Page 114 of Elven Crown

About time too. Shade had been stuck with so many old models of nearly ancient magitek weaponry. More often than not, relying on those weapons could be deadlier than only relying on their own magic, and not everyone here had that luxury.

With no voiced objections, Rebecca nodded again and took another sip of coffee. “Excellent. Then that’s what we have to look forward to today.”

A few tables throughout the common room broke into animated conversations. When Rebecca glanced toward the hallway where Maxwell stood, a little flicker of vindication rose inside her.

She would’ve been lying if she’d said she didn’t enjoy it, either.

She’d known Maxwell wouldn’t like this, and while she hadn’t intentionally made this announcement just to piss him off, she liked the idea of being able to predict what he would and wouldn’t appreciate.

Their understanding of each other was getting somewhere, at least.

Farther than even Rebecca had anticipated, because then the shifter surprised her when he barked out, “You heard the commander. Report to training at nine hundred hours.”

That sounded good enough, though when Rebecca checked her watch and found it was still only seven in the morning, she cringed inside. That gave her two more full hours of actively avoiding Rowan and trying to keep herself busy doing something else.

“Better make that eight hundred hours,” she added.

Maxwell did not like being corrected by her openly and in public like this, either, but he’d just have to deal with that.

“There’s no reason to waste time if everybody’s this awake and ready to go,” she said. “So I’ll see you all in the gym. Get ready to figure out exactly what else we’re up against out there, because now we’re gonna be using it ourselves.”

She lifted her Styrofoam coffee cup in a silent toast toward the entire common room, which garnered several excited shouts from some operatives while others raised their morning cups toward her in return.

Then she made her way back across the room, heading for the hallway that would take her to the private stairs up to her second-story office. She could still feel Rowan watching her from whichever table he’d chosen to get comfortable at next, but she ignored him.

Instead, she looked Maxwell’s way and found him scowling at her.

The expression didn’t carry as much vitriol in it as she’d grown accustomed to, but it did make her wonder if she’d have to explain herself to him at some later point—that she hadn’t taken over just to piss him off but that this was what leading Shade in the way it needed to be led looked like.

This was how she did thingsright.

Who was she kidding? She didn’t need to explain herself to anyone, including the shifter.

She raised her cup toward him as well and hoped Maxwell got the message: she’d be in her office, after all, if he needed to find her.

When she left the common room, the weight of avoidance and indecision lifting off her shoulders made what had been her emotional baseline now feel like overwhelming relief.

She’d made a plan for Shade’s operations in the field and at the compound, and she’d managed once again to keep Rowan at bay long enough that he couldn’t drag her aside into some stupid conversation.

Maybe if she just kept this up long enough, he’d finally get the hint that it would never happen the way he wanted. He might get so fed up with trying and being made to wait endlessly after all his efforts that he just stopped asking.

Rebecca snorted and took another sip of coffee.

Fat chance.

When Rebecca entered the training room twenty minutes before she’d ordered their new weapons training to begin, her first look around put her instantly on edge.

The gym looked nothing like the last time she’d been here, but it didn’t need to look the same. She still felt the residual magic lingering in the air just days after Rowan had completed The Striving here.

It was equally easy to remember what she’d done to him during the ceremonial challenge.

If she had only had her guilt over almost killing Rowan with her Bloodshadow magic in this very room, she might havefelt more in control of herself. Today, though, she also had Maxwell’s new mood to deal with.

And she knew it was her fault.

He hadn’t argued with her after she’d ordered Shade’s new training regimen to start today, but that hadn’t kept him from souring toward her.

For the last half hour, she’d tried to first gauge his intensely pissy mood. Then, when she’d realized it was one of those things only time and distance would mellow out, she’d switched to avoiding him so they wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves even more than they already had this morning.

---