Page 80 of Elven Crown

Rowan scoffed. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know how you do things wherever you come from,” Maxwell said, “buthere,we clean up after ourselves.”

He tossed the last body over the edge with a loud splash when it hit the water. Then he spun around again and stormed back toward the rest of the team without another word.

He didn’t look at Rebecca again, either, which she wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t just beensoclose to figuring out what that sensation was. Maybe even naming thatthingshe felt in the shifter’s presence that he also so clearly felt in hers.

Or, at least, she’d been one step closer to that knowledge. But the moment was over.

Rowan stared after the shifter a moment longer, then looked at the lifeless body in his arms and grimaced. “Did I do something?”

Rolling her eyes, Rebecca gestured toward the water as she turned away from him. “Go for it.”

The general mood among the team had returned to normal once they’d disposed of tonight’s evidence and decisions were made as to who would drive which vehicles back to headquarters and who would ride with whom.

To Rebecca, Maxwell seemed to have gotten over his anger, or exasperation at Rowan, or whatever emotion he hadn’t been capable of sharing with her. She would have believed it too if Maxwell hadn’t made it a point at every turn to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the Blackmoon Elf.

More than that, though, he hadn’t looked at Rebecca once since his near attempt to answer her questions at the edge of the docks, and that was its own red flag.

Not that she could place what was wrong or why he refused to look at her. Merely that he didn’t.

After six months of living and working within Shade, of missions and enduring Aldous’s madness, Rebecca realized she couldn’t remember a time when she was in the same room with the shifter and hewasn’talready watching her when she found him. At any point in time.

Tonight, though, was the first time since they’d had their run-in with Harkennr’s security at the Old Joliet Prison that he no longer seemed capable of looking at her even for a second.

Something was different.

If he wouldn’t look at her or talk to her, how the hell was she supposed to know what that something differentwas?

How the hell was she supposed to know how to fix it?

Why did she feel like there was anything to be fixed in the first place?

Those unanswered questions played over and over in her mind as the team piled back into their own vehicle, plus one of Eduardo’s transport trucks to haul their intercepted weapons cargo back with them to headquarters. The not knowing, not being able to figure it out, wore on Rebecca’s nerves.

She understood Maxwell’s issue with Rowan. She understood it all too well. Nor did she blame the shifter for any of it. Often, she’d felt the very same about Rowan Blackmoon, and that part made sense.

What didn’t make sense was Maxwell’s sudden change in attitude towardher. His inability to discuss their first fully successful mission without, as he’d put it, “being in control of himself.” And now he wouldn’t even look at her.

The more she watched him interacting with the rest of the team, though—which consisted mostly of driving the van back to the compound and occasionally grunting in what might have been amusement at something someone else said—she was seeing him in a different light too.

All this time, Rebecca had assumed Maxwell had a problem withherspecifically. That because she didn’t come with a vetted and confirmed paper trail of her entire life and existence on Earth before she joined Shade, he suspected her of being someone or something far different—and maybe even far worse—than what she pretended to be.

In a lot of ways, he would have been right. But after seeing him almost come undone because of Rowan’s attitude problem, she wondered now if Maxwell’s issues extended to all elves in general.

Not that he was likely to have had much interaction with very many elves of any clan. Not in this world.

She still couldn’t help wondering if something had happened, with some other elf at some other time, to put him this much on the defensive. It was always possible that he operated on some preconceived misconception of who and what elves were and how they were supposed to present to the rest of the magical world. That was anyone’s guess.

It didn’t make the shifter’s attitude toward both her and Rowan less concerning, however.

In fact, it could become a major problem for both of them.

If Maxwell’s determination to investigate everything about Rebecca, and likely everything about Rowan Blackmoon as well, led him to any discoveries that included them both, he would find one massive rabbit hole of history and complications and disaster.

A much deeper hole than he could ever possibly have expected.

A hell of a lot more than one shifter, even Maxwell Hannigan, could handle on his own.

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