eldest Ashenmere elder rose at the head of the table. She was four hundred years old. She didn’t raise her voice. She spoke a single phrase in Old Wyrm, which I understood approximately one syllable of, and then she repeated it in English for the humans.
“Rival-clan bond.” The words landed in the room like glass cracking.
I didn’t move. Moving toward Catalina, toward Graves, toward any of it, would’ve detonated the second half of the public record this room was now writing.
I stayed where my delegation had put me.
Anders released my wrist by degrees, once he believed I was still embracing rationality. Soren remained close. He could intercept a bad decision. Bjorn’s hand stayed on my elbow.
My face stayed the way it had been arranged all evening.
Which was impressive. Also fraudulent.
Across the floor, Catalina stood very still. The neckline of her dress was ripped. There was blood at her throat. A narrow line of it, dark against the green dress. Her hands were at her sides now.
Dominic stood in front of her, looking at her with an expression I had never seen on his face in the seven decades I had known him.
Not triumph. He had gotten what the dragon wanted, and understood, too late, what it had taken from the woman.
Catalina spoke.
I couldn’t hear her from twenty feet across a stunned dining hall, but I read her mouth.
You don’t get to do that.A pause.You don’t get to take that from me.
Graves didn’t answer. He looked at her. He hadn’t let go of her neck.
My control thinned to a thread. The delegation felt it.
Anders stepped closer again. Soren’s shoulder came into my peripheral vision. Bjorn’s hand tightened, not enough to bruise, enough to remind.
