Page 9 of Elven Lies

“Oh yeah…” she added. “We were standing over an explosive casting circle beside a stage, and I told you you had to stay back because you’re the only one who can keep things running here without me, in case things didn’t turn out well for me. Remember that?”

Maxwell stared at her and said nothing.

She reached for the twin figurines at the edge of her desk. Their stone surfaces clinked together in her hand. “As far as I know, nothing’s changed.”

“Agreed,” Maxwell replied.

His response surprised her, and she froze, the figurines clinking against each other one more time in the silence when she released them in her jacket pocket. Then she turned toward her Head of Security and raised an eyebrow. “Wait, seriously?”

“Of course. So why should my answer now be any different than it was then?”

Crap.

He’d really figured out how to use her own improvisational logic against her, hadn’t he? And quickly, too.

The heat still rising in her face beneath his gaze grew almost unbearable until she forced herself to look away from him. “This time, though, I could just order you to stay behind and keep things running for me here. Officially.”

“If I didn’t know exactly what you were walking into, sure. But order me now, Roth-Da’al, when I know exactly what you face, and I will be forced to disobey that order. Officially.”

She snorted and rounded her desk. “You would never.”

But when she paused and her gaze flickered toward his face again, as if pulled by some invisible magnet stronger than her own will—and that was really saying something—what she found in her Head of Security’s expression almost made her question everything.

That combined with the growing warmth and intensifying tingle, the unignorable pull between him that strengthened simply by walking around her desk and putting less space between them, made her now feel quite literally breathless.

Maxwell’s gaze reflected nothing but open, honest concern. The same look he’d fixed her with when she’d been lying in one of Zida’s infirmary beds with a giant stake of wooden-targetshrapnel through her belly. Or on a few other occasions, when he’d selected choice moments to warn her away from one very specific, newly inducted elf among Shade’s ranks named Rowan Blackmoon.

Maxwell was deadly serious.

If his expression hadn’t already confirmed it, his next words certainly would have.

“Knox, it was too dangerous the first time at that prison,” he said. “And we didn’t even make it inside the building.”

Rebecca scoffed, forcing more apathy than she felt. Because she didnotwant him there with her, and she couldn’t figure out why.

It wasn’t so she could keep protecting her secrets. Kordus Harkennr was a master of subterfuge and deception himself, but he never dealt in others’ hidden knowledge.

So why did letting Maxwell join her feel like such a horriblybadplan?

“That was a completely different situation,” she replied and forced herself to move away from her desk and head toward the door. “Namely, the fact that you weren’t supposed to be there, setting off their breach alarm the way you did.”

“Again, I agree.”

Rebecca was about to thank him for that before reiterating her decision to make him stay behind, but she’d hardly taken two more steps across her office before her Head of Security swooped in and stepped in front of her to block her path.

Stopping tantalizingly close and dipping his head so far toward her, with only a mere few inches between them, that her unyielding flush tripled in heat and intensity.

The overwhelming urge to close those last few inches between them almost crippled Rebecca’s resolve.

“Last timewasdifferent,” Maxwell murmured, his breath fluttering across her face as the scent of dew-studdedgrass and cool moonlight and that gods-damned sandalwood overwhelmed her. “You and Iare…different.”

The way the words rumbled out of him nearly made her shiver. Somehow, despite the heat flaring through her body, Rebecca distinctly felt the goosebumps rise along her arms beneath her long-sleeved shirt as that dark, tingling pull beckoned her ever closer to him.

What did he mean by that?“You and Iare…different.”

Trapped in his gaze now, Rebecca still lifted her chin—the one defiant act of which she was still capable, because in that moment, every other part of her seemed to have already fallen under this obnoxious, deliciously inexplicable enchantment she couldn’t control and still couldn’t explain.

“And how, exactly, areyou and Idifferent?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

---