Page 198 of Elven Crown

“This is the last warning you’re gonna get,” she told him. “Because you’ve been a pain in my ass from the very beginning, and it stops now. Understand?”

His hazel eyes shimmered with endless mischief as he tilted his head and searched her face. “Is that a command,Laen-Cáir?”

Dammit, even now, he couldn’t stop throwing in these little barbs at her, could he? He knew they were both on thin ice, and it had to have occurred to him that if anyone who spoke the old tongue overheard him calling herHighness, that would lead to more confusion and prying questions.

Unless he was counting on the fact that, after his short time as a member of Shade, everyone else had already decided not to take him seriously.

Rebecca couldn’t count on it. It was too risky.

She forced down the urge to grab him by the front of his shirt and throw him up against the wall to knock some sense into him. But Rowan Blackmoon didn’t learn lessons the traditional way.

So she gritted her teeth and stuck with using her words instead.

“I’m not commanding you to do anything right now,” she said. “And don’t ever call me that again. It doesn’t apply.”

His playful smile vanished before he hissed, “That’s bullshit. After everything I’ve seen here, it’s perfectly obvious.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that, exactly?”

He gestured toward the other side of the garage, where Maxwell and Whit finished loading the rest of the weapons and munitions. “You’ve found yourself a surrogate position of power, ruling Shade instead of taking your rightful place on the Shadowed Seat. You think you’ve changed. That you’re sodifferent. But you’re still here ruling, as if that could ever be an acceptable alternative to your true purpose—”

“No.” Rebecca thrust a finger in his face, closer to losing it on him than she’d expected. “You think you know everything about this place and about what I’m doing here, but you’re dead wrong. This whole Commander-of-Shade thing? This happened purely by accident, I can promise you that. None of it was my choice, and by the time I tried to make that clear to everyone here, it was already too late.”

Rowan’s mischievous grin returned as he studied her face and leaned in closer. “If that’s what you have to keep telling yourself so you can sleep at night,Kilda’ari. But I know better. I knowyou. It’s starting to look like you’ve already forgotten that.”

Andthatwas starting to sound like a threat.

Dammit, she’d hoped their last and only private conversation in her room had made her stance on this perfectly clear, but Rowan was too stubborn to listen to her words and take them with any grain of truth.

Likely because most of what spilled from his mouth was a twisted version of the truth, if it ever contained any truth at all, and he assumed now that she was doing the same.

In her periphery, Rebecca noted Maxwell and Whit almost upon them on their way to the stairwell. The closer they approached, the more of this infuriating conversation they would hear. She had to wrap this up.

“Bottom line, Blackmoon,” she said, “you’re already on thin ice. If you can’t pull yourself together and be a part of this taskforce the way you agreed when you swore your oath, we’re going to have a major problem.”

“If it’s anything like the problems I’ve already seen in this place, I’m sure it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Rebecca wanted to scream.

Why couldn’t he justlistento her?

Now Maxwell was close enough that the tingling warmth consistently racing across her skin and flooding through her limbs and through her core had become impossible to ignore.

He had to have seen her standing here with Rowan, which probably meant he was about to break this up and insert himself between them again.

So she turned away from Rowan to acknowledge her Head of Security before he could repeat his habit of sneaking up beside her at the worst moments.

“Are we all good down here?” she asked.

Maxwell’s silver eyes bored into Rowan’s skull, but at least the shifter had stopped walking toward them. “Everything’s locked up for the night. Unless you have any objections, I say we call it a night.”

“No objections at all.” Rebecca fixed Rowan with a final warning look. “That sounds perfect.”

Then she took off toward the stairs to be the first climbing them toward the compound’s ground floor.

Otherwise, if she’d let Maxwell and Whit head upstairs first, she’d end up alone with Rowan in the garage. She didn’t think she could keep a lid on her anger and frustration with him when there wasn’t a potential audience to keep her in check.

More than that, though, a small part of her recognized that if she found herself alone with Rowan again, where they could speak freely and he could openly plead with her again the way he had in her room, the more his words would chisel at her resolve.

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