Page 4 of Elven Lies

“I get it,” Rebecca replied calmly. “And I understand your concerns, but with this—”

“We’re wasting time!”

“Does Nyx have her phone on her?” Maxwell asked, speaking as levelly and blandly as if he were asking for the time.

Leonard blinked at him, then scoffed. “No.”

“Do we have any other viable method for tracking her location?”

“Well…no. But—”

“Then listen to your Roth-Da’al, Saldrich. There’s a reason she wanted you at this meeting along with everyone else, and at this rate, it’ll be after dark again before you hold your tongue long enough to hear why.”

Leonard’s fists clenched tightly on the table as he stared the shifter down, but then he relented and sank back into his chair, thoroughly chastised and fortunately convinced. For now.

That wasn’t at all how Rebecca wanted him to feel, but at least he’d quieted down.

“That better be an exaggeration, Hannigan,” Bor grumbled. “You’ll catch me dead in my room before you ever see me skipthree meals in a row just for a chat. Not to mention the riots when you leave magicals liketheseto fend for themselves for every damn scrap o’ chow.”

Zida barked out a laugh and rolled her eyes.

Maxwell glowered at them both but didn’t have to say anything else about it. As two of Shade’s oldest members—both of them old-worlders straight from Xahar’áhsh and with an unimaginable magnitude of experience between them—the cook and the healer kept their silence and returned their full attention to Rebecca.

“Now,” she continued, “on top of Hannigan’s valid points, mainly the fact that we have no way to specifically track Nyx, I can tell you all with a hundred percent certainty that riding in after her the way we rode in to recover Diego, Titus, and Burke last night simply won’t work. Not with this scumbag.

“Our chances of successfully bringing Nyx back home, safe and sound, are way better if we all go into this with a different frame of mind. More specifically, if we respond with something surprising. Something her kidnapper won’t expect. With this one, we have to besmartabout it.”

Especially when Rebecca knew from personal experience just how sadistically crafty Kordus Harkennr was and just how terrible he really could be when pushed to his limits.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell anyone in this room why she was so certain what those things were—that, once upon a time and long ago, she had actuallyworkedwith Harkennr, though in a very different capacity than her current position with Shade entailed.

That would only raise more questions she couldn’t afford to answer without unraveling the tangled web of lies strung through at least half a dozen of her old lives and their various aliases.

Besides, this meeting wasn’t about her. What everyone else here did or didn’t know about Harkennr had no bearing on the fact that he’d taken Nyx right out from under them, or that reacting in the usual way wouldn’t get them the usual results. Not with a sick and twisted mind like Harkennr’s.

“All right,” Whit said, his jaw set in determination. “I trust your instincts, Knox. I’m sure everyone else here would say the same thing. So then what does being smart about this actually look like?”

“First, it looks like taking stock of what we know and can confirm. His name is Kordus Harkennr, and he’s set up shop here in Chicago in the Old Joliet Prison. Beyond those two facts, we don’t have much else, including where he’s keeping her or what he’s doing to her.”

“Doingto her?” Leonard asked, his face paling considerably.

“If anything,” Rebecca added quickly. “I can guarantee that if we go blasting in blind without our heads screwed on before we confirm any other information, it’ll only give Harkennr that much more of an advantage than he already has. He’ll take it as a personal attack, and why wouldn’t he? He took one of ours, and we’d be going after more than just one of his. He might even see it as an act of war, even on a small scale.”

“And snatching Nyx out of a fucking recovery bedisn’t?” Leonard interjected.

Maxwell opened his mouth to respond with something no-doubt threatening, again, but he stopped when Rebecca signaled him with two raised fingers and answered the mage herself.

“Of course it is,” she said. “But unfortunately, the asshole who took her has the upper hand here, and we have zero intel. That part’s pretty indisputable.”

Only then did Leonard look like he was starting to put the pieces together himself as well, and Rebecca couldn’t blame him for that, either. His feelings for Nyx and his fear for her safetyhad overpowered his common sense. It was an easy thing to let happen, especially when caught blindsided like this.

Which was part of why she’d called this impromptu meeting in the first place.

Bor grunted and shifted in his chair. “That’s all well and good. Sounds like you know what you’re talking about. I’ve got no issue with that, but Iwouldlike to know how you know even this much of the bare minimum, like you said. That this Kordus Harkennr character’s the one responsible.”

“Yeah, you know what?” Leonard added. “I’d love to know that too. Because the only evidence we found of anything was no Nyx and that creepy-looking doll thing sitting there on the bed where she should’ve been.”

“Thiscreepy-looking doll thing?” Maxwell asked as he gestured toward the corner of Rebecca’s desk and the small humanoid figurine carved of white stone she’d set there before the meeting.

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