She’d walked into a room of dragons and she hadn’t been afraid. Not of anyone in that room. I suspected not even of Graves, though she had the sense to be irritated by him.
Fear would’ve made her sensible. But fear hadn’t been the first thing she offered the room. Attention had. Assessment.
A blade wrapped in manners.
My mate.
Mine.
God help all of us.
Working
Catalina
The first full session was at nine sharp on Wednesday, and Rhain Solberg was eight minutes late.
I had been expecting him to be on time.
Norwegian diplomats were always on time. It was custom that you arrived at the room at the start of the hour, not the start of the meeting, with three minutes to spare for the arrangement of paperwork and the small confirmation handshake with your counterparts.
Bjorn had been at the conference suite at eight forty-three. Yuki had been in the corridor at eight fifty-five.
The U.S. delegation had been in the suite at eight fifty-nine on the dot, in the small competitive courtesy of a State Department team that had been briefed twice on Northern formality and didn’t intend to cede a single small point on it.
Rhain came in at nine-oh-eight. Deliberately. He entered with a coffee in his hand and an apology that sounded sincere enough to be insulting if you knew how much work had gone into it.
“Apologies,” was all he said.
His eyes found me, briefly and exactly. The room got briefly warmer. Then he sat down across the table from me.
I could tell he was about to spend the next two hours pretending we hadn’t stood three feet apart in a receiving hall yesterday and recognized something in one another.
I respected the discipline.
I returned the favor.
Yuki ran the meeting. The Norwegian elder Bjorn sat at her left. The U.S. ambassador’s senior trade representative sat opposite, flanked by two deputies. I sat in the translator’s chair behind the U.S. principal, my notebook open, pen uncapped, expression neutral.
Dominic was at the wall opposite the door. He had walked me up four flights of stairs at eight forty-two and had taken the angle that put the door, the windows, Yuki, Rhain, and me in the same sweep of his peripheral vision. He hadn’t moved since.
Coffee at seven. He hadn’t said more than four words. The four words had beenGood morning, Ms.Cordero.
He had been at my door when I went to sleep. Still there when I woke up. He hadn’t appeared to have slept.
His left cuff was buttoned a quarter inch off. As if he had dressed at four in the morning by the light of a corridor sconce. I hadn’t mentioned it.
I translated. I did it well.
I did it without looking at Rhain Solberg for any longer than required. Rhain didn’t look at me at all. He was making a point.
I made a counterpoint of my own, which was that I was going to be excellent at my job in front of him. I was going to be the best translator in the room, the best translator he had ever sat across from, the best translator anyone in Northern Europe had heard of.
He could refuse to look at me, but I would speak so cleanly he would have no choice but to listen.
It worked. I caught him three times.
Once on a piece of internal Norwegian grammar that the senior trade rep hadn’t understood, where I rendered it twice, both ways, and added the diplomatic phrase that sat between them.