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“That one is suspicious.”

Romily didn’t immediately connect suspicious man on the mezzanine to anything worth her attention. She had a scaffolding brace to reassess and an installation engineer arriving at three, and she went back to work, crouched at the base of the atrium’s east wall with her notebook open across one knee.

She sensed him before she saw him. Not a glance. Not a sound. Only weight — the physical pressure of being looked at by someone who wasn’t being subtle about it and didn’t especially care whether she noticed.

She didn’t look up. Looking up would mean admitting a stranger’s attention had a physical weight, a sentence she refused to complete even privately, and she had a brace to reassess. She measured the same six inches of railing three times instead, numbers that hadn’t changed since the first measurement, pencil moving out of pure stubbornness.

The weight didn’t let up. If anything it sharpened, like whoever was up there had all the patience in the world and nowhere else he needed to be either. Fine. She could out-stubborn a stranger on a balcony. She’d out-stubborned worse.

Curiosity did what curiosity always did, eventually, and won.

She looked up.

He was on the mezzanine rail, one level above the lobby floor, both hands braced on it hard enough that restraint seemed to be the entire point of the gesture — like he owned the building and was actively holding himself back from doing anything else about it, which, she’d find out later, with real irritation, was closer to the truth than she meant it to be.

Dark suit, no tie, the kind of stillness that belonged to a much bigger creature than the frame holding it. He wasn’t glancing. He wasn’t caught in the act of anything, the way most people were when you looked up and found them looking. He was watching her, straight on, undisguised, with the total, unbroken focus of a man who had clearly never been told to look away and taken the advice — and, from the set of his jaw, would have considered the request itself a small act of aggression.

She’d expected mild curiosity, maybe — the polite once-over people gave a stranger doing anything unusual three stories up. This wasn’t that. This was focus with weight behind it, the kind of attention that didn’t ask permission to land where it wanted, and it wanted, apparently, to land on her. Nobody looked at a stranger like that. Nobody looked at a stranger like they’d already made a decision about her and were simply waiting, patient beyond reason, for the world to catch up.

Heat climbed up the back of her neck, fast and completely unauthorized. Her stomach dropped like a missed stair. Her body had opinions about this development that her brain hadn’t been consulted on, and every single one of those opinions was inconvenient.

She looked back down at her measurements a half-second too late to make it look like she hadn’t been looking at all.

Noted. Logged. She was going to meet whoever that was on her own terms, thank you very much, and definitely not while her pulse insisted on doing this in her throat. She filed the whole reaction away with the same clinical interest she’d give a structural crack — noted, concerning, worth monitoring — and refused, on principle, to give it any more attention than that.

“Ms. Devlin?” Elena’s voice cut back in, patient but clearly on its second attempt. “The engineer’s arriving early. Would you like to review the load specifications now, or⁠—”

“Now’s good.” Romily didn’t look back up at the mezzanine. She didn’t need to. She could still feel where he was standing, and that was a problem she intended to solve by not looking up there again for the rest of the afternoon.

She gathered her notebook, her pencil, and what remained of her professional composure, and followed Elena toward the far end of the atrium without once glancing at the mezzanine rail, which took far more effort than it had any right to for a woman who’d known the man’s name for exactly zero minutes.

She lasted eleven minutes.

FIVE

NORDEN

Norden knew she was already in the building before the elevator reached his floor. His dragon had known the whole ride up, certainty settling into his chest like a verdict nobody had asked it to deliver.

He’d cleared the hour. Canceled two calls, told his assistant not to bother rebooking them, and she hadn’t asked why.

He stood at the window instead of behind the desk. Sitting was a decision about how this went, a man waiting to be impressed, and he had no intention of letting furniture make that decision for him. He crossed his arms and watched the city do nothing interesting fourteen floors down, and realized, somewhat late, that he didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth right now except exactly where he was standing.

Three days since the photograph. Three days of surveillance reports and a gutted calendar and one truly unproductive midnight flight that hadn’t fixed anything. He still hadn’t decided what he was going to say to her. Eight hundred years, and he’d never once walked into a room without knowing how it would end. This was new. He didn’t love it. He didn’t hate it either. That, in its own way, alarmed him more than either option would have.

The door opened without a knock.

Of course it did.

She crossed his office like she already owned more of it than he did, which made no sense for a contractor on her first visit, and yet — here they both were. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the light, head tilted, reading the room the way he’d read a balance sheet, and it took her seconds to find everything wrong with it.

He did the same thing to her. It took far less time to find nothing wrong at all.

Mine. The word rose again, same as it had over a photograph, except now it had a body attached to it, and a voice, and he had far less patience left for pretending otherwise.

He’d read the file, studied the photograph, and told himself he knew what to expect. He hadn’t accounted for the way she moved through space in person — economical, without hurry, like apologizing for taking up room had never occurred to her.

Dark hair pulled back. Sleeves shoved to her elbows. A canvas bag that had clearly been places actual work happened, not the kind that photographed well and did nothing else. She crossed to the shelf behind his desk, eyes catching on the one object in the room nobody had ever successfully identified — old, dense, worn smooth in places that suggested centuries of a hand doing what her own hand was currently doing to the strap of her bag.