Page 58 of Elven Shadow

He wanted her to know he was watching. Fine.

Rebecca tossed her hair over one shoulder, flashed him a tight smile, and winked.

She didn’t get to see his reaction before the library door gave under her quick shove, but it was probably better that way. What mattered was thathe’d seen what she wanted him to see—that his intimidation tactics hadn’t bothered her one bit.

That she had nothing to hide.

Maxwellhadto see those things, because the only other option was that he uncovered the truth. Including how much he was getting to her, unraveling her thoughts, setting her blood to boiling beneath her skin.

If he even knew that much, it would undoubtedly ruin everything.

Everything she’d seen of him in the last twenty-four hours made it impossible to tell whose side he was really on or where his loyalties truly lie.

From this point on, the only thing she could really count on was that Maxwell Hannigan would do everything in his power to make every second of her day that much harder to control.

Whether he’d been spying for Aldous or really did support the other operatives in their covert plans didn’t matter anymore.

If Rebecca didn’t get out of the compound soon, she was going to explode.

And when she exploded, that generally meant things went dangerously wrong for everyone around her, too.

She tried all day to keep her frustration and impatience in check. The secret meeting in the library had thrown a serious wrench in her plans, mostly because she had no idea what the others expected from her, and it hadn’t been explained.

Worse than that, Leonard and Diego seemed to have disappeared entirely. Or they were avoiding her on purpose. She couldn’t quite tell.

Either way, there was no denying her role within Shade had taken on a different meaning, a different flavor soured by the fact that all her attempts to keep sliding by under the radar had failed.

Rebecca had been sucked into Shade’s inner workings anyway, far deeper than she’d ever wanted, and she couldn’t find an immediate escape route.

The pressure had built so quickly, she didn’t know what to do with it.

The common room was off limits; she couldn’t blow off steam in the compound’s main gathering space without anyone noticing. If she headed for the training rooms at the other end of the building, she’d be more likely to kill someone in an accidental sparring match.

And no matter where she went, Maxwell Hannigan seemed to find even the smallest sliver of a reason to be there too.

For the rest of the day, the shifter had apparently made it a point to follow Rebecca from a distance, showing up at the last second with his infuriating habit of watching her from across the room and glaring at her unendingly.

As if the whole in-house-rebellion thing had beenheridea in the first place.

As if he was just waiting for her to slip up, to do something stupid, so he’d finally have a solid reason to petition for her removal from the organization right along with Aldous’s impending removal too.

Maybe eveninsteadof Aldous.

But even Maxwell’s actions made no damn sense.

If he was so intent on continuing to do his job as Head of Security, who answered to Aldous and Aldous only, why the hell had he even been in the library with his security team in the first place?

To spy on the budding rebellion? To take all their secrets back to the changeling in charge and turn them in for extra brownie points?

Whose side was he really on?

The avalanche of unknown factors tumbling down on top of her from all sides drove Rebecca insane, and she didn’t even have a safe space within the compound to vent her frustrations at the horribly shitty timing of it all.

Because everywhere she went, the shifter was somehow seconds behind her, always watching.

Even the idea of locking herself up in her room—the one place that had brought her some peace and quiet and solitude over the last six months—felt like a trap.

She was sure she’d end up putting holes in the walls and destroying everything just to let off the worst of the maddening pressure inside her, but eventhatcame with a guarantee of someone else noticing and asking questions.

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