Page 48 of Elven Lies

Once they’d made it out of the compound’s surrounding area on foot, now heading toward downtown Chicago, Rebecca couldn’t hold her silence any longer. Her curiosity had grown too great, and with no one else around, neither of them had to mask their answers anymore. Or their questions.

“You didn’t actually answer me in my office earlier,” she began.

“I remember giving perfectly acceptable answers to everything,” he muttered, still annoyed enough to stare straight ahead and reply as if she weren’t right beside him.

“When I asked you how you know anyone in Chicago, including a key-maker. You didn’t actually answer. You just gave me more vague details about the key-maker.”

“Oh.” He chuckled. “That.”

“So now I’d like an answer.”

“I bet you would.”

She rolled her eyes and overcame the urge to throw him into the middle of the street. “I’m being serious. I wish you would be too. There’s no one around in need of a performance, okay? It’s just me.”

“Oh,nowit is, huh?”

When she shot him a warning look, the frustration she thought she’d seen beneath his expression disappeared before Rowan replaced it with another carefree chuckle.

“I’m sure you’ve already noticed,” he said, “but I’ve been on the road for a long time. I’ve been lots of places in my travels, and believe it or not, Chicago’s only one of them.”

“Your travels, huh? All those fun and games in a new world? All those tricks waiting to be played?”

“In my search foryou, actually.”

Rebecca’s mouth snapped shut as they continued together down the sidewalks lining semi-busy streets. She didn’t like being reminded of that at all—that Rowan was here only because he’d been searching for her to bring her home.

In fact, that was a topic she’d hoped to avoid forever, if she could.

Now she had no way to avoid the topic, nowhere to go to get away from him, and only her constant rage simmering just beneath the surface to protect her from the horrors of the life she’d left behind.

The life to which Rowan insisted on returning her.

Was this his plan all along? To get her alone like this so he could make his move before she ever saw it coming?

16

Rebecca’s pulse thundered through her veins like lightning and ice shooting through her. Her breath quickened. Her senses flared to full alert—watching, listening, feeling the air around her for whatever changes Rowan enacted next to force her back into the old waking nightmare her life had once been.

Did he not see how much it would cost her if he did this? How much it would cost them both?

“Honestly,” Rowan continued casually, as if he hadn’t a care in the world and nothing hidden up his sleeve, “I haven’t been in Chicago that long, so you’d be right to question my knowledge of the city.”

Thatwas the conversation he returned to now?

Rebecca swallowed the seed of panic sprouting just beneath the surface of her self-control and tried to look at this logically. If he wanted to keep playing make-believe, fine. But she wouldn’t let him win. “But you’ve been here long enough to meet a key-maker?”

“No. I didn’t even meet him in Chicago.”

“What?”

“Funny story, really.” Rowan grabbed a thin twig off an overhanging branch and snapped it off as they walked. The tree rustled furiously behind him, and he studied the twig intently before tossing it over his shoulder. “Thisguy I met in Colorado…”

As he named the state, Rowan shot her a knowing look beneath raised eyebrows.

As in Golden, Colorado, to be more specific.

He was talking about the Gateway, which had to have been how he’d made it into this world at all. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him. Not like it had been for all the others who’d crossed over before the Gateway was officially open. There were always other methods of getting from one place to another. If anyone knew that, Rebecca did.

---