Page 4 of Elven Crown

The other half of her wanted to smack that self-serving smirk right off his face.

Once all the injured operatives were out of the holding room and the security team regrouped in the hall, Maxwell stepped out and grabbed the door handle to pull it shut behind him while he glowered at Rebecca.

“Five minutes,” he said tersely before shooting another warning glare at their prisoner.

Then he pulled the door shut behind him.

The locking mechanism engaged with a heavy thunk and a metallic click, followed by a flash of red light on the security panel beside the door.

Finally, Rebecca was alone with him.

She only had five minutes to get across the most important information without letting any potentially deadly details slip through the cracks of her carefully conceived identity in this world.

Here with Shade, she was Rebecca Knox, the task force’s only elven member and newly elected commander.

That was not the version of her Rowan Blackmoon had known once upon a time—or the version of her he clearly assumed he still knew.

In the next five minutes, she had to figure out how to be both versions of herself without blowing her cover entirely and destroying everything she’d built in this city and with this task force.

She should have asked for more than five minutes.

Rowan’s dark, simpering chuckle he delivered through his nose as he stared at her, unblinking, made that clear.

“Roth-Da’al, huh?” He said. “Well look at that.Someone’scoming up in the world.”

“Now you know who I am,” she replied, her mind racing to come up with a viable way out of this precarious situation within the laughably short timeline she’d given herself. “But I want to make this clear from the start. We’re not here to talk aboutme.”

She could only hope he understood what she was trying to say, and now it felt like she was trying to be three different people at once instead of the usual one—or sometimes two, by necessity.

“Well.” Rowan’s hazel eyes bored into hers, and time felt like it slowed to an eternally stretching second.

Rebecca’s mind worked overtime and at top speed.

She was still being watched. Of course she was. They were both being watched via the holding room’s security cameras, which were always on and always recording to capture unanticipated situations just like this one.

And she knew Maxwell was watching.

She could feel the shifter’s gaze on her almost as viscerally as if he’d never left the room. This wasn’t something her Head of Security would leave up to chance, only to rewatch it all on the recording later.

She had to be more careful with this not-so-private conversation than she’d been with anything else since joining Shade. If Rowan were to let anything slip in this room while he thought the two of them were alone, Rebecca’s entire cover would be blown wide open.

The consequences of that were vast and varied, including Shade turning completely upside down should its members discover who and what she really was. Rebecca would lose her position as Shade’s commander mere days after she’d been voted in to assume the position.

And Shade didn’t just fire their commanders.

No, losing this job meant losing her head.

2

Rebecca swallowed hard, setting her jaw and lifting her chin as she faced the elven prisoner on the table. Inside, her gut twisted, and an unwelcome plea pulsed through her mind.

Don’t fuck this up for me, Rowan.

“Well then,” Rowan mused, tapping his chin with a finger before spreading his arms. “I assume that means you want to talk aboutme.”

She didn’t want to talk to him at all, but she had to keep this up until she could figure out what to do with him.

“You still haven’t answered my first question,” Rebecca said, acutely aware of the room’s single security camera mounted high in the corner. From the corner of her eye, she calculated her angle to it and how much of her body the security feed currently picked up.

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