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“Two millimeters matters. Ask literally anyone in structural glass, I have several names on file if you’d like references.”

“I don’t doubt it. I’ve simply learned not to argue the point, considering how that particular argument has gone for me every previous time I’ve attempted it, without exception.”

Outside, the city carried on with its usual indifferent business, and inside the penthouse, for the first time since any of this started, neither of them needed to be anywhere else. She let her eyes close, his heartbeat steady and slow under her ear, and thought, with the last clear thought she managed before sleep finally caught up to her, that no matter what came next — Magnus, the business of the empire, the long list of things a claimed dragon’s mate apparently needed to learn — she intended to meet all of it exactly like this. In. All the way in.

TWENTY

ROMILY

The atrium opened on a Tuesday, in exactly the kind of winter light Romily had designed the whole installation around, and the first thing she noticed was that nobody had told the crowd how to react to it.

Nobody needed to. The panels caught the low afternoon sun and threw it back liquid, shifting, a slow-motion tide of color moving across marble that used to be merely expensive and read now as truly alive. Guests walked in mid-sentence and stopped talking. Some of them looked up and stayed that way long enough that their companions had to physically redirect them toward the bar.

A photographer tried three angles, gave up, and simply stood there with the camera hanging forgotten around his neck. Somewhere near the entrance, a string quartet that had been hired for ambient background music found itself, twenty minutes into the reception, playing to an audience that had stopped listening in favor of staring straight up.

Romily stood near the entrance in a dress she’d bought for tonight and had already forgotten she was wearing, watching six weeks of scaffolding and arguments and one memorable structural miscalculation resolve itself into the thing she’d promised Elena it would be, back when Elena had been far less inclined to believe her. The atrium no longer held light. It moved with it, hour by hour, the way she’d sworn it would and nobody except Norden had fully believed.

You had to be standing inside it. I told you that would be the problem. I told everyone that would be the problem.

Elena Voss found her near the base of the installation twenty minutes in, champagne untouched in one hand, wearing an expression Romily had never once seen on her.

“It works.”

She said it to nobody. Flat, quiet, completely unguarded — a woman encountering direct evidence against a position she’d defended since the concept review, months before Romily ever picked up a torch, and finding, to her own visible surprise, no counterargument left to give.

“I know.”

Elena turned, and the look she gave Romily was the look of a woman formally, publicly revising an opinion she’d have sworn on her own competence since before the first panel ever went up.

“It works,” she said again, and this time it landed in a completely different register — not assessment, closer to wonder, delivered by a woman who didn’t, as a rule, allow herself wonder during business hours.

Romily tucked that one away as possibly the single most satisfying professional sentence of her entire career, and didn’t say so out loud, because saying so out loud would have meant admitting how much Elena’s approval had ended up mattering.

“I’d like the record to show I never doubted you would deliver something usable, technically speaking.”

“You told me, verbatim, that suspending glass panels from the ceiling sounded like a lawsuit with extra steps.”

“I stand by that assessment as a general engineering principle, permanently and without qualification. I’m simply revising my opinion of this specific application of it, under mounting evidence.” Elena allowed herself the smallest, most reluctant smile Romily had ever seen. “Brand consistency has never produced a room people cry in. I checked. Three separate guests, so far, and the evening is nowhere near finished.”

“I’ll take that as the compliment I assume it’s meant to be, generously.”

“It’s the highest compliment I currently have available at this hour, on this much champagne. Enjoy it while it lasts, because I intend to revert to my usual standards by tomorrow morning.”

Darius found her at the drinks table, champagne in hand, grin already at full wattage.

“You’re claimed.”

“I’m aware.”

“He’s been genuinely unbearable for six weeks straight. On behalf of everyone in his professional orbit — thank you, sincerely, we are all deeply, personally relieved.” He raised his glass toward her with the ceremony of someone who considered this toast a matter of historical record. “To the woman who finally gave the rest of us our CEO’s attention span back.”

She raised hers to match his toast. Across the room, Norden watched the exchange with a flat, unreadable expression that knew exactly what was being said about him and had decided, apparently, that public relief was an acceptable price for the last six weeks of cost to his staff’s patience.

“He can definitely hear you.”

“He can. I’ve said far worse to his face and survived it easily. I’ll keep testing the boundary until he actually does something about it, purely as a matter of scientific curiosity.”

“That sounds like a personal problem, and possibly quite a recurring one at that.”