Page 157 of Elven Shadow

Holy shit.

She’d known Shade had various operations in the works. They always did. She’d known the task force’s reputation exceeded them and had for some time. That reputation had even been positive once upon a time, before Aldous, but it had never occurred to her that the organization hadthismuch potential work just waiting around to be snatched up.

“Aldous actually worked on all this?” she asked, flipping the binder’s cover open and pretending to read over the first few pages.

Maxwell snorted. “He hardly ever opened the dossier.”

“Okay… But I asked for top priority stuff.”

“Yep.” The shifter nodded at the overloaded binder, then pressed his lips together as if forcing himself not to freely speak his mind. “And you’re looking at it.”

Damn.

So not only had Aldus been a complete chickenshit too full of himself to value anyone else’s life or fulfilling the mission for which Shade had been formed in the first place, but he hadn’t even looked at the top-priority cases or contracted jobs specifically sent to Shade headquarters by contacts or potential clients.

Fucking changeling.

Frowning as she perused the binder’s contents—which had been diligently organized in chronological order, the most recent incoming requests at the top—Rebecca finally had to stop trying to make sense of words she couldn’t even focus on long enough to read.

So she sat back in her chair and looked up at Maxwell again.

Maybe he was slightly more useful to her than just being a constant pain in her ass. Or hecouldbe, provided she figured out how to ask the right questions.

“So which city are we looking at with the most top-priority contracts to get started on?” she asked.

For a long moment, it seemed all he could do was stare blankly at her, though his jaw muscles worked furiously beneath his unflinching stare. That was the only part of him that moved in the ensuing silence until he drew in a deep breath through his nose and said, “Takeyour pick.”

Wellthatdidn’t help her narrow down anything. What a fucking mess Aldous had made. For a guy who’d so highly valued his own reputation and opinion of himself, the legacy he’d left behind was a total joke.

She’d rather not think of him at all at this point. He was gone.

Then the memory of his last moments in this world sparked a new train of thought, which might have been the first time the changeling had actually provided something useful.

Only in death.

“Did you put all this together yourself?” she asked, gesturing toward the binder.

Maxwell nodded, and that was it.

There was no point commenting on his thoroughness again, so Rebecca decided to go straight for the kill.

Hopefully,thiswould be enough of an attention-grabber to get her Head of Security caught up in the details. Maybe it would even keep him so busy that he forgot all about hovering over her shoulder like a hungry mosquito.

“Is there anything in here on Hector?” she asked.

Something changed in the shifter’s expression then—maybe even something like interest or pleased surprise to hear he wasfinallyserving under a commander who gave a shit about what happened both within and beyond these walls.

As soon as that excitement had appeared with a flash across his silver eyes, though, it vanished again beneath the mask of Maxwell’s stoic apathy. But at least he had an answer for her.

“Not in there.” He scowled at the enormous binder, then crossed the office again toward two large metal filing cabinets sitting against the opposite wall, each with impressively large and complex locks updated to state-of-the-art security standards.

Not that anyone who particularly skilled at breaking into locked things couldn’t get into these filing cabinets whenever they wanted, but as far as she knew, shifters couldn’t cast their own wards. Only an idiot would try to break into the commander’s office at Shade headquarters anyway. Because they’d also have to deal with the organization’s Head of Security.

After a lot of clanging and banging around before he locked up tight again, Maxwell returned with a much smaller file folder, which slapped down onto the desk in front of Rebecca as if the shifter couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

“You’ve got a little bit of everything in here, don’t you?” she muttered, reaching for the file.

Maxwell grunted. “Not as much as I’d like.”

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