“You’ll stand outside her door,” Yuki said. “You’ll keep doing what you have been doing, and you’ll add nothing to it. No declarations, no displays, no attempts to make the bond easier for you by making it louder for her.”
She did not look away. “That’s your assignment.”
Yuki set both hands flat on the desk. “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe she’ll choose to kill you. She walked the length of my council chamber with blood on her throat and corrected vocabulary before anyone could decide whether she was a victim or a liability. Women who rely on violence rarely choose to debate terminology first.”
She returned the reassignment order to the folder and closed it with the same care she gave every dangerous thing. “She’ll use you if you make yourself useful enough and quiet enough to be worth the trouble.”
I turned the words over. They did not comfort me, but comfort was not the point. They oriented me, and that was more useful.
Yuki tipped her chin toward the door. The meeting was over.
I closed the door behind me on the way out.
I stationed myself in the corridor outside Catalina’s room and stayed there for the rest of the night.
The line between us did not give me her thoughts. It gave me distance, which was its own punishment with her behind those locks, and it gave me emotion in fragments I had no right to touch too closely.
For an hour, there was fury. Then exhaustion.
Eventually, the line quieted. She was not asleep, but the sharp, bright thinking in her softened. The fury did not leave so much as fold inward, and though the distance between us stayed the same, the bond eased at the edges, like a weapon lowered but not set down.
I matched my breathing to that quiet. The rhythm was not mine. It was the only thing I was permitted to keep.
Margot
Catalina
Ihad been awake since five.
By any operational measure, the assignment had failed in the dining hall. Leadership would call it an escalation, becauseescalationlet everyone keep using the same terminology in unadulterated chaos.
In D.C., Davis had told me there would be no extraction team. No friendly faces inside if I was caught. No cavalry, no operational miracle, no one coming through a service door with a badge and a plan.
At the time, that had sounded like a warning. Now, sitting in a locked room with a dragon’s claim under my skin, it sounded more like a forecast.
I had a bite on the left of my throat, a line in my chest that hadn’t been there yesterday, and the memory, still freshly mine, of a forty-foot dragon climbing the side of the building in his natural form to press one dinner-plate-sized eye against my window.
The assignment hadn’t ended.
Fine.
The assignment had become a dumpster fire.
By six-thirty, I had spent ninety minutes thinking through the implications of having no possibility of leaving and no agency contact at all. No phone, no courier, no pre-arranged extraction phrase. For the first time since I had arrived at Ashenmere, every decision I made belonged only to me.
It was the opposite of comforting.
The bond ran quiet, banked to almost nothing.
Dominic was outside my door, separated from me by stone, locks, and whatever rules Yuki had put around him after the window incident. He wasn’t in the room and not close enough to be useful in any practical sense, but he was close enough for the bond to sit under my ribs like a dimmed current.
I could feel only the broadest shape of him through it: proximity, attention, and restraint.
Not calm. Chosen, and held, every second.
* * *
The lock disengaged at nine sharp, and Yuki Mendel-Ashenmere walked in with a single folder in one hand and a black phone in the other.
