And then there was his warning.Catalina. What do you know about claims?
Not enough, I had told him.
I had thought he meant Dominic. That had been the obvious answer. Dominic’s presence filling a corridor. Dominic at my door. Dominic looking at me like the rest of the world had become background noise.
But Rhain moved between me and the attaché with the same quiet precision dragons used for everything that mattered.
Which left me with two possibilities.
One: Rhain was working me the same way I was working him. Attention, access, protection as leverage. A little warmth here, a little rescue there, until I started mistaking strategy for safety.
Textbook asset work. Annoying, but respectable.
Two: it was more than that, and I may have been doing my job too well.
I didn’t have enough information yet to make the call.
Which meant I needed to keep both theories alive.
The Norwegian delegation shifted around him.
Anders at his shoulder. Soren by the wall. Bjorn at the table.
Nobody had drifted there by accident.
Rhain gave me the smallest palm-down gesture.
I’ve got the room.
A promise that he had the sightlines, the exits, the men with too much cologne, and the Norwegian delegation positioned exactly where he wanted them.
I believed him.
For approximately three seconds.
Then the skin at the back of my neck lifted.
The Sichuanese deputy was several feet away. Her eyes movedpast my shoulder. Her face made the adjustment I had been watching dragons make all week.
Very quietly, in Mandarin, she said to me, “Take care of yourself.”
I turned my head a quarter inch.
A hand wrapped around the back of my neck. Scarred at the knuckles. Hot against my skin.
I didn’t move.
I had been trained for fifty-three different scenarios involving compromised positions in foreign territory. This wasn’t one of them.
Dominic turned me to face him. Gently.
The hand at my neck didn’t press. The body in front of me didn’t crowd. He turned me with gentle certainty.
His pupils were vertical. He wasn’t even trying to bring them back to round.
He kissed me.
His mouth was hot. The taste was cedar and metal and him. Lips first. Then teeth at the inside of my lower lip, sharp. A sound came out of me before I could stop it. Then his tongue past the seam, slow, taking, the heat of it against the heat of mine.
