15. Chapter 15
15
A s much as she didn’t want to start something they most likely wouldn’t have time to finish—if the past was any indication of what to expect—Rebecca just couldn’t help herself when she tore her gaze away from their scattered teams and looked up at Maxwell with a frown of her own.
“Deserving rarely factors into a thing like that,” he’d said.
She didn’t even need to ask for an explanation.
“If it did,” he added, “so many things would be very different.”
He seemed to think that was all the explanation she needed, but it fell far short of satisfying.
She still hadn’t developed an appreciation for the shifter’s cryptic comments. That single statement could have meant any number of things.
Was he talking about them? Specifically, Rebecca and Maxwell? Or was he referring to Shade as a whole in their current circumstances?
Or was this simply her Head of Security’s way of attempting to contemplate the overwhelmingly big picture and all of life?
Then it occurred to her they might have had very different definitions of deserving a thing like that.
Rebecca had meant that, after the horrors Nyx had experienced during the attack on her transport convoy and then later being abducted by Harkennr and held for ransom in his personal prison dungeon, the katari absolutely deserved a little comfort and companionship. Which she’d clearly found in Leonard.
Those two didn’t necessarily have a name for it, but it was clearly there.
And it was vastly different than what existed between Rebecca and Maxwell.
That was an inexplicable. One of a kind. Something they still couldn’t explain or quantify.
So he couldn’t have been talking about them , right?
This wasn’t quite the most important conversation to have, she knew. But as they stood there, side by side, silently watching the begrudging calm settle over the small pockets of Shade operatives gathered around newly lit fires, she couldn’t help but take the bait.
“You think it’s all luck, where we end up?” she asked. “The people we end up with in the end? Random coincidence?”
“For some.” Maxwell tilted his head in consideration, his arms still folded, as if to protect himself from saying anything remotely vulnerable. “A series of seemingly random decisions leading to an outcome they’d like to believe they would have chosen anyway.”
That was quite the mouthful coming from him. Surprisingly philosophical. Still, he’d only answered halfway, as usual.
Rebecca shot him a quick sidelong glance, confirming the fact that his gaze still roamed outward, though the lack of tingling that brought an unfailing flush to her face every time he looked at her could have told her that anyway.
“For some…” she echoed. “And for everyone else?”
He took forever to reply, and she started to think she’d asked a very simple question the shifter had no desire to answer.
But then her cheeks erupted with the blooming heat of his gaze, sending a shuddering ripple of dark need and longing through her from head to toe and back up again.
The sensation didn’t fade or transform. Realizing it wouldn’t, she looked back up at him with her breath sticking in her throat.
Though he hadn’t moved from her side, Maxwell loomed over her now, his silver eyes pulsing softly and eliciting a new flare of heat in her cheeks every time. She could have sworn he’d just moved so much closer than he’d been sixty seconds ago.
When he finally opened his mouth to reply, Rebecca was ensnared once again within the intensity of his gaze and the absolute, unflinching seriousness within them.
“Some of us never have a choice in the matter,” he muttered, gazing at her as if she were supposed to have known exactly what that meant. “And never will.”
That wasn’t an answer at all.
But now she knew he was talking about them. He had to be.
With everything they knew about each other, Maxwell must have realized by now that Rebecca accepted a lack of choice just as much as he did, which was none at all.
The lack of choice fate and prophetic destiny afforded was what had brought her to Earth in the first place.
In a warped line of thinking that felt wholly logical in the moment, it meant if he was referring to what existed between them, that they were among the faceless others who never had a choice in the matter and never would, it meant he resented their connection. Resented everything that had happened between them because of it.
That maybe he even despised it.
Then again, he could have meant they never had a choice in where they’d ended up tonight.
Or did he mean they’d had no choice in the greater events around them and therefore didn’t deserve what they’d been dealt with life in Chicago? With Shade? With each other?
Not knowing and incapable of figuring it out on her own made the conversation that much more infuriating.
It didn’t help that the shifter’s expression gave her no indication of what he’d meant, whether it carried a positive or negative connotation for him. There were no facial cues to read as he gazed down at her, wearing as stonily unreadable of a mask as ever.
The next thing she knew, Rebecca stopped caring about what he might have still been hiding behind that mask. The blazing heat of his closeness overwhelmed everything else.
Had he gotten even closer?
Her breath quickened, her pulse roaring in her ears, her body rejecting the overwhelming heat of Maxwell’s endless gaze and his closeness burning her up from the inside, like a deadly fever despite the brisk chill in the air.
That heat overpowered everything else to the point that, she finally realized, she picked up no emotional or energetic hint from him usually shared through their connection.
Was he purposefully blocking his thoughts from her now? Or was this irresistible heat and building pressure all there was?
If he’d been uncomfortable now or feeling anything negative toward her or their circumstances, she would surely have felt it. But there was nothing. It could have meant anything…
Then that ever-present pull between them strengthened, doubling and tripling in need and intensity like tightening knots tied one on top of the other, over and over again. That need for him—or something more their connection demanded but couldn’t specify—grew so powerful, Rebecca felt herself leaning toward him, guided by the strength of this unknown thing that was neither completely hers nor completely Maxwell’s.
Suddenly, she didn’t even care anymore what the shifter’s full answer to her question might have been. Whether he’d been subtly addressing their connection all along. Whether he thought they deserved it or had a choice or anything in between.
She was on fire, just standing there, gazing up at him.
She could give in to this thing between them now and submit to it forever, just like this. Completely lose herself within it and with him.
Like she’d never even had a choice to begin with…
Oh…
That was what he’d meant the whole time, wasn’t it? Whether they deserved this inexplicable connection. Whether they’d had any choice at all in its existence. None of it ever could have changed the fact that it had found them and captured them both.
None of it would have changed a thing.
The blaze of understanding urged her toward him ever closer, guiding her to just give in and let it consume her the exact same way she’d felt it while sitting at Maxwell’s bedside in the infirmary. In that single moment before one kiss that was so much more than what it had promised.
When the only thing she’d cared about was that he was alive . That she’d saved him. That she wouldn’t have to keep going without the shifter’s constant presence at her side.
They could be there again, if she just let go of everything she thought she knew and let herself fall…
The gentle pop of a snapping twig exploded in her ears, followed by a rustling scuffle of dirt and dry grass.
Such a gentle and harmless sound, all things considered, but that was all it took to shatter the swelling moment between them.
Just like that, their connection released them both from its exquisitely compelling grip.
Rebecca blinked, ripped her gaze away from the shifter’s glowing silver eyes, and glanced briefly over his shoulder toward the sound.
Godammit, it was Rowan.
“Well hey, there.”
At Rowan’s infuriatingly cheery greeting, Maxwell spun around to face the Blackmoon Elf with a low growl.
Rowan looked up from watching his own footsteps, then shot Rebecca a playful grin. “Had enough time to cool off?”
“Nowhere close.”
Of all the things he could have been doing right now, as the mastermind behind Shade’s current albeit temporary imprisonment, had he seriously not found anything better to do than constantly bothering her with his non-stop reappearances at all the worst possible moments?
“Yeah, I guess that’s understandable.” Rowan shrugged one shoulder, then stopped and looked up at her. “Given the circumstances and everything. But now that everybody’s here and your people are all laying low for a little R and R, there are still a few things you and I need to go over. I would’ve laid all this out before, but you took off out of that trailer in a real hurry. Kinda like you actually had somewhere else to be. So—”
“Stop.” Rebecca glared at him, refusing to listen to any of it. Even when the bruising along the side of his jaw had now become a dark smear of swollen flesh from jawline to lip.
She still didn’t regret that punch.
“We start working together after I guarantee my people are safe and can handle things without me for as long as this is gonna take. Not before then. This is still a hostage situation, in case you forgot, and you are still the one who put us here.”
“Uh-huh.” Rowan glanced back and forth between her and Maxwell, as if trying to figure out what they were doing standing here together, alone. Then, with a carefree chuckle, he took a few steps closer, crunching dead leaves and dry grass and more twigs beneath his elven boots.
The noise, of course, was entirely intentional. If the Blackmoon Elf hadn’t wanted to make a sound, he wouldn’t have.
“I don’t blame you for taking that stance,” he continued, leaning slightly toward her. “Makes perfect sense. And I wouldn’t keep bothering you if it wasn’t important.”
“Yes you would.”
He blinked vacantly at her, shot another sidelong glance toward Maxwell, then sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. “Listen, why don’t you and I go somewhere a little more private, just the two of us? To discuss the finer points of—”
“No.” Maxwell took one large, intimidating step toward the Blackmoon Elf, all the while eliciting a growl that continued beneath his steady breath as if it would never end.
Like a cat’s purr, Rebecca thought.
If that cat were at least twenty times its normal size, could shift into a wolf, and purred when it was angry, or aggressively territorial, or just plain-old in general.
Rowan took put one more step between him and the shifter, then chuckled again, this time at Maxwell. “Well that’s cute. But this time, little dog, you are explicitly not invited. Just to be sure we’re all on the same page, here.”
“It’s not happening,” Rebecca cut in. She would have loved to even out his face with a matching bruise on the other side, but her all-consuming rage that had fueled the first blow had since vanished.
She wouldn’t attack him again, if that even mattered to Rowan. She wouldn’t have agreed to another conversation with him for anything, even if she took Maxwell with her.
Anything Rowan might have categorized as critical and immediately important could wait until this mandatory ceasefire was over.
Shade’s safety came first. Everything else could wait.
Rowan seemed stunned by her refusal, maybe even surprised that she hadn’t tried to talk Maxwell down the way she had so many other times before. When the Blackmoon Elf had been nothing more than another Shade operative with the rest of them.
He huffed out another laugh, but this one lacked his ever-present carelessness. “All right. Point taken. I get it. You’re upset—”
“She shouldn’t have to tell you that,” Maxwell growled, standing firm beside Rebecca without giving an inch. He looked Rowan over and tilted his head. “If the bruise and the split lip didn’t get the message across, no conversation, no manner of talking will make things clearer for you. That sounds like a you problem, elf.”
Rebecca might have laughed if the sight of Rowan didn’t sicken her so intensely, her legs itched to just start running.
That was a very new association to make with him. Something told her it would be particularly difficult to separate the sensation from the sight of him, if she ever could.
Rowan huffed out another laugh and shrugged, ignoring the shifter again to gaze imploringly at Rebecca. “You know how it goes. Things get heated, words are exchanged, sometimes blows, any number of them with the potential for a marginal amount of regret later on.”
“Not this one.” Rebecca folded her arms and stared him down.
She wouldn’t let him keep talking in his blustering attempt to drag her in again. Whatever he thought still remained of their friendship, whatever few threads he assumed he could still pull to bring her around, no longer existed.
He’d have to figure that out on his own, and then he’d have to get over it.
“Huh.” After gazing at her for a moment longer, Rowan looked away toward the woods, wiggled his swollen jaw back and forth, then gingerly prodded the side of his face toward his busted lip, as if only just remembering what had happened. “Well, there’s still plenty of time. You know where to find me.”
He shot her another quick glance, as if to gauge how much guilt he’d stoked in her, then turned around without a word and stalked off toward wherever he would apparently turn in for the night.
Rebecca sighed as she watched him go, more grateful than ever to have Maxwell in her corner. Especially now that she wasn’t so torn about how to deal with Rowan, one way or the other.
The elf’s seemingly easy acceptance of her rejection was definitely new, which might or might not have meant he was finally taking her seriously. If he’d been looking for pity or sympathy, though, he certainly wouldn’t find it with her.
Still, watching him disappear within the darkness across the dome settled the full weight of her decision squarely down on her shoulders. It wasn’t a pleasant weight, either, but it was necessary.
This was real, this rift between her and Rowan. He’d gone too far with his manipulations and duplicity, and she could no longer afford the extra room and energy for his faults. Things were officially different between them now and they always would be.
The exchange between Rowan and Maxwell was also different. The shifter clearly still wouldn’t stand for Rowan’s obnoxious tricks and attempted machinations. While there had still been obvious tension between them, it was no longer violent.
Because Maxwell was now certain of Rebecca’s feelings for the Blackmoon Elf, which no longer included wanting to look out for him or to take responsibility for him the way she’d tried so hard to do at first.
Who knew what they’d be up against in the morning? But for now, at least a temporary truce and the unsteady peace that came with it were more than welcome.
Peace…
She didn’t think she’d be experiencing any of it anytime soon. Such were the burdens of any leader, no matter which side they fought on or with which motivations.
“You should get some rest,” she told Maxwell while she scanned the open land dotted with makeshift camps and low-burning fires. “Who knows what we’ll have to deal with tomorrow?”
He made no sound as he stepped up behind her, but her ability to feel his intentions before he acted on them, for whatever reason, had returned.
“I’ll turn in too, in a bit,” she added, turning around to face him. “I just need a little—”
“Understood.” Maxwell’s gaze roamed across her face, and he nodded. “I do not pretend to have final say over any of your decisions, but someone should remind you not to stay up all night.”
She cracked a smile for the first time in what felt like ages. “Look at that. My Head of Security gives wellness tips too, now. What a fun surprise.”
He leaned down toward her, almost as if he were about to pull her into an embrace, but stopped halfway only to mutter, “I would not take Zida off the payroll just yet.”
Then, with a final lingering look that seeped into her with the soft pulsing of his silver eyes, he stepped past her to make his way across the trampled earth, likely to form his own private camp away from everyone else, where he could keep an eye on damn near everything by the flickering light of his own fire.
Had that been a smile at the corner of his mouth before he’d turned away?
Rebecca huffed out a laugh and watched him walk away.
After all the dangerous surprises and horrendous discoveries they’d made tonight alone, there was somehow still room for small, brief moments of levity.
It didn’t change their situation, nor did it make the next forty-plus hours feel any less grueling until that wall came down.
But even a soft, exhausted smile lasting only a moment relieved some heaviness of her mounting burdens.
The reprieve didn’t last long, no matter how much time she spent on her own, keeping a careful and diligent eye on her operatives’ fires beneath the dome.
The fires were the least of her worries.