Page 19 of Elven Crown

With her heart thudding in her chest, the sound of it in her ears drowning out every other bit of growing noise echoing through the training gym, Rebecca was helpless to intervene on her own behalf. She didn’t fight back as Bor guided her toward the dais and up the two shallow steps. This was where Shade superiors were meant to settle down for the best view.

The horror of her dawning realization thrust her into frozen inaction.

Rebecca couldn’t get out of this. Not when the gym was filling up faster than she’d ever seen. Not when she had nowhere to go without being seen. Not when the entire task force expected her to act the part as their Roth-Da’al for a ceremony she’d fucking ordered.

On top of that and without knowing it, she’d just inadvertently sentenced another elf to death.

“That one’s yours.” Bor finally released her forearm and gestured with a gruff toss of his hand toward the largest chair. This one was centered perfectly, all for the clearest view once Rowan took his place.

Larger than all the others, this chair could have passed as a much more tasteful version of a throne than anything Aldous had ever used before she’d taken his job. It was here for a reason—so everyone in this room knew without a doubt who was boss.

As she settled slowly into the largest chair reserved for Shade’s commander, her entire body vibrated with the flushesof dreadful heat and icy, numbing cold alternating inside her, battling for a monopoly over her physical sensations.

There was no getting out of this. No sneaking away. No cleaning out the flask and demanding someone refill it. There was no backtracking now that she’d already made her decision.

The deed was done. The only thing she could do was to sit here and watch the aftermath of it.

Everything happened too fast. Rebecca couldn’t pretend to withstand the growing dread gnawing at her from the inside. It was all she could do not to throw caution out the window and call the whole thing off, no matter how odd it would be or how suspicious. No matter how many people she disappointed.

But she couldn’t.

She’d made this bed for herself, thinking after all this time that she could outsmart and outmaneuver Rowan Blackmoon on her own turf and with an entire magical task force behind her. But she’d taken it too far in the wrong direction.

This was as bad as putting her proverbial foot in her mouth could possibly get.

Minutes after the first operatives had streamed through the gym’s doors, the room had filled to the brim with eager magicals talking and laughing and adding to the growing energy of anticipation thickening in the air.

Never before in her six months with this underground organization had Rebecca felt so stifled by the collective energy, so suffocated by the sentiment she couldn’t share with them. All of it mixed with her own acute helplessness and made her sick.

There was nothing she could do. She’d run out of time.

This was happening.

At the end of the constant stream of Shade operatives came Zida. Their resident healer hobbled across the gym more slowly even than Bor, though no one offered to help the old daraku woman to her seat.

No one dared.

Before she knew it, Rebecca sat stock-still in her commander’s seat, with Zida in a slightly smaller chair on her left and Bor on a stool at the far corner of the elevated stage—the traditional old-world positions for advisors and consultants to the Roth-Da’al of any community.

Some help they were to her now.

Rebecca didn’t want to speak with either of them, and she couldn’t ask for their advice or counsel now. She couldn’t trust anyone when it came to her fears.

When it came to her near-future crime of sending Rowan to his death.

Neither Bor nor Zida would insert their own opinions unless their Roth-Da’al specifically asked for it. But Rebecca was too terrified of what she might have set in motion to ask for anything.

After a minute-long gap in the last of Shade’s members to enter the training gym, the final group made their appearance.

Maxwell stepped through those open double doors first, scanning the gym as if he led the way as a personal bodyguard for those who followed instead of as the Head of Security answering only to Shade’s commander.

The second he appeared, that warm, tingling pull toward him tugged at Rebecca’s core again, like it did every time she and the shifter were in the same room.

Like a coil of rope woven from threads of the sun had tied itself around some unknown, integral part of her while the other end led to that same missing piece inside Maxwell Hannigan.

Over the last few days since this sensation had first started, Rebecca had ignored it, for the most part. It was all too easy to ignore what she didn’t understand and couldn’t explain.

But now, that feeling combined with the tightening dread gnawing at her insides, growing heavier and colder by the second as she watched Maxwell enter, only made her nauseous.

---