“No.” A single syllable. Bare of defense, softening, or of any lie.
I did appreciate the honesty. Still, I seethed, “I could kill you for that.”
His face didn’t change. His hand stayed at my neck. The new pulse in my chest ran one half-beat behind his.
“You could try.”
Across the floor, someone moved toward Rhain.
The Norwegian delegation had closed around him. Nothing like the politician-and-aide formation humans used after an incident. They were containing a fire and not letting the room smell smoke.
Bjorn at his left. Anders at his wrist. Soren angled between him and the cleanest path to Dominic. Rhain stood inside the containment with his hands at his sides. White-knuckled. His eyes had gone dragon.
The eldest elder of the Ashenmere council rose at the head of the long table. She was four hundred years old. She didn’t raise her voice. She spoke a phrase in Old Wyrm. Then she repeated it in English for the humans. “Rival-clan bond.”
The words landed. Nobody in the room moved.
Faces changed. Postures shifted. The Norwegian delegation closed tighter around Rhain. The Ashenmere elders movedtoward their own leadership with coordinated urgency, trained for a crisis they had hoped would never come.
I stood in the middle of it with blood on the mark and a stranger’s heartbeat in my chest, surrounded by ancient creatures whose faces showed me something I recognized.
Fear.
They were afraid of me. What had happened to me had just changed the rules.
* * *
They brought me to a third-floor room.
A soundproofed council chamber, the deputy explained quietly. They were going to convene immediately. They would ask me to remain in the antechamber. There was water. There was a chair. They wouldn’t be long.
The deputy left.
I sat and closed my eyes for thirty seconds and let myself feel the things I had been not-feeling. The bond in my chest where there was now a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
The bite that had stopped bleeding. The blood had dried in a narrow line down to my collarbone.
I wouldn’t wipe it. I had decided that on the dining-hall floor. The blood was evidence.
He had taken something from me in front of an audience. Not only the bite. The private question I had spent all day obsessing over.
The balcony. His hand in my hair. The way I had leaned in before I remembered Nate, the mission, and every reason I hadn’t to want Dominic Graves.
I had been trying to decide what the kiss meant.
Dominic might’ve been running on whatever old and dangerous thing had been moving under his skin all week. But I had been running on attraction, adrenaline, and hormones.
I had a boyfriend. I had a job. I had a mission. And somewhere inthe middle of all three, I had started to like him.
Dominic had dragged that private, inconvenient truth into the light in front of a hundred and twenty people.
My hands curled against my thighs. I wanted to hit him again. Worse: part of me wanted to touch the mark. I did neither.
I opened my eyes and straightened in the chair.
My cover was destroyed. Davis would know in twenty minutes. There was no flowchart for what had just happened.
The eldest elder had saidrival-clan bond.
