Page 75 of Elven Lies

“All out?”

What was he talking about?

“Yeah, really travel in style. No more sneaking around and sticking to the shadows, looking for underground places to hide us magical types. We can stay at the best hotels in every city. Eat the best Earthside food…

“Well, not that it’s all that amazing to begin with, buttheydon’t know that. Hell, we could even rent a car and drive ourselves back to the Gateway that much faster. Maybe even bring a few extra gifts back home with us to… Wait a minute. Is that a fuckingtreasure chest?”

As he bounded away toward another perceived treasure, Rebecca had to pull herself back to the present. She ripped her gaze away from the stack of large, shiny silver briefcases she’dbeen eyeing and searched for Rowan among the other mounds of valuables. “Gifts?”

“Yeah. You know what I mean,” he said over the creak of a heavy wooden chest’s hinged lid being hauled open. “Hey, a little brown-nosing never actually hurt anyone. And I’m certainly not above it.”

No. Absolutely not.

She had to stop this line of thinking in him, and she had to stop it now.

“First of all,” she said, her eyes widening as she stared at him, “if it’s across state lines, I’m not goinganywherewith you. And second, none of this belongs to us, Rowan. Everything in this room is Shade’s.”

The clinking of individual coins and other metallic tidbits falling between his fingers stopped abruptly, then he rose from where he’d hunkered over the wooden chest to gaze around the room, his haughty superiority restored. “Pretty sure it belonged to that Aldous guy, actually.”

“None of which he actually earned on his own or ever deserved to keep,” she snapped. “He was stockpiling all the profits from every single mission, by the looks of it. Anything we acquired. Payment from Shade contracts… He took it all. And he’s just been dumping it in here, stockpiling his own little fucked-up nest egg. He couldneverhave spent all of this on his own.”

“I don’t disagree with you. I’m just saying. Now would be theperfecttime to take it all back with—”

“No. You haven’t been listening to me. We can’t take anything back. This doesn’tbelongto us. This is everything Shade should have been benefiting from all along. For years. Decades.”

“I mean, if that’s how you wanna look at it. I guess…” Rowan returned to sifting through the coins in the alleged treasure chest, and Rebecca had another moment to think about what this meant.

A moment to fully realize just how insanely outraged she was by the discovery.

Now that she’d said it all out loud, she’d made it even more real. Standing here in the proof of Aldous’s deception made it clear there was no guarantee it stopped with this vault.

If he wasn’t already dead, she would have killed the motherfucker all over again, just for this.

“All right, fine. We don’t have to take it all back with us. Not even as much as we can carry. I’ll concede there.” Rowan laughed again and left the wooden chest open to go dig through something else. “But you have to admit this is some pretty perfect timing. So we just take a small portion for ourselves. We won’t even make a dent in what he’s got here, but it’ll sure keep us happy and healthy and comfortable on our way back. Just think about it.”

He barked out another laugh and moved on to a different pile. “By the time anyone even realized we were gone, we’d be halfway across the country again, and no one would know where to look because no one would even know where we went.”

Rebecca fought to hold herself in check, or she wouldn’t be able to stop from exploding on him. “I am so serious. If you try to shove that brainless plan down my throat again, I’ll rip out your tongue just so I don’t have to listen to you.”

The threat burst out of her so quickly and so easily, she surprised herself with the ferocity of it. Threatening Rowan for real with real bodily harm wasn’t something she’d generally made a habit of doing, but now that it was out, she realized she absolutely meant it.

She also realized she didnotwant him here with her. Not just inside Aldous’s secret vault filled with mind-numbing wealth but with her at headquarters, with her as part of Shade, with her in Chicago or even on Earth.

Even relenting to his demand that they went out to find Mr. Kaplan the key-maker on their own, just the two of them, hadn’t stopped him from acting up. He wasn’tlisteningto her. He didn’t take her decisions seriously. He’d killed two orcs she’d already released, and now he was making plans to steal from the stockpile of goods Aldous had stolen from his own task force, just to fund a trip back to the Gateway and Xahar’áhsh beyond.

A trip Rebecca had told him repeatedly she didn’t want to make and never would.

He’d grown far too reckless, betting on their friendship from hundreds of years ago and gambling away any other bit of trust she might have still had in him.

Rowan had to go.

Great. Just one more thing to add to her never-ending to-do list.

She tried to put the new realization out of her mind and focus instead on what could be done right now. So she headed toward the pile of enormous silver briefcases propped against the end of one display case, marginally pleased to find the one on top clasped but not locked.

Rebecca opened the case’s heavy lid, and a small smile flickered across her lips only to disappear a second later. Somehow, smiling in this room just felt wrong.

But the suitcase itself was still a valuable discovery.

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