Rhain looked at me properly then.
He had blue eyes. The briefing hadn’t done them justice. North Sea blue, in late afternoon. Gray in some lights, deep in others, never quite the color you expected.
The briefing had also missed that his eyes seemed perpetually amused. The agency file on Rhain Solberg had described him in the language of a serious diplomat.Trained.Composed.Effective.
The agency hadn’t used the wordamused.
The agency file had been written by an analyst who had spent three weeks on Rhain’s open-source record. None of the pages had conveyed what was sitting across from me now: a man who had decided, somewhere in his many decades, that the world was a thing he was going to find continuously interesting.
Heat bloomed behind my hipbones.
Irritating.
“You’re not a translator, Ms.Cordero,” he said conversationally. Without inflection. The voice for telling a waiter the soup is cold.
I didn’t blink. “I am, actually. The State Department issued paperwork and everything.”
He gave a smalltskbefore using my firstname. “Catalina.”
My body reacted.
I matched his tone. “Rhain.”
The set of his shoulders shifted.
Dominic’s head turned.
Not only to me and Rhain, but to the space around me, as if proximity had rules no one had bothered translating.
Older than jealousy. More formal. A claim. The thought landed cold and hot at once.
“What’s your real designation?” Rhain asked.
“State Department translator. Cleared for diplomatic protocol up to and including state dinners with sovereign supernatural entities. My paperwork is on file with both the Norwegian embassy and the Ashenmere council.” I paused. “Would you like me to email it to you?”
“Yes.”
I almost laughed.
He had saidyesthe way Dominic saidno.Flat. Declarative. Infuriating. He meant it. He had asked for the email and would, when the email arrived, read it carefully.
“This is going to be a long week,” I said.
His smile changed. The room felt smaller. “Yes.”
The senior trade representative returned from his phone call brightly. He had no idea the table he was returning to had briefly become a diplomatic hazard.
Lunch resumed.
We didn’t speak again about anything that mattered.
Rhain told a story about his grandmother in Frogner. I asked him a question that I knew the answer to from his Wikipedia page. He said something charming. I said something less charming. The senior trade representative didn’t notice that he was sitting in the middle of a low-grade duel.
When lunch ended, Rhain stood smoothly, offering the room exactly as much of himself as it needed.
“Ms. Cordero,” he said.
“Lord Solberg.”