Chapter 415: The Kiss Before The Miss

Beta Draven gave it two blocks before he made his first attempt.

"The citadel should be visible from the next elevation change," he said, voice steady, eyes forward, gently reminding the group that they had a mission and the mission was not a walking tour. "If we take the eastern staircase, we gain sightline advantage and cut our approach time in half."

Blair nodded. "Agreed. Eastern staircase. Let’s go."

They made it forty feet.

A vendor was blowing glass in an open-air stall. The molten orb at the end of his rod was cycling through colors that didn’t exist in any spectrum Brennan had studied, shifting from violet to something past violet that the human eye had no business perceiving and was perceiving anyway.

Blair stopped.

"The thermal manipulation required for that color shift suggests they are using light-based oxidation rather than mineral additives," she observed, eyes locked on the glass. "That changes everything I assumed about their material sciences."

Brennan materialized at her shoulder like a man summoned by the word oxidation. "The temperature alone, Blair. To hit that spectrum, he’d need to exceed anything a standard forge produces. Which means either his hands are doing it or the rod is enchanted. Look at the rod."

They both looked at the rod.

Beta Draven looked at Briggs. Briggs looked at Beta Draven. The glance between them was brief, loaded, and carried the mutual understanding of two men whose delegation had been derailed again. This time by a glassblower.

"Perhaps we could observe the craftsman on our return trip," Briggs offered, his voice polite. "The prisoner is unlikely to be released on her own recognizance while we admire local industry."

"Briggs is right," Beta Draven seconded. "The sooner we arrive, the sooner we negotiate."

Blair straightened. "You’re right. Both of you. Let’s move."

They made it one block.

A bridge connected two towers ahead of them, and the underside of it was covered in mosaic tiles that reacted to foot traffic on the bridge above. Every step a pedestrian took sent a ripple of light across the mosaic below.

Blair’s hood fell off. She didn’t notice because her neck was craned backward.

"Dynamic load-responsive art installation," she breathed. "The tiles are pressure-mapped. Each footfall generates a unique pattern. That means every person who crosses that bridge produces an original piece of art and they probably have no idea they are doing it."

Damon pulled her hood back up with his free hand. The gesture was automatic at this point. Hood up. Tuck the hair. Resume walking. The muscle memory of protecting a woman who kept forgetting she was a princess because the city was more interesting than her own safety.

"The eastern staircase," Beta Draven reminded the group from behind, his voice carrying the patient repetition of a man who had said this sentence before and was prepared to say it again because repetition was how you trained wolves, and this group was behaving like puppies at a park.

"Yes," Blair said. "Eastern staircase. Absolutely."

They made it half a block.

A garden was growing out of a wall, which was already a zoning violation. Not beside it. Out of it. Plate-sized leaves, glowing petals, the whole stone breathing like it had lungs and a god complex.

Blair clapped.

Her hands left Damon’s grip and connected with each other at a volume that turned six heads. The hood fell off from the motion. The hair escaped. The glow from the wall caught her face. Damon was already reaching for the hood again.

He pulled it up. Tucked the strand. His fingers brushed her jaw.

She was already clapping at the next thing. Of course she was. Next up: A bedazzled gutter along the walkway with glowing water flowing through it. Her hands connected again and the hood slipped backward.

Damon grabbed her hand.

Not the hood. The hand. Because the hood was a losing war and the hand was the source of the problem. If the hand was in his, the hand could not clap, and if the hand could not clap, the hood stayed on, and if the hood stayed on, the princess of Drakencrest remained a woman in a cloak instead of a high-value target in a foreign kingdom.

She looked at him. He looked at her. The look lasted one second.

He raised her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles. The kiss was brief. Unhurried. The kind of kiss a man gives when he has stopped pretending the administrative excuse was ever real and has decided that the truth is simpler and the truth is that he wanted to do that and he did it and the consequences could form a line.

Blair’s face gave the street nothing. Her pulse gave her hand everything.

Briggs saw it.

His jaw unhinged by a full inch. The satchel slipped again. The attorney who had been briefed on legal strategy, diplomatic protocol, and approximate travel time was now watching a wolf Beta kiss a dragon princess’s hand reverently in a foreign city.

Beta Draven saw it.

His eyes registered the kiss, tracked the trajectory of Damon’s mouth to Blair’s hand, and completed the observation in under a second. Then he looked away. He was the last person alive who was going to judge a man for kissing a woman’s hand. Good for them. Moving on.

Brennan saw it.

But he did not look away. His eyes moved from the kiss to Blair’s face to Damon’s face and back to the joined hands, slow-tracking the whole thing like a nature documentary was unfolding three feet in front of him and he was rooting for the animals.

"Brennan," Damon said without turning around.

Brennan blinked. Straightened. Looked at the sky like it had been his primary interest all along.

"Beautiful stars tonight," he announced.

"Briggs. How about you take point and find us those stairs," Beta Draven offered.

Briggs gave a nod and moved to the front of the group, urgently grateful for a task that gave him plausible deniability if questioned about this later.

They made it two blocks before Brennan stopped. The group stopped. Except this time, Brennan turned to a woman who was sitting on a fountain ledge.

"Excuse me. Could you point us towards your incarceration facility?"

The woman looked up at him.

"Sure, dear. You’ll want to follow this road until it splits at the fountain with the twin spires. Take the left fork. It curves past the Healer’s Row and up towards the Citadel. The incarceration hall is the building on the eastern face, just below the main terrace."

"Thank you so much," Brennan replied, and meant every syllable.

Brennan turned to the group with the directions memorized.

Blair looked at Damon. Damon looked at Blair. The shared glance contained the mutual humiliation of two tacticians who had been outperformed by doing the most obvious thing possible.

"He just asked," Briggs said, the way someone says a magician just used a regular deck.

Beta Draven pinched the bridge of his nose. "That was always the play."