21. Chapter 21
21
R ebecca burst through the door and into her office like her life depended on it. At this point, she couldn’t tell the difference anyway.
She had to get away from Maxwell, away from this thing between them and its power over her.
As soon as she slipped inside, she spun around, fully intending to slam the door in the shifter’s face and leave it at that.
The hallway erupted with a furious snarl a second before Maxwell barged through the door. The force of his entrance ripped the door out of Rebecca’s hand and sent her staggering backward while he muscled his way into her office in all of half a second.
As she gaped at him, the physical pain of tearing away from him receded beneath an explosion of roiling anger. “What the hell do you think you’re—”
“I need to hear this from you , Knox,” he said in something between a growl and a rumbling shout. “And I’m not leaving until you give me a real answer.”
“A real answer! You think I’ve been lying through my teeth this whole time? If you still think I’m playing everyone here for some secret ulterior motive, that’s your choice. I don’t have time for it!”
“I know there’s something more about Blackmoon you’re not telling me,” he snarled, pacing in a short line across the center of her office, the pulsing strobe in his silver eyes providing their own light show. “I need to know what it is. I need to know, or I can’t—”
“No, what you need is a cold shower,” she snapped, following his pacing with a furious glare. “Alone. Once you’ve had a chance to cool down, then we can talk. I can’t have a conversation with you when you’re snapping in my face like a rabid dog.”
She stormed back toward the door, grabbed the doorknob again, and whisked it open to give him a clear shot out of her office.
She only got the door a quarter of the way open again.
Maxwell leapt across the room. The doorknob once more ripped painfully out of Rebecca’s grasp when he slammed the door shut, this time with both of them still on the same side of it.
Rebecca whirled around to face him, another furious retort at the tip of her tongue.
He was right there, nearly on top of her, slamming both hands against the wall on either side of her head, like he meant to pin her there without actually touching her at all.
“You knew him before he ever broke into this compound!” His words and the threatening act of pummeling the wall in a show of strength without touching a hair on her head only fueled the intensity of the energy flaring up between them.
Maxwell loomed over her, snarling, his silver eyes flashing and his rage and desperation washing over her as heat and energy and need roiled within the laughably small space between them.
Rebecca could hardly think beneath the all-consuming intensity pulling her body toward him while she would have preferred to punch him in the face, while he seethed at her, barely containing himself around her because she could feel it.
She struggled for a response. The only thing that passed her lips was a shakily whispered, “What?”
“From the moment you first laid eyes on that elf the day he got here, I knew there was something. His blatant disregard for orders. His disrespect for everything we do here. His recklessness endangering all of us. You vouched for him, and I never could figure out why.”
Rebecca was captured in his gaze again, unable to move or say a thing, hardly able to breathe, half-expecting him to yell at her one second and snap her head off with one fatal blow from a wolf’s jaws clamped around her neck.
At the same time, she couldn’t ignore the fact that Maxwell’s arms trembled now as they pinned her in on either side, pressing against the wall like he meant to bring the whole office down with one mighty shove.
Or like he was finally losing control.
“But there was something between you two,” he snapped through another violent growl rippling up his throat. “I saw it. I saw it, and I told myself I was making assumptions where nothing existed because I—”
He searched her face beneath the brilliant flashing of his silver eyes and snarled again. “Because I wanted a reason, any reason, to get rid of him.”
“And now he’s gone,” Rebecca muttered, her voice having recovered more of its strength. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter! Blackmoon took every opportunity to endanger us from the start. To endanger you . Some people are like that, but not all of them know how to push all the right buttons every time. Not the way he pushed yours.”
Fuck.
This wasn’t Maxwell’s attempts to threaten her now that he’d gotten her alone.
This was his confession. The unsolicited reveal of everything he’d noticed and watched and suspected now coming out at once because it had nowhere left to go.
With a painfully heavy sigh, he lowered his arms from the wall, careful not to even brush up against her along the way, and took one step backward with his next shaky inhale. “I thought I was losing my mind. But that night, at the warehouse… That night, Blackmoon knew exactly what you needed to help me. Like he’d done it before. Like he’d already agreed to do something no one else should have been able to do, and he did it for you. ”
The way he said it made it feel like an accusation.
Maybe that was exactly what this was, but he hadn’t outright said it. No, he wanted to push her to the very edge until she broke and told him everything, and that would never happen. It could never happen.
Rebecca took a deep breath and shook her head, unable to look away from him as his multiple realizations flashed one right after the other across his face. “Hannigan, this isn’t—”
“Then downstairs, just now, the way you all but banished him publicly for everyone to hear… That’s not a response to the actions of a random operative overstepping his bounds and turning his back on this task force or any other. That’s personal. Vindictive, cautious, and hyper-vigilant.”
His silver eyes roamed across her face, leaving a trail of irresistible heat across her cheeks and nose and lips.
She had to stop this.
“Because he’s dangerous,” she said.
“To you , Rebecca. That’s what this is. You can’t deny it, and I need to know why. I need to know what he did. I need you to—”
With another growl bursting out of him, Maxwell tore himself away from her, as if he meant to pace the office again. But he couldn’t stay away from her for longer than that, turning back and forth in an aggravated half-circle while he tried to find the words he wanted.
While clearly battling the urge to be as close to her as physically possible.
The same urge Rebecca was afraid would finally win if she did or said anything else.
Then he stopped his restless shuffling and looked her dead in the eye. “Who is he to you?”
Oh, fuck. He’d figured it out.
By the Blood, she wanted to tell him everything. She wanted to tell him everything for weeks now, since before she’d brought him back from death that night at the warehouse. Several times, she almost had.
Rebecca had almost bared all to the shifter. The same shifter with a fucking elven rune tattooed on his chest.
But that mark had nothing to do with Rowan, did it? If that were the case, Rebecca might still have a decent shot at trusting her Head of Security enough for this—of trusting Maxwell as someone she might actually let into her life.
But if she wasn’t sure and she still told him…
The anguish behind his eyes, their silver light pulsing slower now as he heaved another shaky exhale, silently pleaded with her to give him something to confirm his suspicions where Rowan was concerned. To reassure him that he wasn’t crazy and hadn’t lost his mind because of what he’d seen and how he felt.
In some ways, seeing it hurt even worse than the physical pain of separating from him. It was the pain of Maxwell’s pleading, his physical need to understand what he’d seen between her and Rowan and all the implications of it.
To know where he stood with her.
To understand why he was still alive when, by all rights, he shouldn’t have been.
If it had been anyone else but Rebecca there with him at the warehouse that night, Maxwell would be dead now. This conversation would have never existed.
Rebecca had fought against this growing connection between them for so long. She’d resisted the overpowering longing it birthed inside her, had used every bit of logical thinking and possible rationale for why she must ignore it at all costs.
But By the Blood, she couldn’t resist him in this . Not now. Not when she could feel his desperate need for the answers, his fear of never getting them, and the brokenness that filled him when he believed he’d been kept in the dark.
By her.
She felt it all, even if Maxwell had never uttered a word. His pain became her own. His growing, desperate need with the power to end everything else that ever mattered if that need was never satiated.
The next thing she knew, Maxwell stood directly in front of her again, all but pinning her to the wall beneath his gaze and the desperation radiating out toward her. His eyes begged her to give him what he needed so badly, he’d started to believe it might kill him.
That flare of energy between them surged again, growing into an untamed heat like a raging wildfire burning away her common sense and her resistance. Her attempts to fool herself into thinking this could never be and why.
Until nothing remained but the pervading certainty filling every space inside her like water, like breath, like life. That she only needed one reason why this was right , even if she couldn’t name it. Even if her rational mind couldn’t puzzle it out.
That one reason was right here in front of her, transforming her into something she didn’t recognize despite the growing certainty that this was exactly where she was always meant to be.
That all roads always had and always would lead right back here to this. To Maxwell’s silver eyes and the scent of dew-studded grass and moonlight drowning out all other thought.
To being almost certain she could not only hear his thundering heartbeat but could feel it racing in desperate rhythm with her own.
When Rebecca opened her mouth, it was as if someone else—some thing else—opened it for her. Whatever she might have thought she wanted to say next fled beneath the words spilling out of her on their own, like physical pressure drawing the words out of her, drawing her response to Maxwell’s question and his need for the answers only she could give him.
Once it began, she was no more able to resist it than she’d resisted kissing him in the infirmary two weeks ago, before everything between them had become instantly more complicated in a split second.
“Right now,” she said, “at this moment, Rowan Blackmoon is an unpredictable threat and an inarguable danger I can no longer ignore. Nothing more.”
Her voice didn’t even sound like hers anymore, no matter how desperately she thought she’d struggled to keep it all locked away.
Maxwell’s silver eyes roamed across her face, searching her, probing for more, as if he could see through all the secrets and the darkness and the necessary evils of survival to peer straight into her soul.
There was more she hadn’t said. A part of her still didn’t want to say any of it, but now she couldn’t help it.
“But he used to be something else to me. Once.” The words spilled out of her like honey oozing over the rim of an overflowing glass—slow and sticky and unstoppable, drawn out by natural forces without a name. “A long time ago, he used to be…more.”