Elven Lies (Court of Rebellion #3)

32. Chapter 32

32

O f course this was how Rowan wanted to handle things after all his recklessness. After endangering her entire team in this last-minute op. After that fucking car chase that had almost killed Maxwell.

Any normal person would have felt the weight of their own actions and given it a goddamn rest until the right time revealed itself. Or at least a less-shitty moment.

But of course Rowan Blackmoon would try yet again to distract her from her role within Shade and her responsibilities. Of course he’d try to make this all about him and what he wanted.

The realization made her so furious, Rebecca froze for fear that if she responded right away, she’d end up killing him .

“Rebecca?”

“Not now, Blackmoon,” she grumbled through gritted teeth. “I appreciate your help. Now I need you to go offer it to someone else who needs it.”

At first, she thought he’d left. But then Rowan’s presence reappeared on her right as he got down on one knee beside her.

“I know this was a lot,” he said, “but this is really important, Kilda’ari . I need you to—”

“I said not now!” She lashed out with both hands to shove him away.

She just wasn’t in full control of her emotions again, or her magic.

So when she shoved him, an unintended burst of blazing silver and black light erupted at the contact and sent him flying away from her across the dirt.

Shit. That wasn’t what she wanted, either.

Against her better judgment—dictated in the moment by anger and frustration and how terrified she’d been for Maxwell, all thanks to Rowan’s selfish recklessness—Rebecca spun around on the dirt to face him. “Blackmoon…”

His expression stopped her cold when she saw it. The deep hurt in his eyes beneath the surprise of sudden realization. The kind of look she hadn’t yet seen on him since he’d first appeared in Chicago.

A look that told her he was finally starting to put together all the pieces, after she’d spent so long trying to show him the truth of what she already believed was perfectly obvious.

Was she truly going to apologize for that? Why should she? Rowan hadn’t apologized for any of his knee-jerk reactions. Not genuinely.

As they stared at each other, Rowan pushed himself to his feet and didn’t bother dusting off his hands or his clothes. He held her gaze all the while, as if looking away would only give her that much more power over him.

As if it would let her right into his most private thoughts.

He swallowed thickly, his pained frown deepening even further. Then he shot a quick glance toward the shifter lying in the dirt beside her.

“Now I see,” he said as he took two slow, hesitant steps backward away from her. “All this time… I had it all wrong.”

Beside her, Maxwell sucked in a sharp breath.

Rebecca’s hyper-vigilance where the shifter was concerned forced her to turn back toward him. “What is it?”

“Just…” He tried to breathe through it. “I think…”

She must have been an open book in that moment as he gazed up at her. It visibly cost him an enormous effort to wipe most of the pain from his expression before he added, “I’ll be…fine. Eventually. You saw to that.”

Convinced he wasn’t in any more immediate danger, Rebecca squeezed his hand and looked over her shoulder, meaning to tell Rowan she shouldn’t have reacted that way. That they could talk when all this was well and truly over.

But Rowan was gone.

There was no sight of him amidst the battlefield, which she now realized had changed significantly since she’d left it to pull her Head of Security back from the brink of death.

A few sporadic pops of weapons fire cut through the air. They’d clearly reached the end of the battle. All the vehicles were abandoned. The inside of the warehouse had caught fire and continued to burn.

Miraculously, all of Harkennr’s forces stationed at this warehouse facility for storing his next shipments of abducted victims had been put down for good.

Most of the bodies littering the ground belonged to the enemy, though Rebecca recognized the horrified expressions of three civilians she could see from here who’d fallen in the fight, realizing only at the last second before death that they’d been rescued.

Now, the only activity around the battlefield came from Rebecca’s operatives. Some scoured the facility for gear and weapons to take back with them. Others searched for any civilians they might have missed in the chaos. The rest combed through the property for any potential evidence to help them pin down more of Harkennr’s facilities, resources, and plans they couldn’t have discovered on their own.

After all, they’d needed a witch named Maddie to tell them about this warehouse in the first place.

By the Blood, it was over. Shade had come out of it on the other side, with few injuries beyond Maxwell and—from what Rebecca gathered now—zero casualties.

She hoped it stayed that way.

Maxwell’s next sharp breath drew her attention right back to him again, even beneath the sound of Zane and Ben shouting for someone to go get the vehicles from down the road to start loading up the wounded.

Their words hardly registered. Now that she studied Maxwell again under the flickering light of the growing blaze still burning away inside the warehouse, nothing else existed but the two of them, the proof that he was still alive, and the tingling flare of energy surging through their clasped hands and racing up through her entire being.

Strangely, that unknown connection between them now somehow felt like her prize. The long-awaited recognition and validation of everything she’d been trying to do for Shade. For Maxwell. For herself.

“Hannigan!” Tig shouted somewhere behind her. “He’s over here! Let’s get him in first.”

“Roth-Da’al,” Maxwell muttered, his voice so much weaker now than it had been only a minute before.

He was barely conscious. She’d put him through the rigors of an intense Bloodshadow healing she’d only ever used on herself but once. Nobody could have withstood that and jumped right back to their feet.

He still had plenty of recovery ahead of him. Only now, they both knew he’d pull through it.

“Don’t give me that Roth-Da’al shit,” she muttered, leaning down over him to make sure she heard whatever he said next. “You’re gonna be fine. You’ll see. I bet Zida only locks you up in the infirmary for a week. Two, tops.”

She huffed out a wry laugh that died when Maxwell’s eyelids fluttered, closing slowly as if they each weighed a hundred pounds, no matter how hard he fought to stay conscious.

“ You did this,” he murmured, “and I owe you a debt.”

“You don’t owe me a damn thing.”

He licked his lips, his face quickly losing color from sheer exhaustion. “A debt I’ll spend the rest of my life repaying.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, still trying to keep the levity so she wouldn’t completely break down. “Who says I want that I-O-U?”

Even his next grunt as he fought to stay awake sounded weak, fading along with him.

“Rebecca…” He managed to squeeze her hand in his weak fingers.

The sound of her own name on his lips stole her breath completely. She clasped his hand with both of hers now before gently squeezing back. “We can hash all that out later, okay?”

“No…” His eyes fluttered shut and stayed closed.

She thought that was it until she and the team could get him set up in recovery under Zida’s care. But when she tried to release his hand, Maxwell’s grasp on her fingers tightened. He tugged her closer with surprising strength for his current state.

“From this moment,” he whispered, as if talking in his sleep, “I am yours. Forever.”

By the Blood… She could never have predicted how those words from him would make her feel. She could never have predicted the words themselves, but he’d given them. She couldn’t deny that much.

A swell of joy and rightness and an unfamiliar need she didn’t understand flared through her. It only lasted for half a second before all the other implications rushed through her mind.

Maxwell barely clung to consciousness. She’d just saved his life. They weren’t even off the battlefield yet, and there was still so much left ahead of them.

There was a very high chance this was Maxwell Hannigan’s duty talking and nothing else. He likely wouldn’t remember a second of it when he recovered.

Even with that knowledge, though, she didn’t enjoy hearing it any less.

“Let’s table that for when you know what you’re saying, okay?” she said gently. “Right now, you need to rest. We’ll get you back home in no time and get you patched up the rest of the way. I promise, you’ll be fine.”

His hand slackened in hers as he finally submitted beneath his remaining injuries, though she’d healed the worst of it, and the unavoidable exhaustion.

Then two of her operatives appeared, working diligently together to get their unconscious Head of Security off the ground and into one of Shade’s waiting vehicles that hadn’t been destroyed by Rowan’s antics.

While they loaded Maxwell into the back of one vehicle, Rebecca was hardly aware of anything but the certainty racing over and over through her thoughts like a prayer. Hoping he was fine. Hoping she’d done what needed to be done to save him. Hoping everything would finally work out after this.

And she believed it, with every cell of her being, despite the plea repeating on an endless loop the rest of the night.

She stayed by Maxwell’s side through all of it, refusing to leave him or the rear of the vehicle as the rest of her teams cleaned up Harkennr’s warehouse and salvaged anything and everything they could.

When they finally left the facility with as many newly freed civilians as they could transport, Rebecca refused to ride anywhere else but the back of the vehicle with Maxwell. Along the way, someone else tried to explain to her what was happening everywhere else, but the words passed over her like a dream.

The only part of this that felt real was staying with Maxwell through all of it until they got him into the infirmary and Zida could take over.

Despite having seen his obvious improvements already, Rebecca still wasn’t used to not immediately healing someone with her Bloodshadow magic. Especially when she’d increased its power with Rowan’s to pull the shifter back from death.

It was odd to see him still unconscious, still injured, still needing time to recover, though she didn’t doubt he would.

That didn’t stop her from taking extreme caution with everything until then.

On top of that, she’d never used her healing on a shifter, which probably accounted for the fact that he hadn’t healed completely as soon as she’d finished. The more she contemplated this, the more likely it seemed that Maxwell Hannigan—her Head of Security and now something far more, whatever they were to each other—might actually be the single loophole to her abilities.

Was he only one who didn’t respond immediately to her Bloodshadow magic the way she expected? Was it because he was a shifter, or was it due to the unexplained connection they’d formed that still made no sense and continued to reveal surprise after new surprise?

Most concerning of all was the question of whether her connection with Maxwell was as much of an advantage for both of them as she’d recently begun to believe—or if it was the one thing strong enough to lead them astray and ruin them both.

If it was the latter and Rebecca somehow wasn’t able to save him after all…

She didn’t know what she would do. But right now—as the Shade teams raced through the night toward Headquarters and Rebecca sat in the back of the vehicle with him, holding Maxwell’s hand—the thought of losing him terrified her more than anything she’d faced in a long time.

Now, Rebecca could no longer keep the inevitable truth at bay. She could no longer ignore it just because it suited her.

She genuinely felt something more for Maxwell. Something deeper than she’d previously let herself admit, though she still couldn’t decide if that was a strength or one of the most dangerous threats she had yet to face.

What would happen if she gave in to it and chose Maxwell? If she fully let herself submit to what she felt for him and all the possible futures to which it might lead?

Letting herself get close to Maxwell felt infinitely more attractive, more right , than doing anything her family or the Bloodshadow Court or even Rowan wanted of her. More than what the damned prophecy she didn’t believe in would require of her.

She’d been promised so long ago to the elven clans of Agn’a Tha’ros and their people, to the Bloodshadow Court, and, in very specific terms, to Rowan. Everyone believed she and Rowan were fated for this precise and exact future together in a single purpose. That she and Rowan were meant to bond with each other as the prophecy allegedly foretold, all to save their people.

But the prophecy never said shit about someone else coming into the picture, did it?

Someone like Maxwell Hannigan.

If she really did feel for him the way she felt for him now—if it was real —that could only mean one thing she hadn’t let herself believe until now.

It meant Rebecca could choose her own destiny. That she did have a chance at living her own life the way she wanted, and Blue Hells take anyone who said otherwise.

She almost let herself get excited about that prospect as the Shade vehicles finally closed in on their headquarters compound. But then one horrible thought entered her mind and changed it all.

She might have the ability and the freedom to choose her own destiny and live her life on her terms, regardless of what the Bloodshadow Court and the Agn’a Tha’ros elders insisted they claim from her. And she wanted Maxwell to be a part of her decision and part of her new story written out the way she saw fit.

But only if, once the shifter recovered, Rebecca could truly trust him enough to tell him the entire truth of who she was and where she came from. Of everything she would deny and reject in an instant if it meant sharing something more with him.

Because, she realized, she would have to tell him the full truth eventually.

She’d just held death at bay to keep Maxwell with her in this world, and she’d done it with her Bloodshadow magic. No one was supposed to know she had that power, least of all him.

However unlikely, Rebecca still couldn’t imagine a viable scenario in which Maxwell didn’t remember what she’d done for him and how. And if he did, all bets were off.

She would have to tell him everything and hope he still wanted anything to do with her afterward. Once he had the truth he’d promised her he would one day discover.

Neither of them could have predicted it would be like this .