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Kaydren did not go to the gathering at the gate.

He had learned long ago that the useful work happened in the rooms nobody watched. Everyone else was at the threshold, congratulating each other on a thing that was not yet finished. He stayed in his quarters on the administrative level. The mission manifest lay open in front of him, twenty names Earth was sending across the dark. He read them the way he read everything, slowly and twice.

He had lost the round. He was precise with himself about that, because a man who lied to himself about a loss made the same mistake twice. The arena had taken his careful season apart in eighteen minutes. The ambassador he had spent a year trying to remove now stood at the gate beside a restored hero. That was the board as it stood, and Kaydren did not rage at a board. He studied it. The board had just gained twenty new pieces.

He came back to one name on the second pass, the same name the ambassador had filed. He and Athena Livingstone had the inconvenient habit of finding the same things interesting. The name was Diana Montanari, a diplomatic specialist who had come up through the Vulcana program. The public record covered that program in four bland lines, and Kaydren did not trust bland lines. He had already begun to take them apart. A diplomat did not need the clearance this one carried. A diplomat did not travel with the quiet arrangements this one had made. Somewhere in those four lines was the real reason Earth was sending her. The real reason would be the lever. It always was.

He would find it before she landed. He had sixty days and a great deal of patience. Patience was the one thing this planet had never managed to take from him.

He closed the manifest. Then he opened a channel he had not used in a long time. It reached a party on Dobromia who shared his private view that the alliance was a mistake dressed up as a rescue. In the careful language of men who never quite say the thing, he began to make an arrangement.

The mission was sixty days away. That was not a deadline. It was a runway.

* * *

Sixty days from landing, a ship full of Earth's people was still coming through the dark. It carried a woman with more to her than her manifest admitted, and the trouble that would come down with her. In the barracks of the royal guard, a warrior named Kavren read the same roster. His matte purple scales were dark in the low light. He learned the names he had been given to keep alive. He did not yet know that one of them would change the shape of his life.

* * *

He was sent to guard her. He never expected to become the one man who would risk everything to claim her…

Continue the Weredragon Mates saga with “Claimed by My Weredragon”.