2. Chapter 2
2
W hen Rebecca reached the wall of glass overlooking the compound’s common room and saw the surge of bodies moving as one in a partially scattered crowd all bustling toward a single focal point in the corner, her thoughts immediately turned to the worst-case scenario.
Very few things justified a turnout of the entire task force in the common room all at once, the majority of which hadn’t turned out very well for them in the past.
Was this another attack? A repeat of Hector’s assault on Shade’s headquarters complex with his homunculi? Had someone else managed to infiltrate the compound when they least expected it to carry out as much damage as possible while catching Shade unawares?
The knot in her gut solidified into a heavily sinking stone, heralding nausea and the likelihood of growing rage, when the next possibility hit her.
Had Rowan returned to Shade after his unexplained absence to continue on as if nothing had happened?
The questions and their multitude of possibilities raced through Rebecca’s mind in half a second. Then her awareness caught up to her, and she finally identified what was actually taking place down below as she Maxwell looked down over all of it.
The steadily parting wave she’d first noticed among the gathered operatives, the focal point of so much excitement, revealed itself a second later when the magicals both converged on and respectfully distanced themselves from a single individual at the center.
The chorus of shouting voices rose not in alarm or protest but in joy and proud relief across beaming smiles and attentive gazes at the individual who’d caused such an uproar.
It was Nyx.
The katari was easy enough to spot, even if she hadn’t been standing apart from most of the others—her darker-purple hair and luminous violet eyes a shade brighter than her naturally violet-hued skin unmistakable among the crowd. Though she still looked tired, a deeper purple flush darkened her cheeks as she grinned at every celebratory face gathered around her.
Even if Nyx had had the opportunity to say anything to the crowd, Rebecca and Maxwell certainly wouldn’t have heard it. But the underlying sentiment was perfectly clear.
After the katari’s harrowing experiences—being attacked in her transport convoy, barely making it back to Headquarters alive, and somehow surviving an abduction from the infirmary by Kordus Harkennr himself, or one of his agents—Nyx had spent weeks recovering in Zida’s infirmary. Now, she had now apparently been cleared to return to normal life.
Or as normal as life could ever get for a member of Shade.
Another trembling cheer rose from nearly the entire task force. The only other person who could get close to her was Leonard.
The mage looked happier than anyone else to be standing there beside Nyx—delighted, even. He settled a gentle hand on the katari’s shoulder while another raucous cheer for Nyx’s recovery blasted through the common room.
“It’s about damn time,” Rebecca muttered beneath a flooding rush of her own relief and gratitude. “I’d started to think Zida was keeping her in there as some kinda warning.”
“Good.” Maxwell’s gruff but no less endearing word rose beside her, and Rebecca had to stifle another unbidden shiver at the sound and the tempting warmth rising toward her on his breath. “She deserves a welcome like that.”
“If anyone does, it’s Nyx. Absolutely.”
Now that they’d cleared that up and there was nothing to do but watch in appreciation, Rebecca found herself far more interested in studying the faces among her task force enjoying the katari’s welcome-back party.
The joy and pride scrawled across every expression as contagious laughter ricocheted across the common room. The palpable pride radiating off every operative and member of the compound staff in attendance.
Even Bor had paused his morning hustle in the kitchens to see what all the fuss was about, allowing himself a tiny smirk as he poked his head through this service window over the counter.
On the far side of the room, standing just beneath the arched entrance of the hallway leading toward the infirmary and the residential wing, Zida folded her arms, her beady black eyes surveying everything all at once, though a reminiscent smile lingered in the wrinkled pucker of the daraku’s pursed lips.
Yes, everyone was glad to see Nyx up and walking around, mostly recovered again, if not fully. Even those who didn’t know her well or hadn’t yet had the opportunity to meet her looked just as pleased as all the rest.
There were five of them—the brand-new faces within the task force, who were probably seeing Nyx the katari in person for the very first time.
Five of the thirty rescued civilians Rebecca’s Shade teams had recovered from Harkennr’s transport convoys the night those teams had later staged an assault on the warehouse outside the city.
Five of the six freed civilians who’d possessed enough presence of mind, physical strength, and marginally working knowledge of firearms to join in on the chaotic mess that assault on Harkennr’s warehouse had eventually become.
The witch Maddie Everest and her sister Lacey—from Boise, Rebecca remembered—were among those new faces now, as well as the skittish dwarf Adam, a troll named Braxus who looked surprisingly more like an oversized nymph, and Shade’s second Cruorcian mage on the roster, though Theo hadn’t yet proven his own blood-magic skills against Diego’s.
It was a large number of new initiates among Shade’s ranks to declare their desire to join the task force all at once, though each of them had successfully completed The Striving with flying colors—if that was anything to judge by.
Now, they called themselves members of the privatized task force that had saved their lives, liberated them from unspeakable tortures at the hands of Harkennr’s forces, and helped those victims to wage their own war against Harkennr while seizing whatever vengeance they could find in demolishing the warehouse.
The memory of that remained painfully fresh in Rebecca’s mind, despite all the good things that had come out of it in the end. Now, though, watching her operatives through the window of her office overlooking it all, amidst the pressure of everything that could go wrong bearing down on her as Shade’s Roth-Da’al, she couldn’t help but revel just a little in the evidence of everything that had still gone right .
Five new members among their ranks, all recruited in a single night, each of them so grateful for the opportunities Shade had already provided that they’d wanted to become a part of the very organization that had saved them.
If that many new magicals had felt the call to join like that and devote their lives to Shade the way everyone else had, this organization was clearly doing something right.
Rebecca had to be doing something right.
A small but no less dazzling silver lining to their current difficulties and all the challenges they still had yet to face.
Then Rebecca’s thoughts returned to those challenges and their inherent risks, not to mention the burdensome weight of full responsibility settled squarely on her shoulders as Roth-Da’al. Just like that, the moment of swelling pride and momentary levity was over.
It was all she could afford.
There were too many other things to juggle right now. Too many other threats to keep an eye on. Too many potential disasters, both for Shade and for Rebecca personally.
If she didn’t pay each of them the close attention and proper consideration they each deserved, those threats were likely to topple down around her and drown her beneath the crushing wave of consequences. Not just Aldous’s and not just Shade’s, but her own as well.
“She looks a lot better than I expected.”
Maxwell’s voice ripped Rebecca the rest of the way into the present, where she settled with a crash of self-awareness and responsibility.
“Honestly,” she added, “it kinda feels like a miracle that you recovered from near death a hell of a lot faster than she did. And I know she took one hell of a beating to get her there.”
“A miracle, huh?” he asked, shooting her a sidelong glance.
Rebecca forced herself to keep staring down through the window instead of meeting his gaze. “If you believe in that kinda thing. Then again, you’re a shifter. She’s not. That probably has more to do with it than anything else.”
“A good part of it, anyway. Nyx, however, didn’t have you to help her along through the worst of it. But I’m certainly grateful I did.”
She stiffened beside him and said nothing. She couldn’t even bring herself to move.
Maxwell hadn’t explicitly laid it out, but she knew he referred to the healing abilities she’d used to draw him back from death’s door that night. Her Bloodshadow healing. The type of magic no other elf should have possessed and no other did possess, as far as the Agn’a Tha’ros Clans of Xahar’áhsh were concerned.
Just one of her power’s various facets, highly sought after by countless different factions and warlords intent on owning that power—right along with owning Rebecca Bloodshadow. Using her and her abilities to carry out their own agendas on Earth or Xahar’áhsh or any other conceivable battlefield.
She’d used it to save Maxwell because, when faced with the possibility of losing him, she’d known in her bones and without a second’s hesitation that she couldn’t lose him. That she needed him far more than she’d ever let herself need anyone, no matter how ridiculous it seemed or how little evidence she’d amassed to explain such a need.
Except now, with the knowledge of that fucking rune tattooed on his chest, that need felt like a liability now more than ever.
But was it enough of a liability to make her wish she hadn’t saved him that night?
She didn’t know.
What was wrong with her?
Once again, in the absence of Rebecca’s attempts to continue the conversation any further—and she certainly didn’t want to—her Head of Security took it upon himself to do so anyway.
“And speaking of that help… We still haven’t fully debriefed that part of the operation at the warehouse.”
“Haven’t we?” Rebecca turned away from him to face her desk again, her movements stiff and mechanically clunky, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. “Because I definitely remember seeing a full report of that night’s events on my desk. More than one, actually…”
The sensation of the shifter’s movement across the office as he followed her with perfectly silent footsteps made her wish—not for the first time—this connection between them didn’t exist.
It was so much easier to walk away from him when she couldn’t feel his lingering gaze on her, or his every movement toward her, or his almost desperate need to get to the bottom of each and every damn mystery existing between them.
Could the shifter really not just leave anything well enough alone?
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said above the muffled thump of his slow, steady, calculating gait across the floor. “And it won’t be found on any debrief report. You and I both know that.”
Rebecca had thought stopping to take a commanding position behind her desk might have offered a bit of a buffer between them—something physical and solid, the closest thing she could get to a wall. But it proved disastrously ineffective.
Of course it did. She could feel this shifter through solid walls now. What good could a fucking desk do?
She cleared her throat and pretended to re-engage her concentration on the reports scattered across her desk. “I did what had to be done, and we’re both still here. “I’m not sure what more could possibly be included in an official debrief—”
“Unofficially, then,” Maxwell interrupted. “Just the two of us.”
Despite her constant commands to avoid it, she couldn’t help but look up at him again, instantly falling prey to the intensity of his silver eyes fixed firmly on her face.
Blue Hells, she literally couldn’t take her eyes off him, could she?
What did he think he would get out of cornering her with this conversation, now or at any other time? Did he really think she would unload her secrets to him, all at once, simply because he’d inadvertently asked for it?
Did he truly believe she now trusted him anywhere near enough to begin?
They stared at each other a moment longer before Maxwell let out another heavy sigh through his nose and tilted his head. His brows drew together in concern and confusion and some other emotion she couldn’t accurately name right now. But she was sure it had cropped up before on the shifter’s very short list of known expressions, animated or not.
“Are we really not going to talk about this?” he asked.
Somehow, she kept a straight face. “Would talking about it change the outcome of what was done?”
Maxwell’s frown deepened. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”
“Actually, the way I see it, it’s really very simple. You almost died. I had a way to keep that from happening. I used it, and here you are, no longer dying.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me, I’m insanely grateful that it worked,” she added. “But that’s all there is to it, Maxie. No deeper meaning. No bigger puzzle to solve. It happened, and here we are, ridiculously lucky that you get to keep on living and that I didn’t have to scramble to find a new Head of Security just to bridge the gap.”
By the Blood, that made her sound like a heartless asshole.
“Yes, we’re all very fortunate,” he grumbled. “No argument there. But my point is you knew exactly what you were doing that night. And so did Blackmoon, didn’t he?”
Uh-oh.
He’d just revealed his trap, and now Rebecca was caught up in this web, with no way to talk herself out of it.
The second she considered the alternative of a bald-faced lie delivered to Maxwell on a silver platter, the flaming tingle of their connection pulsed through her with a rigid agony that felt like she’d been stabbed.
Rebecca managed to keep it all down with nothing more than the flicker of a grimace, but the warning pain had been perfectly clear.
Lying to his face would be unbearably painful, physically or otherwise.
And how the hell did this thing growing between them like a separate entity even tell the fucking difference?
How could it give warnings or want anything on its own?
Screw the connection, whatever it was. Rebecca’s options were simple.
If Maxwell had aligned himself with her enemies somewhere along the way, and the rune on his chest was a mark of his service to someone working against the Bloodshadow Court—and those numbers were many—the shifter would already know all the pertinent information connecting the Bloodshadow Heir to the Scion of the Blackmoon Clan. Rebecca to Rowan.
That would have inevitably become part of her enemy’s plan—to pit Rebecca and Rowan against each other before a shifter spy slipped in through the cracks to fill the void.
Everyone who knew her true identity also knew Rowan’s, plus the vows they’d never taken tying them to that fucking prophecy. As far as the elves of Agn’a Tha’ros and anyone standing against them were concerned, she and Rowan were a package deal.
But if Maxwell wasn’t working with anyone else—if he’d been painfully honest with her from the start, though nowhere near translucent—that mark inked into his flesh could only mean one other thing.
That Maxwell was meant to be a part of her story. A part of all this from the very beginning.
A shifter marked for an elf ?
It was hardly conceivable, let alone more likely than him spying on her for her people’s enemies.
But not impossible.
The proof of that lie right there in front of her, beneath the right collar of his button-down shirt…
“I don’t understand.” With a little growl, Maxwell stepped closer, his eyes pulsing with a slow, languid rhythm.
Like the low flicker of a dying fire still attracting moths to the flame.
“After everything we’ve been through, you and I, you still refuse to give me the truth.”
“The truth…” Swallowing thickly, Rebecca tried to pull away from him but found herself tethered to the spot, unable to command her body, unable to shut it down. “The truth has many different faces.”
“The truth of how I’m still alive.” His next rumbling sigh made her cheeks flush, and now, somehow, he stood right in front of her.
“The truth of how you brought me back and of how Blackmoon knew to aid you. At this moment, that is the only truth that concerns me, and I doubt it is as complicated as you claim.”
She wanted to shove him away.
She wanted to tip her face up toward his and kiss him again. Feel that dark, eternal need drawing them closer as whatever this was between them only grew. To forget what she now knew…
And why she now couldn’t give in.
She wanted to make him stay and keep him from the truth he requested. She wanted her brooding-shifter cake and eat it too.
Only once had Rebecca successfully lied to him before, and it had been small. Tiny. A thin warping of the truth with her own unveiled intentions at its core. Before her Shade teams had advanced on Harkennr’s warehouse, she’d shared with Maxwell that she’d told Rowan to stay behind with the vehicles, in case they needed a quick getaway.
The brilliant agony of those few seconds of twisted honesty had sufficiently convinced her lying would be difficult and agonizing.
But it was possible.
“Rebecca,” Maxwell growled, dipping his head toward her ear until they were almost pressed together, the heat of his body wild enough to spark a fire and her inexplicable need ready and waiting to fan the flames.
The sound of her name on his lips made her shiver. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe.
“I need to know,” he murmured. “And I need to hear it from you before I do something I already know I’ll regret.”
By the Blood, he made that threat sound like the promise of seduction—if they weren’t already there right now.
The next deepening growl in his voice almost masked the tremble there too, but she heard it.
Either Maxwell fought against this blazing cord tugging each of them ever closer to the other, or he was using it. Manipulating it to poke and prod in all the right places until her resolve finally crumbled.
How could anyone even learn to do such a thing?
The second she opened her mouth to respond, she knew lying to him about this would never happen. This thing between them had already grown to the point of making it impossible.
It left her with only one other option.
“Please don’t ask me again,” she whispered.
“Tell me why.”
Was she trembling now, or was that just her head spinning beneath his closeness and the urge to reach for him anyway and offer it all?
“Because I don’t want to lie to you,” she said, failing to support the sturdiness she’d wanted in her voice. “Because I can’t lie to you, and I can’t give you the answer you want.”
“That’s not fair.”
When Maxwell finally drew away from her, the cold rushing in against the side of her face to fill the space his lips had just occupied made her shiver again. The exquisite agony of him physically pulling away from her made it even worse.
Then Rebecca was looking up into those silver eyes. Hooked. Captured. Possessed by the shifter’s gaze in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.
“You could ask anything you wanted of me,” he said, “and I would give it to you without question. Any task. Any truth. Anything at all.”
Fuck, he was baiting her.
Blue Hells, he’d made this way too tempting.
The only thing Rebecca wanted to ask him now was where he’d gotten that damn tattoo and what it meant to him, to her, and to everyone else who might have been involved. But she couldn’t bring it up. Not yet.
Not until she had a hell of a lot more information about it. The problem was figuring out where else she would get that information.
So instead, staring up at him and fighting the urges nearly overpowering her as they squared off like this, Rebecca went with her last resort in sticky situations. She turned the tables.
“So you’re telling me I could ask why you’re a lone wolf in Chicago without a pack, and you’d give me the whole story, just like that?”
Maxwell blinked, then his expression darkened. His perpetual scowl returned, just like she knew it would, but his words still surprised her. “If that was what you wanted to know, yes. I would tell you everything.”
He wouldn’t tell her now, though. No, because she hadn’t specifically asked him to or ordered it. But he was completely serious, wasn’t he?
His jaw muscles worked furiously as he loomed over her, his breath like a the steady, in-and-out whisper of the surf crashing on a beach.
Beneath it all, though, Rebecca felt his surprise and hesitation. His discomfort.
She’d just hit a big sore spot on this shifter. She’d never broached this topic with him before, though she knew others had. Did she want to push him? Did she want to make him tell her the story he hadn’t shared with anyone else, as far as she knew?
No, Maxwell had only offered this as a transactional carrot on a stick, complete with the tit-for-tat expectation hidden in his veiled confession. He would expect her to return in kind with her own secrets.
Rebecca didn’t want that hanging over her head along with everything else. Plus, if she drove her Head of Security into revealing those hidden parts of himself, especially the story behind that fucking tattoo, there was always the chance he’d give her an answer she really didn’t like…
She wasn’t ready for that.
Either way, though, she couldn’t refuse him now. Not with the power this thing between them held over her and Maxwell, drawing them closer while they struggled independently to protect themselves. To maintain control of their own need.
Independent of this connection or not, she had to give him something .
With a heavy sigh, Rebecca bowed her head and gave in as much as she could afford. “All right. It’s…complicated. Because I’m…different.”
A puff of warm air fluttered across her face when he grunted. “We’ve established that.”
Was he still trying to make jokes? They really needed to work on his comedic timing now.
She tried again. “What I mean is, there are some things I can do that aren’t exactly…common practice for most other elves. Or even possible, really, no matter the clan.”
“You can heal others.” He said it not as a question, or a guess dressed up in false confidence, or even as a hope. He said it like he already knew.
Of course he did. She’d healed him . That was a given.
“Not exactly. I mean, that’s part of it, obviously, but that’s not all.”
“And what is? All of it.”
By the Blood, this was so much more difficult than she would have thought.
Rebecca didn’t want to answer that question. How could she? To answer “all of it,” she would have to reveal so much more than merely how she’d saved his life that night, with Rowan’s help.
She’d have to tell Maxwell everything she’d been so close to telling him in the infirmary after that kiss. Things she’d yearned to reveal until finally letting herself believe she could trust him with all of it, if no one else.
That had changed in an instant as soon as she’d seen the rune on his chest under the infirmary lights. The ripples of that single change weren’t anywhere close to finished spreading.
Maxwell might only suspect who she was, if he worked with her enemies. Rebecca certainly wasn’t the only elf in the history of her kind who could heal others with her magic, just not quite in the same way.
He growled again, and this time, his irritation leaked through. “So far, you’ve only given me summaries and repetition of what I already know. Why won’t you give me what I’m requesting?”
Because she didn’t want to offer up her biggest secret on a silver platter without knowing whether the shifter would pounce on her with teeth and claws or tuck those secrets away and dutifully hide them beside his own.
She couldn’t just hand over the confirmation of his suspicions. If he’d aligned with others against her, he could be trying to claim absolute certainty that the Rebecca Knox he knew was the Bloodshadow Heir he’d been sent to manipulate.
“This isn’t really a tell-all kind of conversation,” she said. “It’s just something I can do.”
“And Blackmoon is like you, then.”
“No!” she barked, far too quickly and with more denial than necessary. Rebecca shook her head and forced herself to calm down. “No. Definitely not.”
No one was like her.
“Then how did he know what to do?” Maxwell dipped his head toward her again, sending another shivering tingle of want and hunger and the anticipation of agonizing separation through her from head to toe. “How did you know you needed him?”
Fuck. This was exactly what she’d feared would happen. That Maxwell would remember just enough about that night and his miraculous escape from death that he’d come up with questions like this. Hot irons and stinging barbs prodding the structural foundation of Rebecca’s resolve, searching for weak points.
“I wasn’t thinking at that point,” she said. If she couldn’t lie to him, she might as well go with circling the truth instead. “It wasn’t something I thought through as precisely as that, okay? You were down, Hannigan. I tried to heal you by myself, but it wasn’t working. It wasn’t enough. I needed help, and Blackmoon was there. He just…instinctively knew what to do, I guess.”
She opened her mouth to offer another partially true excuse, but after all the half-lies she’d already given him, the unbelievable pain flaring through her and the heavy weight like cement in her veins at the mere thought of continuing to lie to his face became too strong. She couldn’t withstand it any longer.
Fuck this connection.
Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply and prepared herself to do what she hadn’t done in centuries. To open herself up, just a little. To give him something .
Because, despite her suspicions, she couldn’t convince herself Maxwell didn’t deserve at least something.
“Honestly, it’s not as straightforward as just having another elf around to help with some quick-fix healing magic.”
As soon as the words were out, the heaviness lifted from her body. The pain clenched around her core loosened. The excruciating wrongness of trying to lie to him softened and began to fade.
Rebecca hadn’t cultivated an appreciation for being manipulated, or even the inherent meaning in the physical relief of doing the right thing. But By the Blood, the relief was enough to make her give in.
She fixed her gaze on Maxwell’s silver eyes beneath his darkening frown, the muscles of his jaw and along the sides of his neck pulsing as he held himself in check his nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly with every breath.
“It’s not simple at all, actually,” she continued. “I wish it were. But Blackmoon and I… A long time ago… Well, it’s not really relevant to now, mostly. But it’s still important.”
She couldn’t believe she was here, literally standing on the precipice of revealing everything, of sharing with Maxwell Hannigan the details of her relationship with Rowan. That they used to know each other, a long time ago. That they used to be friends, maybe even something more, if things had turned out differently. If they’d made different choices.
That she and Rowan had each been promised to each other, sworn to uphold their duties to the Bloodshadow Court and Agn’a Tha’ros and every elven clan of Xahar’áhsh, according to their station and alleged roles in a prophecy no Agn’a Tha’ros elf had laid eyes on in over a millennium.
Rebecca was about to give in to what she wanted for herself and what Maxwell wanted from her. To what this nearly sentient connection between them wanted.
Now that she was here, staring down into the abyss, she knew she could never turn back.