Page 44 of Elven Crown

Scoffing, she tucked a lock of hair behind one ear and searched her mind for viable escape routes. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips without her permission as she studied him.

She’d let him get away with way too much back in the day, and that had obviously come back to bite her now.

“You’ll always be a pain in my ass, won’t you?” she muttered.

He shifted in his seat to face her more directly and shrugged. “It’s very likely.”

Maybe she would have sat with him. Maybe she was on the verge of giving in to his requests. They might have even built a remedial bridge between them again, if they’d had the chance.

But the door to the secondary armory burst open, and Maxwell barged into the room, his silver eyes wide and bordering on the edge of panic. “Thon-Da’al!”

The second Rebecca met his gaze, her smile disappeared, replaced by an instant sinking freeze in her belly before it dropped all the way to the floor.

She knew Maxwell Hannigan well enough by now to know he was about to inform her of another emergency.

And with Rowan sitting at the table to her left, she couldn’t think of anything else that might have made her Head of Security look this concerned about what happened next.

Rebecca absently wiped her palms along the legs of her jeans as she watched Maxwell heading toward her. Only then did she realize how clammy her hands had become at the sound of the shifter’s voice.

Since when did her hands get clammy when someone called for her?

The first answer that popped into her head was that the overpowering urgency coursing through her from head to toewasn’t actuallyhers. That it belonged to someone else. To Maxwell…

That was insane. Rebecca didn’t feel other people’s thoughts and emotions. Not like this.

She didn’t get clammy palms for seemingly no reason, either.

While Maxwell stalked toward her, holding her in his silver gaze like a snare clutching a startled rabbit, a snort on her left ripped Rebecca’s thoughts back into her physical reality.

“By the Blood,” Rowan murmured as he watched the shifter approach, gaping like this was a violent car crash on the interstate. “Does this guy ever stop?”.

“Shut up.” Rebecca tore her gaze away from her incoming Head of Security to point at the disassembled weapon on the table in front of Rowan. “Just finish cleaning this, put it back together, and don’t get in the way.”

Then she took off to meet Maxwell in the middle. The urgency behind his eyes convinced her that whatever he was about to tell her, it was better discussed away from everyone else. Especially Rowan.

Behind her, more disassembled weapon pieces clattered across the table before Rowan grunted in disgust. “I can’t eventouchthis stuff.”

When Rebecca and Maxwell finally converged by the door, his heavy breathing concerned her even more than his urgent shouts for the Thon-Da’al.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“New intel,” he said, his voice low and subdued while those silver eyes cast a wary, flickering glance around the room.

“About?”

Maxwell’s nose twitched before he grimaced. “About a…pre-existing problem I need to brief you on.”

Her mind instantly returned to their impromptu infiltration of Harkennr’s base, and she wiped her palms on the legs of her jeans again. “The prison?”

His expression went momentarily blank before he dropped his gaze and cleared his throat. “No.”

Was this whatsheepishnesslooked like on her Head of security?

“Then what is it?” Rebecca prompted, then waited longer than usual for him to look up at her again.

“Actually, it’s Eduardo,” he said. “One of his teams.”

Eduardo and his griybreki. Rebecca hadn’t thought about the slimy wannabe crime lord for what felt like forever. Not since she and her team had gone up against him in the abandoned apartment building over a week ago.

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