Page 32 of Elven Lies

As much as she didn’t like it, Rebecca thought he was telling the truth about that, at least.

Maxwell rounded the chair with Nyx in his arms, pausing beside Rebecca to eye her with silent urgency.

“That’s good to hear,” Rebecca told Harkennr, then gestured toward Maxwell as they both stepped down off the dais. “This has been…an informative discussion.”

Harkennr’s lips twitched as his brilliant green eyes looked her up and down, sparkling with amusement and thinly veiled cruelty. “I’m sure.”

He waited for his guests to make it halfway back across the room before he said anything else. “Oh, I almost forgot…”

Bullshit. Harkennr’s memory was a steel trap. Unfortunately.

She slowly turned around and waited for his final parting words.

The warlock gestured toward the dais again, as if it contained more than an empty metal chair lined in thick cushions. “You’re welcome to go the route up the back staircase and out through the tunnels. That will offer you much faster access to the surface.”

Right. Because the door at the top of the front staircase was still closed and locked from the other side. No doubt Harkennr could open it himself from this side, but Rebecca didn’t envision him walking them all the way back out to their car.

“Thank you,” she said. “Where can we find this back staircase?”

“Ah, yes.” He withdrew the remote again and pointed it toward the dais and the circular alcove surrounding it. Another rumble of moving stone echoed around the room, this time slightly muted. “In the back up there, behind the black curtain. And don’t concern yourselves over directions. It’s a straight shot back to the surface from here. There’s no chance of losing your way.”

A cold prickle in the back of Rebecca’s mind warned her that there was more to this, maybe that Harkennr had a few more parting comments to offer, but he merely watched them with his prim smile, standing there in his dinner jacket like he’d just successfully hosted the most brilliant social event of the century.

She wasn’t in a hurry to take this special secret route up the back staircase and tunnel system, but they didn’t have a choice. And Harkennr knew that too. He was forcing them to take him at his word and to trust him. The thought made her sick all over again.

He didn’t stop them when she and Maxwell returned to the dais and Rebecca swept aside the curtain of thick black velvet hanging along the alcove’s back wall. When she did, the door of iron bars that could have been pulled from one of the old prison cells above clicked and swung open a few inches on its own before she opened it the rest of the way.

Once again, she and Maxwell stood on one side of an open door, staring into the gaping darkness stretching ahead of them, with no idea what they might find within. But this was how they got out.

“Back to the real world,” she muttered with a nod at Maxwell.

He snorted, unable to do much else with Nyx dangling limply in his arms, then stepped through when she gestured for him to enter first. He didn’t like this either, but until they left theboundaries of Harkennr’s facility, there was nothing they could do but keep moving forward.

As soon as they’d both entered the tunnel, the iron door swung shut behind them with a muted clang. Rebecca looked over her shoulder to see only the reverse side of the thick black velvet she’d dropped back into place. She wouldn’t have put it past Harkennr to have installed automatic mechanisms on all the doors in this place.

Maxwell paused at the sound, then they continued together side by side. “That was foolish of him to reveal these tunnels to us. It may be a faster, easier way out now, sure. But it could also be our way back in.”

“That’s exactly what hewantsyou to think,” Rebecca murmured before considering the new can of worms her comment might open.

He frowned at her in the tunnel’s semi-darkness as their footsteps echoed all around them. “What makes you say that?”

“Trust me, with someone like Harkennr, anything we see or hear is only because he wants us to see or hear it. It’s useless to try to use it against him.”

“I don’t see why…”

With a snort, she peered around the next bend in the tunnel before motioning him around it with her. “For the same reason fish have a terrible track record of using the worm against the fisherman.”

“Hmm…”

She waited for him to say more, but it didn’t feel like the shifter would be offering his thoughts for free at the moment, and her curiosity overwhelmed her. “Hmm? That’s it?”

“I don’t agree with your analogy,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“To start,” he grumbled, “I can think of several other comparisons more fitting to you and me both than afish. It doesn’t make sense.”

Of course it didn’t. Not to him. Especially when he still had no idea just how well Rebecca knew Kordus Harkennr. But now that it sure did seem like Harkennr had showed them everything during this meeting, as if he’d revealed his entire hand all at once, Rebecca recognized the sensation only too well. It put her even more on edge.

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