7. Chapter 7
7
R ebecca’s face burned at the thought of what Titus was really trying to tell her here.
Her task force wouldn’t open up and be themselves in front of her, but not because they were scared of her. That meant there was still a reason for it.
A reason Titus thought he knew.
She swallowed and fought to keep her voice level. “Then what’s the reason?”
“Plain old respect,” he replied, turning to discover new treasures while knocking over several more piles of others in the process. “Honestly, I almost forgot what that looked like before Aldous got…taken out of the picture. But I know it when I see it. And it’s because nobody wants you thinking less of them ’cause they did or said something the wrong way that don’t line up with protocol and shit.”
When Rebecca leaned back against the edge of another antique desk beside her and it wobbled beneath the added weight, she abruptly straightened and pretended not to have noticed anything. “I feel like anyone who knew me before should still know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of protocol.”
“Oh sure. I know that. Everyone on our old team knows it too. But I also gotta say there weren’t many more of us who did know you at all before you ended up Roth-Da’al.”
Then why did everyone vote me in? she wanted to ask, but that line of questioning didn’t seem very productive.
“But trust me,” Titus continued as he removed his hand from a cardboard box, which he’d already wrapped in several long strips of expensive silk. “It ain’t because anyone’s scared of you. That’s a fact. Naw, if there’s anybody to be scared of, and I’m not saying I am, it’s Hannigan.”
The laugh bursting out of Rebecca cut off sharply when she clamped her mouth shut. “What? Scared of him ?”
“I said not me.” Titus lifted both hands in concession before the rest of the silk scarves slipped between his giant fingers like water to flutter down to the floor. “Yeah, I know. You neither. Obviously.”
“It’s that obvious?”
He sent her a deadpan stare and raised an eyebrow. “Think about it. How many folks do you see on a regular basis chatting up our good ol’ Head of Security because it sounded like a fun idea?”
She couldn’t hold back a snort. “Yeah, I think I get your point.”
Dammit, now she was thinking about Maxwell again.
The whole point of coming out to the vault—beyond re-upping task-force funds to keep on hand at HQ—was to get away from Maxwell Hannigan. To get him out of her mind. To give herself a break and even a little bit of space where her shifter Head of Security wasn’t a major focal point.
Good fucking luck with that.
“Speaking of,” Titus continued absently, as if he were about to broach the most benign topic ever, “what’s the deal with you two, anyway?”
“What?” Rebecca would have whirled around if she hadn’t already been facing him. With nothing else to occupy her physically while her mind reeled for viable ways to answer that bombshell of a question, she shuffled back and forth beside the desk, knocking over other piles of valuable items tucked away without rhyme or reason to their organization. Or complete lack thereof.
“You heard me,” Titus muttered, though he made a point not to look at her when he said it.
She had to give the vuulbor credit, at least. He knew how to read a room, especially when it was just the two of them.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It was the only thing she could think of to say, because this was the first time anyone had flat-out asked about her and Maxwell. At least right to her face.
All things considered, it was amazing no one else had brought it up sooner.
“Nah, come on.” Titus clicked his tongue before lifting an enormous storage chest like it weighed nothing and dumped it upside down, spilling its contents of jewelry and coins and feathered hats and a ridiculous number of rolled-up cloth all over the floor. “It’s obvious as hell, Knox. So if you’re trying to keep what you think is still a secret, lemme just stop you right now and tell you it ain’t.”
“Obvious, huh?” she replied, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
What the hell was she panicking about, anyway? He’d nailed the truth. It wasn’t like it was against the rules…
Not as far as she knew, anyway.
No, it was just against her own personal rules. Maybe even worse than that, because that stupid rune tattooed on the shifter’s chest made it impossible to fully trust him anymore. Like they’d gone full circle and were starting all over again with each other.
Only this time, Rebecca and Maxwell were each armed with a lot more knowledge about each other.
That made this… thing between them that much more dangerous for both of them.
She scoffed and pretended to examine some other fragile trinket hidden behind a pile of ivory chess pieces on the desk. “You sure that’s not just your wishful thinking talking?”
“Wishful thinking? Shit. Not when you two would’ve rather killed each other than play nice for half an hour. All the way up until you… I mean, until the day Aldous…”
“It’s cool, Titus.” She shot him another quick smile, getting a grip on herself once again, because that was easier to do when someone else was stumbling for the right words instead of her. “Let’s call it what it is. I killed Aldous and took his place.”
“Wait a minute. No. You got attacked, acted in self-defense, and we voted you in. Big difference.”
Rebecca shrugged and turned around, figuring it might help him be a little more open to the rest of the conversation if she wasn’t gaping at him like he’d just grown two heads.
“You wanna know what I think?” Titus asked.
“You’re gonna tell me anyway, aren’t you?”
“I think you’re trying your damnedest to change the subject, here.”
“Ha! Of course I am.”
He grunted. “Of course you are.”
And that seemed to be it.
He’d definitely surprised her with his line of questioning. She’d always taken Titus for the big-silent type, and he could take a hell of a hit—or two, or three, or get strapped to a magitek proximity bomb and make it out alive again simply so no one else would have to.
If Titus had read her like an open book, how obvious was it to everyone else on the task force?
“Just calling it like I see it, boss,” he muttered before disappearing—mostly—behind another massive stack of boxes toward the far corner.
Rebecca could either take this personally, or she could acknowledge it for what it was—one of her operators calling her out and forcing her to face the truth, even when that was the last thing she wanted right now.
“Look at you ,” she called across the vault with a smirk. “Not just a pretty face, are ya?”
Titus shuffled around, paused, then thrust a hand out from behind the stack of storage containers to shake his shiny new gold illusion cuff at her. “Not with this thing. You want me to put it back on, boss? Then I can be just a pretty face all day, if that’s what you want…”
“No!” Rebecca barked, then couldn’t help but join him when Titus’s booming laugh filled the single room still too small to contain the full size and volume of it.
It made her ears ring again, but that didn’t stop her from having a good laugh with him at her own expense.
If she couldn’t still do that as Roth-Da’al, what was the fucking point?
“No, that cuff stays off until we leave the building,” she told him. “I haven’t seen many magicals who look creepier with a human illusion, but you, my friend, are one of them.”
“Fine. Then you won’t have to look at my face when you answer the question.”
Rebecca waited for that question to follow, but it never did. “You haven’t asked a question.”
“Oh yes I did.” This time, his head poked out from behind the stack of crates, making it look much larger and more stone-like than usual without his body visibly attached to it. “But I’ll refresh your memory. What the hell’s up with you and Hannigan?”
“I told you it’s nothing.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Pretty sure I did. And that’s all you’re gonna get out of me.”
“Why? Because it’s a secret ?”
“Sure. A whole lot of secret nothing . So if you’re done playing with costume jewelry and burying me in personal questions, let’s get outta here. Because I’ve got everything I need.”
The silence in the vault continued for so long, she started to think she’d taken it too far. Not that she’d ever seen Titus get his feelings hurt, but there was a first time for everything.
But then another of his booming, ear-splitting laughs preceded him as he stepped out from behind the stack of crates, smiling and shaking his head.
“What’s so funny this time?” Rebecca wasn’t entirely certain she actually wanted the answer.
He stopped halfway across the room and grinned. “Damn. You really got no idea, do you?”
Her next laugh didn’t sound very genuine at all. “What does that even mean?”
“I asked what’s going on between you and Hannigan, and you’re giving me this hemmin’, hawin’, workaround-denial shit instead of a real answer. You can’t give me a real answer, because you don’t even know .”
Damn. Another point to the big guy.
“Well, don’t expect me to come running to you first thing if I ever do. You know, figure it out.”
“ When you do.”
Rebecca looked sharply up at him again and found one giant gray finger—glinting with pilfered rings that didn’t even make it past his first knuckle—pointing at her face.
“Because it will happen, Knox,” he added. “But hell, if it takes you that long to figure out on your own… You know what? I’m not sure I even wanna know.”
Well that was… perceptive of him.
Now she’d be second-guessing every interaction with Maxwell from here and out, again. Plus every interaction they’d already had. Analyzing each of them for its hidden meaning. Which, apparently, was glaringly obvious to everyone else.
Or at least just to Titus, but that felt like enough.
“All right.” Rebecca decided to snap herself out of it, because second-guessing never helped anyone. “I got what I came here for.”
“Yeah, me too.” Titus tried to strut back across the vault toward her, but his enormous frame and the cluttered space made strutting downright impossible. “Ready when you are, boss.”
“Uh-uh.” She pointed at him. “Not the rings and the bear, buddy. Pick one or the other. That’s my final offer.”
He stopped and stared at her like a pouting child before heaving a massive sigh and slumping his hulking shoulders. “Fine…”
“While you’re deciding, why don’t you grab these crates right here and take them with you?”
“Just two?”
“Yep. Two is all we need for now. Don’t worry, they’re full.”
Chuckling, he crossed the rest of the room and hardly bent over at all before hoisting both crates, one on top of the other, and hefting them like a pile of laundry onto his shoulder. “Got anything else?”
“No. You head out. I just gotta check one more thing in here.
Without another word, Titus ambled slow and steady out of the vault and back to the level-five lobby, chuckling to himself the whole way.
Rebecca allowed herself a small smile at the big guy’s hidden talents of picking out the deeper meaning of things right in front of him. This trip had been more than worth it for that little surprise alone.
But when she rounded the closest desk, she turned around to peek back through the open vault door to make sure he wasn’t watching.
Titus might have been able to see what she couldn’t yet let herself fully admit existed between her and Maxwell Hannigan. Not out in the open to someone else, anyway. But she couldn’t let him see the small, four-inch doll made of burlap and sand she pulled from her jacket pocket.
Rebecca gazed at the hex doll and knew she was making the right choice in this, at least.
If this thing really was the Darkspawn, she’d be as much of an idiot as Aldous was to keep carrying it around with her on her person.
She still didn’t know if she believed what Rowan had told her about this little trinket filled with old-world magic and disguised as an Earthside child’s toy, but she didn’t want to risk it. She certainly didn’t want to use it again, accidentally or otherwise, until she knew exactly what this thing was.
She opened and closed all the drawers in the antique desk just to make it sound like she was looking for something instead, then doubled back and shoved the hex doll deep down in the bottom left-hand drawer beneath a stack of signed photographs and an illegally imported humidor still fully stocked with pungent cigars.
No one would be snooping around in here without her knowing about it. And now no one would be getting their hands on one seriously powerful old-world artifact, Darkspawn or not.
Fortunately for her, Titus didn’t hover over her in the vault, scrutinizing her every move the way Maxwell had the first and only time she’d brought him here. She might as well seize the opportunity to bury one more liability in her possession amidst all the other valuable junk in this vault and call it a day.
One less thing to keep her up at night, along with everything else, and admittedly the easiest to get off her plate.
When it was done, she left the vault, pulled the door shut behind her, and double-checked that it was locked up tight.
“Let’s get out of here,” she muttered and headed for the golden circle in the center of the level-five lobby floor.
“After you, boss,” Titus rumbled, sweeping a hand out in front of him while holding two giant, ridiculously heavy crates of valuable Shade funds on his other shoulder with one hand.
Their trip out of Nexus and back to Shade Headquarters was calmer and more uneventful than Rebecca had believed was possible.
She wanted to believe it was because her task force had made a dent in all the issues this city’s magical underground faced. Maybe that they finally had some decent luck after everything they’d been through. They sure as shit deserved it.
She wanted to believe all these things, but she couldn’t shake the feeling something horrible was about to fall on their doorstep any second now.
She just had no way to figure out when it would, or where, or who would be behind it. At this point, Shade had several enemies to choose from, and those enemies were now dealing with the new Roth-Da’al.
Most of them knew Rebecca was the one who’d filled the position after Aldous left the game forever.
The closer she and Titus approached the compound, though, the more her expectation grew into certainty.
The other shoe would drop. Nothing in this city could stay this quiet for long. Not with so many loose ends and missing pieces still floating around out there, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike back…
Without any more knowledge than that, Rebecca could only hope she and her task force didn’t get completely caught off-guard again. They’d learned their lesson in that sense several times over.
But if just one of those loose ends got the drop on them one more time, she wasn’t nearly as certain that they’d be able to bounce back in quite the same way.