“Rhain,” Bjorn said quietly.
The use of my name wasn’t comfort. It was a leash.
“I know,” I said. I kept my voice pleasant.
The Ashenmere council moved toward Yuki. The Norwegian delegation closed around me and Bjorn. The U.S. ambassador’s principal stood up looking like he hadn’t been briefed for any of this and was going to ask, in approximately ninety seconds, what the hell had just happened.
The cultural attaché was nowhere to be seen.
Excellent survival instincts, suddenly.
Bjorn pulled me back two steps. I went because he had me, and because Anders and Soren had arranged themselves so that the only direction available without making a scene was backward.
“She’s being moved,” Bjorn said, quiet.
“Yes.”
“We won’t interfere.”
“No.”
“Not because we don’t want to.”
I looked at him then. His face was still. The same stillness he had carried into councils and funerals and the room where my mother had died.
“Because if we interfere now,” he said, “we make her the battlefield.”
I hated him for the sentence.
I needed it.
Catalina was being escorted by two Ashenmere deputies up the steps and out the back. Dominic followed three paces behind the deputies in the enforcer’s position, head not turned. Yuki walked three paces behind Dominic. The Ashenmere council followed three paces behind Yuki.
The procession was perfectly formal.
The procession was for the audience that didn’t understand yet that it had just been made to witness the political detonation of the year.
* * *
Bjorn closed the door behind us.
Anders took the position beside it. Soren went to the window. Giving me the courtesy of privacy while making sure I couldn’t reach the balcony and decide I had wings before sense.
The politeness of Norwegian containment remained, as ever, one of our most irritating national gifts.
Bjorn set his glass of water down on the desk with careful precision.He looked at Anders and Soren. A dismissal without language.
Anders hesitated. I didn’t blame him.
Bjorn’s gaze sharpened.
That solved the hesitation.
They left. The door closed.
Only then did Bjorn turn fully toward me.
Bjorn watched me until I sat.
