Then he turned and walked into the building.
I lowered my hand from the glass as the bond quieted. The fury remained, but the next part of my plan had begun to form.
The dragon enforcer who had brought himself to my window in his real body was, unfortunately for everyone, leverage councils understood.
Post
Dominic
It was twenty-three forty-seven on Friday night, and I was standing in the corridor outside Catalina’s chamber, officially assigned as her enforcer and practically useless on the wrong side of the door.
I had broken almost every rule of my role tonight in front of a hundred and twenty witnesses. A public claim without council pre-approval.Mineon the public record. A bite at visible depth in front of the State Department’s senior trade representative. And a grievance handed to Rhain Solberg that old law would recognize and instinct would not forgive. He was going to come for me. I was going to let him. But not yet. Each violation would have its own file by morning.
She came within an inch of putting me on my back in my own dining hall. I should not have admired that. I did anyway.
Three weeks of testimony, precedent, witness statements, medical review, and political containment dressed as due process. At the end of it, I would either still be an Ashenmere enforcer, or I would not. That did not hold my attention. The only question that mattered was whether my mate would still be alive, protected, and free enough to hate me properly when the reviews ended.
The line between us held steady, loud beneath the steadiness but controlled, and for that I was grateful. It gave me no words, no thoughts, no access to the privacy of her mind, which was more mercy than I deserved after what I had already taken from her tonight.
What it gave me instead was distance and condition. She was beyond the door, close enough to feel and still unreachable behind stone, locks, and council caution. She was awake, sharp, bright with thought, thinking hard enough that the bond seemed to hum under my ribs.
Her fury reached me first, hot and clean. Beneath it was shame. Beneath the shame, calculation. Cold, deliberate, and very much alive.
The calculation was the part that let me breathe. I was not enthusiastic about what Catalina might be planning, but the fact that she was planning mattered. Thought meant structure, and structure meant she had not collapsed into shock, fear, or a silence no bond could translate.
* * *
I left my post at midnight and had the deputy hold the corridor in my place, though stepping away from Catalina’s door did nothing to quiet the instinct under my skin. If anything, standing on the wrong side of the lock had sharpened it until it began offering solutions I could not afford to consider. Shift. Climb the wall. Put myself at her window again.
I had already done that once tonight.
Once could be explained, if not excused. It had been a public act. I would answer for it during the council’s first deliberation, where every person in that room would understand exactly what it meant for a dragon to go to the window of the woman he had claimed.
Doing it twice would become a declaration. It would be a claim repeated after warning, a statement made in full knowledge of the consequences, and more than the council could absorb while pretending this situation remained procedural.
So I left the corridor and went outside, where I stood in the courtyard for forty minutes in human form, looking up at Catalina’s dark window.
Through the bond, she had pulled back and gone stiller, but not quiet. Her emotions were banked rather than gone, the sharpest edge of her fury folded inward where it could become a blade if she chose.
The instinct in me did not care for procedure, consequence, or the political distinction between protection and possession. It cared that she was behind glass, that there had been blood on her throat, that her hand had touched the window, and that she had walked away from me because I had given her every reason to do it.
Reason did not comfort that part of me, and I understood then that it would refuse comfort on certain subjects for the rest of my life.
I would have to learn to manage that.
I went to find Yuki. I took the long route through the compound, the one I had used for decades when I needed to think before I trusted myself to speak.
Before the dining hall, I had understood my role. I was Ashenmere’s enforcer. I acted when ordered, held position when required, and kept my instincts inside the lines the council called law.
I had done that since I was young.
Tonight, I had failed.
I had bitten Catalina Cordero because another man had kissed her cheek, because she had named a boyfriend on a balcony, and because every dragon instinct in me had treated those things as a threat.
That was not an excuse. It was evidence.
Yuki’s office light was on at ten minutes to one.
