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“I wanted it said out loud so you couldn’t invent a technicality later.”

“I would never invent a technicality.” She let that sit half a second. “I might invent several.”

He lost. Some small, honest part of him was relieved about it.

Victor tried once, in the elevator, tablet open to Tarek’s address. “I can have a team assembled in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t have twenty minutes.”

“Norden—”

“I don’t have twenty minutes, Victor,” he said without heat, which landed harder than heat would have. “Someone put a knife to her throat an hour ago. I’m done waiting for paperwork to catch up to a decision I already made in that corridor.”

Victor didn’t argue further. Victor, of all people in this building, understood what he was looking at — a man who’d already stopped being reachable by protocol, standing in an elevator only technically, the rest of him already three miles away and closing.

“At minimum, take backup for the ground floor. Two men, before you’re inside.”

“Fine. The lobby. Not past it.”

“Understood.” Victor’s jaw tightened, the closest he ever came to visible worry. “Bring her back the way she is right now. Not worse.”

“That’s the plan.”

“And if it stops being the plan.”

“Then there won’t be a building left standing to argue with me about it.”

Norden had the address. He had two years of Tarek’s patient, layered intelligence-gathering finally curdled into a location on a map, and he had, above every operational consideration available to him, a decision already made in the total, unrevisable way a dragon made decisions once its mate had been touched. He was moving before the elevator doors finished opening.

The financial district building presented itself as precisely what it was designed to look like — clean lines, professional signage, a lobby with a receptionist’s desk unoccupied at this hour, the kind of place that photographed well in a brochure and told you nothing true about what happened on the floors above it. Security cameras tracked them from the corners. Norden didn’t slow for any of it.

Two guards met them at the stairwell door, competent, well-trained, unprepared for what walked through it. He put them down without breaking stride, efficient, contained, still fully himself in every sense that mattered. Romily stayed a half-step behind him, glass shard unwrapped from its dish towel, watching the corners the way he’d taught her to without ever once meaning to teach her anything.

“You’re doing the thing where you go quiet before you get violent.”

“I’m aware.”

“Is this the part where I start worrying?”

“Not about me. Stay behind me once we’re through this door. I mean that as a request, not an order, but I’d like you to honor it regardless of the distinction.”

“I’ll stay close. I make no promises about behind, tonight or ever, so don’t ask me to.”

“I’ll accept close, then, and consider the entire matter settled.”

The shift started somewhere around the second floor, a heat building behind his sternum that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with permission finally granted after eight hundred years of withholding it. His shirt strained across his shoulders. His vision sharpened, colors bleeding toward heat signatures instead of ordinary light. Romily’s hand found his arm once, brief, grounding — not asking him to stop, simply letting him know she was still there.

By the third floor, he wasn’t fighting it anymore.

The shift wasn’t elegant. It had never been elegant, not in eight centuries of doing this, and tonight was no exception — bone and scale rewriting themselves in seconds, the ceiling of the stairwell shattering outward as he outgrew the architecture built to contain ordinary men, drywall and steel support raining down in a cloud of dust and debris. The thing ancient and enormous and uninterested in restraint finally let go of everything it had spent a lifetime holding in check.

A shifted dragon inside an enclosed building was a problem no protocol on earth had ever solved.

He found the first team of Tarek’s security on the fourth floor and didn’t slow down to negotiate. Claws found flesh. Fire found nothing — he kept that leashed, barely, aware even now of Romily somewhere behind him — but everything else was fully, completely off the chain.

Men who’d trained for corporate threats, for hostile takeovers and industrial espionage, had no framework whatsoever for what came through that stairwell door, and it showed in how fast the shouting stopped, in the blood already spreading dark across polished concrete, in weapons discarded by men who’d finally understood, too late, precisely what they’d walked into. One man got a single shot off before Norden closed the distance; the bullet went wide, buried itself in drywall a foot from Romily’s shoulder, and the man who’d fired it didn’t get a second attempt.

Norden found the surveillance infrastructure on the fifth floor and started taking it apart with the same efficiency he’d have used dismantling a hostile board — except now efficiency looked like server racks crushed to scrap under a single clawed hand, monitors exploding in showers of glass and sparks, two years of Tarek’s patient watching reduced to wreckage in under a minute.