Page 39 of Elven Crown

Like how she was going to fill the rest of her day with important Shade-command duties so Rowan wouldn’t catch her with no more excuses for putting him off.

A heavy stack of paper dropped to the floor with a thick smack, then Rebecca found her Head of Security crossing one ankle overthe opposite knee in his chair and folding his arms as he stared at her, his reading material now abandoned on the floor.

Something about the way his smirk had grown in the last few seconds made her acutely aware of just how alone they were right now. With no one around to interrupt or intervene.

But she didn’t want that smirk to go anywhere, either.

“We could talk about what happened the other night in Joliet,” he said.

In Joliet. Their breach of Harkennr’s operations base at the Old Joliet Prison just a few days ago.

Remember remembered that night vividly. But instead of returning to the battle they’d haphazardly fought against Harkennr’s forces guarding the property, her mind took her straight to the aftermath of that little skirmish.

Of Rebecca standing in some human’s back yard in a trailer park on the city outskirts, watching Maxwell first walk away from her completely naked to strip someone else’s clothes off the clothesline.

Of him approaching her again, wearing someone else’s cargo pants and button-up shirt he hadn’t yet bothered to fasten. Of the chiseled lines along his chest and abs dancing beneath the allure of shadows wavering in and out of the vivid starlight.

When Rebecca’s face flushed hot at the memory, she cleared her throat, sat back in her chair, and folded her arms. Then she spun away from Maxwell again so he wouldn’t see the color she was sure had risen into her cheeks.

Steeling her emotions and the effect they seemed to have on her body—which were far more frequent and more visceral than they’d been around anyone else in a very long time—Rebecca gave herself to the count of ten. The flush in her face cooled marginally, and she stopped pretending to think it over.

“Yeah,” she said. “We could talk about that. If you think you can handle it.”

She looked his way in time to catch another frown flickering across Maxwell’s brow. This time, it looked like he was tryingnotto smile.

“I can handle it,” he grumbled. “And I won’t even mention how you lied to me and distracted me with assembling a team so you could sneak out and almost get yourself killed in the field with zero backup.”

She snorted. “You just did.”

“Fair enough. Then I promise that’s the last time.”

It wasn’therfault they’d almost gotten their asses handed to them by Harkennr’s soldiers that night. Rebecca had had everything under control on her own until Maxwell had arrived on the scene and given away her position.

Despite that residual irritation, however, she couldn’t help sending a small smile his way. “Good. And I promise I won’t go on and on about you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“Deal.”

Well, that was a start. A much better start than the last time they’d tried to approach the subject.

Too much had taken up their attention after they’d returned from Harkennr’s base. They hadn’t had the time to discuss what they’d seen that night, but now would have been an excellent time for a more in-depth discussion.

If the subject material hadn’t been so depressing.

She saw it in Maxwell’s eyes too as they gazed at each other across the room. He was also thinking of all those prisoners of Harkennr’s—the newest truckload of them freshly delivered to the abandoned prison, or the dozens, maybe even hundreds of others already inside those walls, enduring unspeakable torture for Harkennr’s magical experiments.

As if he could read her mind, Maxwell shifted in his chair and murmured, “Someone needs to stop whatever this Harkennr asshole’s is doing in there.”

Rebecca couldn’t have agreed more. She didn’t have all the details, but she did know the kind of atrocities of which Kordus Harkennr was capable. She also understood the importance of tearing down an operation like that before any more innocent magicals were involved against their will.

Then she remembered the way Maxwell’s wolf had looked at her when he’d stopped in front of the prison’s open front doors while the screams of Harkennr’s current prisoners mingled in the air with the desperate pleas of the newly captured innocents begging to be rescued.

She’d thought he was about to throw himself into the fray, to turn spying on Rebecca that night into what would have undoubtedly become a bungled rescue mission.

But then she’d called him back from the brink of such a stupidly reckless decision by reminding him they had somewhere else to be and other magicals to think of first before throwing themselves blindly into enemy territory they didn’t understand.

“We’ll stop him,” she said, holding Maxwell’s gaze and trying not to let the horrors they’d both seen that night catalyze into the type of rage such injustices sparked in her. Injustices that made the rage that much more difficult to control. “But we have to do it right. We need a plan, and we need to know exactly what we’re up against.”

“I know that.”

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