Page 18 of Elven Crown

No matter how badly she didn’t want to give herself away, Rebecca still failed to control herself. She shot one more anxious glance at the flask of glowing blue potion among all the other Striving reagents.

“I don’t even like Cheerios,” she muttered.

“Huh. Suit yourself.” With a gruff shrug, Bor turned to head for the far side of the gym and the raised dais erected there. Presumably, the chairs situated on it were reserved as the best seats in the house for watching the show tonight.

But Rebecca couldn’t quite look away from the flask, which she’d now just added to the quickly growing list of things to worry about.

She’d manipulated that flask to give Rowan more a kick than he expected. To drastically decrease his ability to successfully complete The Striving, all because she knew how to push his buttons just as intimately as he knew how to push hers.

Now, that small change came with so many more potential consequences than she’d foreseen.

Rebecca had rigged this entire ritual to ensure Rowan’s failure, but now Bor’s warning echoed in her mind, chilling her determination.

If he was right, she hadn’t just set Rowan up to fail….

She’d sentenced him to death.

She had to undo this. Fast.

7

Ahot flush crept up the back of Rebecca’s neck as the realization hit her. Her mistake was too dangerous, too disastrous, to ignore.

She didn’t want Rowan to die. She knew that much.

By the time this certainty settled in and she changed her mind, she was already halfway toward the raised dais in the back, where Bor settled into a chair of his own.

“You know what?” She tossed a thumb over her shoulder, surprised to hear her voice so steady. “I think there might be something I need to—”

The gym’s double doors burst open at once, banged against the adjacent walls, and remained open as a flood of Shade operatives rushed inside. It felt like one long, endless drove of bodies surging forward through those doors, one after the other, magicals talking and laughing, jostling each other, whistling, shouting, riling each other up for the celebratory spectacle awaiting them.

All the chaos that had clanged through her head before Rebecca had slipped into this room returned full-force. Shade had a new initiation test to look forward to, and the time Rebecca had thought she’d had before The Striving began had now officially run out.

Now that she stood in frozen indecision halfway between the dais and the central circle, everyone spilling through the doors got a full view of their commander standing there alone, as if she’d intended to greet them individually.

A few members thumped fists against their chests when they saw her. Most nodded and smiled and continued their animated conversations as the spectators took the chairs first and then found their own places to stand around the gym wherever there was room.

Great. Now everyone could see her, everyone knew she was here, and if she went back to that flask, everyone would see her messing with the setup.

Then the questions would come popping out of the woodwork just like Shade members had come popping through those double doors into the training gym.

That would defeat the whole purpose.

Even if the operatives were all too excited and distracted to notice what she was doing, Bor certainly wouldn’t miss it.

He would know.

But she had to dosomething.

Rebecca surged forward toward the central circle anyway, counting on her ability to look purposeful and focused to hide her thundering pulse and the rising heat of her body as something like desperation but not quite flooded through her, spurring her forward.

A calloused, bony hand wrapped around her forearm and hauled her in the opposite direction.

“It begins,” Bor snapped as he led her back toward the dais. “Time to take our places, Roth-Da’al. We want everything to go well, don’t we?”

How had he reached her so quickly?

Bor couldn’t possibly have known what she’d done to the flask. He might have guessed after walking in on her. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse to remove herself from the old giveldi’s grip that wouldn’t raise an instant alarm.

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