It took two seconds. Two seconds for Dominic Graves to cross twelve feet of dining-hall floor at a speed no human in the room would be able to map.
Then his hand was on the back of her neck and his mouth came down on hers.
Her breath caught. Shocked but pleased. Not refusal.
The sound that came up in me wasn’t small. It wanted to be a roar.
I clamped my teeth on it with every year of training my father had paid for and every older lesson Bjorn had beaten into me for free.
I didn’t let it out. I didn’t move.
Anders’s hand closed around my wrist.
Hard.
Soren had crossed the room and stood to my right now, body angled between me and the shortest path to Graves.
Bjorn was already moving.
The Norwegian delegation closed around me, smooth and total.
No one shoved. No one grabbed my shoulders. No one made a scene. They simply removed every line of movement I might’ve taken.
Professional. Loyal. Infuriating.
Necessary.
He pulled back. “Mine.”
The word landed in dry grass. Everyone heard the word, the cadence, and the public-record finality of it. Yuki, three paces away, was locked in the stillness.
Dominic’s mouth dropped to Catalina’s throat.
The bite.
I closed my eyes. Briefly. A diplomat’s allowance.
Cowardice had to be rationed on formal occasions.
I opened them.
She came on the bite.
There was no more elegant way to understand it from across the room. Her shoulders went forward. Her hands came up to his coat. Her breath caught, then fractured in a way everyone could see, hear, and now never, for the rest of time, un-hear.
I couldn’t feel what she felt, but sight was its own hell.
A hundred and twenty people watched the woman the United States government had dressed as a translator lose herself for one public, irreversible second on the teeth of the Ashenmere enforcer.
Anders’s grip tightened. Soren said something in Old Norse under his breath. A curse polite enough for company.
Bjorn reached my side.
He didn’t speak at first. I read the order in the pressure of his hand at my elbow, in the line of Anders at my wrist, in Soren blocking the forward path.
Stay. Don’t shift. Don’t make this worse.
I worked through the list of things I was choosing not to do.