Page 9 of Elven Crown

If she wasn’t careful, one day, he eventually would.

She couldn’t outright tell him she knew Rowan. That would create more questions about how these elves knew each other, why he would have looked for herhere, and why she didn’t want anyone else to know they had a history. It was far too dangerous.

At the same time, the thought of lying to Maxwell’s face, even while they squared off in the hallway, formed an equally strong knot of guilt and distaste in Rebecca’s gut. Almost like a physical weight pressing down on her, the pressure of which could only be released as long as she told him something that wasn’t a complete lie andalmostthe truth.

“He’s a Blackmoon Elf, all right?” she finally hissed before directing a last-minute glance toward the holding room she’d just left. “I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I recognized it instantly. Putting him through The Striving is the only way to handle this. It’s not a reward, okay? It’s a test. Which is why it exists in the first place. A chance for him to prove himself, and then we go from there. I don’t want him here any more than you do, Max. I can promise you that.”

She didn’t expect her final words to have such an effect on him.

Maxwell’s eyes widened at her promise, almost as if she’d taken a solemn vow that meant as much to a shifter as it would have to an elf.

No, she hadn’t had to bury that truth inside a little white lie of omission, like almost everything else she’d just told him.

She didn’t want Rowan here at all. That part was completely true. His presence jeopardized absolutely everything about her new life in Chicago—her identity, her affiliation with Shade, her command of the entire task force, the secrets she’d spent centuries learning to hide and to keep hidden.

All the effort she’d put into reinventing herself as Rebecca Knox, an Earth-dwelling elf who didn’t technically exist.

At least she’d skirted around Maxwell’s interrogation ofhernow without relying on an absolute lie; until recently, that was something she wouldn’t have had a problem doing.

Now, she suspected that even if she wanted to tell him a bald-faced lie and got it into her head to try, something she didn’t understand and couldn’t explain would be there to stop her. To make those lies impossible.

But that didn’t even make sense.

After studying her a moment longer with his hooded silver eyes and that stony, cold, unreadable expression hinting at constant disapproval and disdain more than any other—if he evenhadother expressions—Maxwell sighed heavily through his nose and pressed his lips together.

When he spoke next, his voice had calmed enough that the wild growl behind his every word disappeared. “If this elf is as powerful as you say, The Striving won’t even be a problem for him. And if you knew that, you wouldn’t have offered him something so easy to attain.”

Damn.

That was as close to uncovering the truth as he’d ever gotten. For some reason, it made Rebecca break into a wide grin she was almost certain made her look insane. “Well then, it’s a good thing you have an elf as your new commander, isn’t it? Don’t worry, Maxie. I’ll take care of it.”

Then she slipped past him to continue down the hall and leave this part of Shade’s headquarters referred to only as the stockade. Thanks, she assumed, to Maxwell Hannigan’s military background no one else seemed to know that much about, either.

He stayed silent behind her long enough for Rebecca to feel like she’d finally made her point and that he’d leave her alone for more than five minutes.

Then his boots clomped across the linoleum floor behind her before he hissed, “How is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Clearly, she’d been wrong.

Rebecca stopped again and looked at him over her shoulder. It wasn’t supposed to make him feel better. He was just supposed to take what she said and leave it alone.

“Because no one knows how to push an elf’s buttons like another elf,” she said matter-of-factly. “If he passes every challenge I have for him, we’ll know he’s worthy. And then it won’t be a problem anymore.”

“That doesn’t make him worthy.”

“Well it was good enough to letmein,” she snapped. “But now you clearly think what was good enough for everyone else no longer is. And in case you’ve also forgotten, that last magical to successfully complete The Striving was me.”

While her gaze registered Maxwell storming toward her again, his fists clenched and his scowl darkening by the second, a little voice in the back of her mind told her she just needed to get out of here before something integral snapped.

But the surge of excitement and expectation and rightness growing stronger with his every step closer drowned out everything else.

Was she just coming up with random, stupid excuses to keep talking to him when this conversation needed to end two minutes ago?

Then she was out of time. Maxwell had reached her and stopped to loom over her once again, barely containing his own frustration.

“I remember,” he murmured.

Blue Hells, he stood so close. Again.

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