He saw me. The lift of his head was tiny. The arrest in his shoulders was tinier. Every line of him went still. The opposite of relaxed. The stillness of a lock catching somewhere deep inside a mechanism.
The liaison hadn’t noticed. He was talking about something.
Dominic Graves was tall. Six-three, maybe four. Black coat over black everything else. His shoulders were a wall. Pale lines crossed his knuckles. His eyes were a very dark brown. Almost black. They were on me in a way I had no category for.
My pulse moved into my throat.
He hadn’t moved. His face hadn’t changed. But something was happening behind the stillness. It was in the air between us. His attention had narrowed to a point. The muscle along his jaw hardened, briefly, in a way that on any other face would’ve been invisible. On his it was a very loud sentence.
“—Enforcer Graves,” the liaison finished, and only then did Dominic move.
A nod toward the liaison, not toward me. “Ma’am.” The voice. Quiet. Rough at the edges. He didn’t have to project. The corridor was already listening.
“Mr. Graves.”
He said nothing. He stepped to the side of the doorway as the liaison opened it for me. He didn’t step back. For about one second of crossing his sightline, I was inside the radius of him, close enough to smell cedar and feel the heat coming off his skin like a banked stove.
Six-three of dragon, not pretending to be anything else.
I walked past him into the room. The liaison followed me in and started showing me around.
Closet. Safe. Stocked kitchenette. Bedroom left, bathroom right. Window sealed. Aide at seven. Panic button by the bed for emergencies only, by which he seemed to mean fire, structural collapse, and very little else.
I asked the right questions and made the right faces. Then he left me and the door clicked shut behind him.
Dominic Graves was on the other side of the door. I knew it the way I knew the position of the exits in any room I walked into.
* * *
I gave myself thirty seconds standing in the entryway, breathing slow, hand flat against the wall. Then I went to work.
Surveillance sweep. Bedroom first. Light fixtures, smoke detector, picture frames, the seam under the windowsill, the underside of the desk, the underside of the bed, the inside of the lamp shade. I found three. Optical pickup in the smoke detector. Directional microphone behind the painting over the bed. Pressure plate under the rug at the foot of the door, the kind that would tell anyone monitoring whenever I crossed it.
I left all three in place.
I would’ve been insulted if they hadn’t bugged me.
I checked the kitchenette. Nothing. The kitchenette was either clean or clever enough that I wasn’t going to find it without tools.
The window over the courtyard was four inches thick. It didn’t open. Bullet-resistant glass at minimum, dragon-resistant probably, with a magnetic seal at the frame. The lock had a six-character electronic code.
I didn’t test it.
I took my work bag into the bathroom, ran the shower, and texted Davis under cover of the noise.
In.
The dots cycled, stopped, cycled again.
Confirmed. Comms protocol active. Daily report 21:00 your time.
Copy.
I turned the shower off and unpacked.
The hangers were heavy oak. A detail people put in places they expect you to live. I hung my dresses, lined up my shoes, put the agency-issue earpiece along with the burner phone under the mattress.
That was what mattresses were for.
