9. Chapter 9
9
“ I didn’t ask for excuses or guesses. I want fucking answers!”
Maxwell’s bellowing from inside the Security office proceeded violent scraping and muffled thumps seconds before a plastic office chair came flying through the open door. It sailed across the hall, crashed against the opposite wall, and toppled to the floor.
Though Rebecca hadn’t quite reached the office, she stopped in the hallway and waited a bit longer, in case the shifter’s temper drove him to throw something else before he realized she was there.
This was already bad.
“That’s what we’re doing ,” Whit replied in the office. “We’ve gone through everything three times, broken down into—”
“Then why is it so damn hard to give me a straight answer?” Maxwell roared.
More thumps echoed into the hall, giving Rebecca a very clear mental image of her Head of Security slamming both hands down onto a piece of furniture and looming over the unlucky bastard sitting closest to him.
That had been Rebecca, once or twice.
She didn’t envy any of the Security team their discomfort and frustration with the shifter’s temper tantrum. Still, this sounded like a gross overreaction on Maxwell’s part. She’d only ever heard him this pissed off around Rowan. Now that the Blackmoon Elf was gone, it seemed Maxwell could make anyone his next target.
As Rebecca moved again to approach the open door, the shifter’s furious snarl made her rethink that choice.
“Look,” Rick chimed in. “It’s all right here in front of us—”
“Not all of it!” Maxwell snapped.
“Yeah, well, this is all we’ve got, okay? See? Here’s the footage. Shot of Archie getting up into the truck this morning. He left at 10:32 a.m. Everything was fine. Then we’ve got nothing for almost an hour. No movement, no signal interference messing with the feed. Cameras two, three, and five all caught the same thing. A whole lot of nothing.
“Then here, at 11:18 a.m., there’s the truck pulling back into the garage. Parked just like it’s supposed to be parked. Brand-new delivery inside. No ambush. No struggle. Look.”
The wild clacking of fingers flying across a keyboard filled the room just as Rebecca reached the open doorway.
Rick rolled sideways in his office chair to make room, pointing at all three large monitors on the desk in front of him. “Camera two has a clear view of the vehicle, yeah? The engine dies, the lights cut off, the door opens, and nothing. See for yourself. You want me to rewind it? Every other feed shows the same thing.”
The blackhorn stabbed the keyboard rhythmically with one finger while the angles of surveillance footage inside the garage switched from one to the next. “All of them show a clear view of the semi inside the garage and that open door. Nothing. As in the door opens, and there isn’t even anyone inside —”
“Then someone fucked with the footage,” Maxwell snarled.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too at first,” Rick added. “But look. All the time stamps line up. There’s no discrepancy in any of them, down to the millisecond. Okay, we’ve got shadows moving with the light over the course of the morning. Right there, a few leaves blow in. Then here come Knox and Titus in the Honda.
“This is all real time, boss. Nobody touched the cameras. I verified and authenticated the footage from every single one.”
“I double-checked his work.” Whit swiveled away from his workstation to face Maxwell. “Twice.”
“So…” One of their newest members—Adam, if Rebecca remembered correctly—stuck a finger in the air and glanced around the room. “We call that triple-checking then, right?”
Maxwell’s low growl overpowered the constant background hum of the office’s private servers and tech equipment keeping all the compound’s systems running smoothly. Except for this little hiccup.
Whit stared at the new guy with wide eyes, as if he didn’t dare offer more of a warning than that.
Rick also stared at the dwarf, but he also chanced an agonizingly slow shake of his head to hopefully get the message across.
The new guy remained dangerously oblivious.
“What?” He spread his arms. “I mean, that’s what we call it, right? If you double-checked his work once, that’s a double-check, but if you did it twice, it’s—”
A feral roar burst out of Maxwell, the sound more wolf than man as he crossed the office in two impossibly long strides. He moved in a blur, sweeping his arm across the top of Adam’s temporary workstation and sending all the supplies flying across the room as if they’d been launched from a cannon.
A ceramic mug shattered against the wall first, followed by the clatter of half a dozen pens, a stapler that left a massive dent in the plaster before clanging to the floor, scattered paper clips, a computer mouse breaking into four different pieces on impact, and a stack of loose papers—all of which fluttered lazily to the floor like a slow, whimsical footnote to the shifter’s violent outburst.
Adam stared at his destroyed office supplies, his mouth hanging open.
“I don’t care if you’ve picked apart the footage frame by frame a hundred times over!” Maxwell fumed. “I didn’t come here so you could spoon-feed me superstitious bullshit!”
“Boss,” Whit cut in, “I couldn’t make this up. Whatever happened, it happened off camera, yeah? Off base, even. It had to be somewhere else.”
“You think I’m an idiot?” Maxwell bellowed. “Do I look like an idiot to you?”
No one said a word.
“Because I would have to be an idiot to believe anything you’ve just told me. The rest of you seem to think it’s a perfectly acceptable answer. You’re telling me the supply vehicle just drove itself back into the garage, parked itself , and cut its own engine with Archie already locked up in the trailer in a pool of his own fucking blood!”
“That’s unlikely to be the only explanation here, boss,” Whit muttered.
Maxwell whirled on him. “I swear to every skinned pelt across this world, Castle, if you tell me the sonofabitch who infiltrated this compound and attacked one of our own is fucking invisible , I will rip you apart, limb by limb!”
“Fuck me…” Rick whispered and slowly swiveled his chair to face his workstation again.
“Somebody better tell me what the fuck actually happened!” the shifter roared.
Rebecca had seen enough. More than she cared to, really.
She stepped through the open doorway and leaned back against the frame. “Did anyone check the cameras in the front lot? Outside the garage?”
Everyone in the room turned abruptly to face her.
Rick’s mouth popped open this time.
Maxwell’s face went completely blank, as if his understandable rage had short-circuited his ability to form expressions even with his silver eyes, which strobed violently at her.
“What are you doing?” he snarled.
“Trying to help. There’s definitely an explanation for what happened. We just have to find it. Which will be a whole lot easier when we cover all the bases. Like pulling the footage from cameras outside the garage.”
“Yeah.” Whit pointed at her, then spun back toward his workstation, his fingers instantly flying over the keyboard again. “It’s a really good idea, actually. I’ll grab whatever I can find.”
Rick kept a wary eye on Maxwell a moment longer before swiveling back toward his station as well. The new guy gaped at Rebecca now, his mouth still slackly hanging open.
She tried to ignore him, despite not having quite been stared at like that in a long time, now that she thought about it. She scanned the various monitors across the workstations lining every wall of the office, then returned her gaze to Maxwell and stepped toward him. “Maybe—”
“Get out,” he growled.
She stopped, unsure how to react to this—when the tingling warmth filling her from head to toe in his presence urged her closer, beckoning her, reaching for more, but at the same time, the murderous fury rippling off every inch of the shifter warned her to keep her distance.
So she settled for the middle ground—a tight, confused smile to show she didn’t take his anger personally and a wry laugh to hopefully cut through some of the tension. “Excuse me?”
“How hard was that to understand?” he shouted and surged toward her, stabbing a finger at the doorway. “ Get . Out .”
“Hey, I’m trying to help—”
“When I need your help, I’ll ask for it! But until then, I don’t want you anywhere near this office. Putting ideas in my team’s head. Compromising this investigation from start to finish.”
“Compromise? I sent word to you the second I knew something was wrong. And then I came here to check on your progress and offer a few ideas your team hadn’t even thought of yet.”
“Of course! And what will you offer next, hmm? More misdirection? More impossible solutions in place of real fucking answers?” The shifter stomped across the office as he barked at her, grabbing another ceramic mug off the closest table before hurling it in her direction.
It hit the wall on the opposite side of the doorway from which she stood, sending chipped shards and the dregs of someone else’s coffee splattering nearly up to the ceiling.
The throw had been intentional, but he’d still launched it in her general direction and not at her.
He was trying to scare her off.
Rebecca ignored it all and watched him with a careful eye, but her Head of Security wasn’t finished.
“Tell me, what’s your help worth these days?” he asked through a snarl. “More unanswered questions leading to more hidden half-truths. How many more secrets do you plan to hide by redirecting the focus of my investigation with my team while Archie lies upstairs in a bed at death’s door?”
Then he surged toward her, flashing silver eyes wild and violent, teeth bared in a furious snarl. “For all we know, you could have been the one who beat him senseless and locked him up in the trailer. None of us would be the wiser for it, would we? Because you showed up here just trying to help —”
“Hannigan!” Rebecca shouted, surging away from the wall to lunge for the shifter before he finished his crazed stalking toward her. She stopped a foot in front of him, forcing him to stop as well or risk barreling right through his Roth-Da’al.
Maxwell snarled and looked ready to sink his teeth into her neck and rip out her jugular at any second.
“Fuck that,” she continued. “ I’m the one who found him there, and I’m the one who made sure we got him out before he died in the back of a fucking supply trailer! This isn’t on me. Whatever else is going on with you right now, you need to pull your shit together and do your job. Based on what I’ve seen here in the last five minutes, this isn’t it!”
The end of her explosive rebuttal echoed around the office, leaving in its wake a tense, heavy silence pregnant with uncontained rage, helplessness, confusion, and the crackle of an altogether different kind of energy surging between her and Maxwell.
Tugging them inexorably closer yet simultaneously pitting them against each other in another battle of wills.
Rebecca had not seen this coming, but she sure as hell wouldn’t back down from the shifter trying to bully her out of his way with condescending remarks and bold-faced accusations he couldn’t back with a shred of evidence.
The ominous popping of his knuckles as he clenched both hands into tight fists cut through the silence first. Then he stepped closer, looming over her with another deadly snarl, his eyes still strobing wildly.
The searing heat burning up from Rebecca’s core and spreading in seconds through all her limbs didn’t belong to her. The sensation was his .
He was about to shift.
Refusing to break from his gaze, she summoned a crackling orb of crimson attack magic in her hand and gave it an extra little boost until it doubled in size, casting violent red light across both their faces like blood spatter. It filled the air with the overwhelming scent of ozone and intensely concentrated magic.
Rebecca held the crackling, hissing orb out to the side, just high enough to ensure he saw it in his periphery. By now, he had to know she would use it on him if she felt the need.
She’d done it before, and she would do it again if the shifter didn’t back the hell down from this one.
“Have I made myself clear, shifter?” she murmured, her voice dropping into its own promise of violence and pending consequences Shade’s Roth-Da’al was well within her rights to dish out, especially now.
In the corner, the new guy let out a terrified squeak, slipped out of his chair and onto the floor, and crawled beneath his desk.
Whit slowly rolled himself backward in his chair until it bumped against the far wall.
Rick hardly breathed.
In the brief seconds of squaring off against Maxwell like this—her Head of Security, her acting lieutenant in all but name, the single person on this task force capable of rivaling her as an equal she used to think she could trust—a furious urge overwhelmed her like never before.
The urge to put him in his place far more than she already had. To prove she could destroy him with a single flick of her wrist and a quick thrust of her Bloodshadow spear. Not to kill him, no. Not to consume him.
This sudden urge whispered to her, egged her on, taunted her with false solution to her biggest problems.
Tempting her to hurt him. To tear him down. To break the lone shifter who dared speak to her like that, just because she could .
The urge was so strong, Rebecca hardly had time to recognize it as the exact opposite of what she really wanted.
She barely had time to stop herself from acting on such a violently cruel impulse, but she did stop herself.
She might not have been able to if Maxwell had pushed her again by a fraction of an inch. Fortunately for them both, he didn’t.
Instead, he looked like he’d just woken from a dream. Or a nightmare.
The violent strobing of his silver eyes slowed and quieted again into their normal dark-silver glow. His shoulders drew back and down with visible effort, either twitching or trembling when he heaved a massive sigh. That exhale seemed to draw all the fight right out of him along with it, the tautness in his every muscle seeping away in seconds.
He completed the transformation from homicidal shifter investigating an attack to a weary, exhausted, confused man towering over Rebecca and blinking at her. Staring at her, as if he had no idea how she’d gotten there. He looked completely beaten, worn down, and returned to his right mind all at once.
The change was almost instantaneous.
At first, Rebecca prepared herself for some other nasty trick or backhanded move he’d kept in his back pocket as a last resort.
But when Maxwell sighed again, cleared his throat, and forced down the last of his pride, she knew it was over. Even before his brows drew together into the most painfully mortified expression she’d ever seen.
Seeing it on his face only made it that much worse.
“Perfectly clear,” he muttered, his voice raw with bottled emotion and coarse, as if the words clung to his throat and physically pained him. “I understand.”
Then he broke away from the challenge of Rebecca’s unwavering stare, averted his gaze, and dipped his head. “Excuse me.”
He said it so softly, in such a low tone, she thought she might have imagined it until she heard the tremble behind his words.
Before she could offer a response, Maxwell stepped around her, burst through the open Security-office door, and stormed down the hall. When he disappeared from view, she realized she couldn’t even hear his footsteps.
She stood there a moment longer, watching the hallway in case he decided to come back. He didn’t.
She could have tried to guess what had gotten to him, but the truth seemed fairly obvious. Shade’s Head of Security—with one of their own operatives beaten and locked in the back of his own vehicle on a supply run right under their noses, without any shred of evidence left behind to pin such a crime on any of their enemies—had found himself feeling useless and powerless to either avenge the attack or ensure it didn’t repeat itself.
He'd lost all control.
It felt safe to assume that was a relatively new experience for Maxwell Hannigan. Rebecca hoped he wouldn’t run off after their little showdown and do something stupid in an attempt to blow off more steam.
Part of her wanted to go after him. The other part of her fought against the stabbing pain coursing through her body at the physical departure.
Letting him take off on his own was for the best. He’d been out of line, and he knew it.
When she slowly turned toward the rest of the office, she’d forgotten about both the Security team still at their workstations and the enormous orb of crackling blood-red light sizzling in her palm, spitting sparks and throwing crimson light across every surface. Rebecca snuffed out the battle magic in her hand, ignoring the disappointment of not having had justifiable cause to use it.
And grateful for it at the same time.
Then she turned toward Whit and nodded. “Pull up footage from outside the garage and around the compound perimeter.”
Whit jumped in his seat and spun back toward the computer before pouncing onto his keyboard again. “Right. Yeah, of course. I’m almost there.”
“Start at twenty-four hours before Archie left and check all the way through to right now. If you see anything that doesn’t look quite right, if you see anything out of the ordinary, a feather from a bird that doesn’t belong here, I wanna know about it.”
“You got it boss,” Whit replied, though his gaze was already glued to the monitor again as he clicked through files and searched for time stamps.
Rick scooted back toward his workstation. “On it.”
For the sake of whatever integrity he still possessed, Rebecca ignored Adam crawling out from under his desk to start his part of the assignment.
Instead, she walked toward the other currently empty workstation, most likely Maxwell’s, and sat to join them in scanning surveillance footage from the last twenty-eight hours. That seemed the best place to start.
The security team would go over all the data and review the facts over and over again, as many times as necessary, for however long it took to get to the bottom of this seemingly unsolvable mystery attack. Whoever it was, however they’d pulled it off, Rebecca and her task force had to figure it out, no exceptions.
There were no other options.
Preferably, they found the truth before Maxwell lost his shit entirely, his anger issues exploded, and he did something he and Rebecca would both regret.
And, admittedly, before she came to fully regret all the secrets and personal details and confessions she hadn’t entrusted to the shifter before now.
Because at this point, she still couldn’t decide if she was even capable of trusting him completely with anything.
“ T his isn’t an interrogation. I promise.”
Diego’s crimson eyes flashed once, then he tugged his baseball cap farther down over his forehead before folding his arms. “Sure feels like it.”
“We’ve been in here with everyone else the whole time,” Rebecca told him, “and you’ve watched me talk to everyone else so far. I’m not treating you any differently, but we all need to work together in this if we’re gonna figure out what the hell happened today.”
The Cruorcian sniffed, readjusted his folded arms, then shifted his weight to one side before barely jerking his chin up at her. “Fine. Ask your questions.”
“Same as I’ve been asking everyone else. Did you see, hear, feel, notice anything strange around the compound over the last twenty-four hours?”
“Well you can put this psychological manipulation with all these questions right up there at the top of the list,” he grumbled.
Rebecca sighed and said nothing until Diego finally relented and looked up to meet her gaze again. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. This fucking sucks, but fine. No, I didn’t see anything weird . If I had, I would’ve said something to someone. I wasn’t even in the garage this morning. Been on weapon maintenance all day.”
“Thanks, Diego. If you think of anything else, come find me or any of the Security team, got it?” With a nod, she turned to scan the crowded common room for the few faces of those among her task force she hadn’t yet questioned individually.
“Wait, hold on.” Diego spread his arms. “That’s it?”
She shot him a pert smile. “Did you want there to be more questions?”
With a shrug, the Cruorcian rolled his eyes and stalked away toward the refreshments table Bor had restocked last-minute to accommodate every Shade member returning again after Nyx’s party.
Then Rebecca continued her rounds, pulling aside the dwindling list of people she hadn’t spoken to yet. She made a point to talk to Shade’s five newest members as well, including Adam, just to cover her bases. But he didn’t know anything more now than during her standoff with Maxwell in the Security office. Nor did he look any less intimidated by his short one-on-one with Rebecca.
The witch sisters from Boise, Maddie and Lacey, were as eager as anyone else to help in the investigation, though they refused to be questioned alone.
“We’re a package deal, the two of us,” Lacey said, smiling sweetly despite the defensive warning in her voice.
Maddie put an arm around her sister’s shoulders and nodded. “We spent a lot of time apart in that warehouse. We’d been together our whole lives before that. It won’t happen again. But that doesn’t change how we feel about what happened. Whatever we can do to help, Roth-Da’al, we will.”
Whether the sisters’ insistence was genuine or they merely played to Rebecca’s compassion—which admittedly had grown immensely during her time in command—she didn’t care. They’d requested a shared room within the compound despite how tiny the rooms were; they might as well have been a single entity anyway.
But neither of them had any information about the attack on Archie, nor did harbor so much as an inkling of suspicion as to who might have wanted to do this.
Rebecca already knew full well who would want to hurt her through hurting her task force, and the list just kept growing. None of her operatives gave her anything she didn’t already know, none of them looked guilty, and no one acted differently when she spoke with them.
She would have otherwise called the last two hours of private questioning in the common room a complete waste of time if it hadn’t been her only option.
The security footage Whit pulled from outside the compound and the perimeter of the parking lot had revealed nothing but Rebecca and Titus leaving, Archie pulling out in the semi, then that same truck pulling back in less than an hour later before Rebecca and Titus also returned.
Unfortunately, the footage from various angles only captured a decent view of the semi’s front passenger window upon its return, and Rebecca’s initial lead was torn to shreds.
She’d hoped they’d capture an image of the driver on the way back, assuming it hadn’t been Archie because he’d been attacked before the shipment’s return.
Now, at mid-afternoon, they still had nothing but an unconscious ogre laid up in the infirmary and the Security team desperately scouring footage for anything they might have missed—plus radio channels, media, and satellite images between Headquarters and their supplier—and an entire task force of magicals ready and willing to do whatever necessary in response.
All while their Roth-Da’al tried not to lose her shit in the process.
Every passing minute without an answer brought them all that much closer to losing everything. So far, the attack on Archie was the perfectly committed crime.
Without solving it, there was nothing to stop that same crime from wiping out the entire task force, and they’d be powerless to stop it.