Page 188 of Elven Crown

Her team hadn’t taken the bait, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d tried.

What was he doing?

As if she’d shared all this out loud with him while they stared each other down, Rowan raised an eyebrow, then lifted one hand to covertly signal her in quick, flicking gestures.

“You don’t like me like this? Until you and I finish what we started, you’re stuck with the new me.”

Dammit.

Rebecca had had her suspicions about what he’d wanted and why he’d seemed so intent on ruining things for her, but now he’d confirmed it.

Rowan had hunted her down all the way to Chicago—and who knew how much farther before that—to blackmail her into that conversation they’d barely begun in her room.

The conversation she never wanted to have.

The conversation Rowan clearly hoped, maybe even believed, would get her to change her mind and make an entirely different choice she’d already promised herself she would never make.

Clearly, he had no idea just how far or how deeply her determination extended when she made up her mind about something, especially when that determination had carried her as far as it had over her last several centuries on Earth.

He could try all he wanted. She didn’t have the time or energy to fight him, which would only encourage him to keep trying.

Instead, she turned away from him to help the others round up what they could before they left this battleground of a theater hall and the whole damn abandoned amusement park for good.

She’d hardly gotten started before the warm, tingling pressure racing across her body and instantly raising the temperature in the auditorium overwhelmed her.

Then she found Maxwell just a few feet away, his perpetual scowl focused on Rowan. He obviously didn’t appreciate the Blackmoon Elf’s current attitude, either. No surprise there.

But when he turned his silver gaze onto her next, dropping it for half a second to her hands before finally turning away without a word, Rebecca’s stomach dropped.

Had that just been a coincidence, or had he been watching her and Rowan this whole time?

Had he seen Rowan’s casual signaling? How much had he seen and how much did he think he knew?

She couldn’t just approach him and ask, but the possibility of Maxwell catching on to the existence of something else between Shade’s only two elves would only raise the stakes, not just for Rebecca but for Rowan too.

If Maxwell got it in his head that these two elves were colluding somehow, he would do everything in his power from here on out to ensure Rebecca never got another moment’s peace.

Another burst of laughter from the team echoed across the room, pulling Rebecca’s attention away from the potential what-ifs.

Diego stood in front of the stage with his arms spread wide, his crimson eyes darkening as he searched the other operatives’ faces. “What’s so funny? I just wanna know what happened to my phone.”

The team made quick work of going through the enemy corpses for any useful information, but they turned up nothing. That seemed to dampen the relatively good mood, though most surprising of all was Rowan’s visceral response to not getting what he wanted, either.

With a frustrated grunt, he kicked the closest corpse and scowled, looking genuinely put out. “This is such a fucking waste. We could have gotten this whole thing over within seconds if we didn’t have to walk on so many damn eggshells everywhere we went.”

Shell and Diego exchanged an amused look before she let out another wry laugh. “You wouldn’t know it, because you weren’t here before Knox stepped up. But there’s something to be said for a healthy amount of caution every once in a while.”

Diego snorted. “Like not setting us up to fail from the beginning.”

Rowan stopped kicking the corpse and fixed them both with uncharacteristic disdain. “You’re all fucking amateurs.”

Crouched over another body on the other side of the auditorium, Maxwell looked up, his scowl darkening more than usual. Then he stood abruptly and charged toward Rowan. “It wouldn’t hurt you to work on improving your attitude, elf.”

“It’s a statement of fact,” Rowan spat, “not an attitude. Watching all of you laugh and joke around after something like this is like watching an infant applaud themselves for walking down the hall.”

Growling low, Maxwell crossed the distance between them with three more lunging strides and loomed over the elf man, his silver eyes flashing. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Rowan’s sharp, bitter laugh cut through the air. “What are you talking about, wolf? No problem at all, right? Because we won.”

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