“Lord Solberg,” I said.
“Miss Cordero.” He stepped past me and continued on.
The deputy turned from the wall like she hadn’t just put herself in time-out.
We kept walking, up four floors and through three sealed checkpoints, until the deputy stopped at the end of the last corridor in front of a plain door.
From fifteen feet away, I could already tell the lock hadn’t been built for privacy. Privacy suggested someone expected me to have choices. This door had been built for containment.
The room beyond was bigger than I expected. I stopped just inside the doorway and took inventory the way I had been trained to take inventory in any room that wanted me comfortable.
Bed. Desk. Window.
The window drew my attention first. It didn’t open, and the glass was thick. Not reinforced in the obvious way. Reinforced in the expensive way.
A private bathroom waited through one door, and a small kitchen alcove sat against the far wall. Beneath the window sat a couchupholstered in medical-waiting-room fabric, comfortable only in the most technical sense.
The deputy closed the door behind her, and the lock engaged. Mechanical first. Then one mechanism beneath it, then another, then a third that took approximately eleven seconds to settle. I counted all eleven, and when the final bolt seated, the room went silent.
Sealed-room silent.
I searched the room without making it look like a search. Dramatic rummaging was for people who wanted to be caught.
The desk came first: drawers, underside, back panel. Nothing loose, nothing useful. The bathroom was worse. Empty cabinet, fixed mirror, and a vent secured with screws designed by someone with a deep personal hatred of improvisation.
In the kitchen alcove, I found two mugs, three plates, a kettle, and no knives.
Cute.
I moved through the rest of the room the same way, checking the sofa cushions, the seams, the window frame, and the space behind the desk. No unsecured vents. No exposed screws. No forgotten pens. No glass I could break without tools and an optimistic relationship with blood loss.
By minute twelve, I had confirmed the room was comfortable, monitored, and designed by someone who understood that comfort was just another kind of restraint.
I sat at the desk and started mapping the damage to the mission.
I was overexposed in every useful sense.
The 21:00 cable was four hours overdue, which meant Davis would have the embassy’s intake transcript by now. He would know about the kiss, the bite, the public claim, and the fact that I had tried to put my fist into Dominic Graves’s face only to have him catch it in front of a hundred and twenty witnesses who now carried my blown cover in their memories.
The Norwegian delegation had filed a bond consultation request, and Ashenmere had denied it, which made my body the center of a jurisdictional dispute. A phrase that made diplomats sweat throughexpensive shirts.
Then there was containment.
My translator cover depended on being useful, neutral, and forgettable. The bond had destroyed all three. I was visibly claimed, politically disputed, and locked inside an Ashenmere suite by a council using the wordprotectiveabout a room I couldn’t unlock from the inside.
The agency would pull me if it could. Debrief me until the edges came off. Contain the narrative. Put me behind a desk in Washington while it decided what Ashenmere owed them for the inconvenience.
The conclusion was already forming, neat and wrong. Compromised asset. Failed cover. Diplomatic liability.
I pushed back from the desk. There was nothing useful left in the room, and nothing useful in staying upright.
So I crossed to the bed, sat, and let my eyes drop.
I’d kill for a croissant.
The bond was loud, like a line left open in another room, except the room was my chest and the man on the other end had just turned my life into a treaty incident.
For one minute, I let it be loud. Pretending it wasn’t there would only make it more powerful, and I had already lost enough control for one evening. So, I did what I had been trained to do with anything I couldn’t stop.