Page 68 of Elven Prince

“Why would someone retaliate like this?”

“Why would they his us this hard just to get atyou?”

The question rippled in various forms throughout the crowd, and Rebecca gave it appropriate space to work itself out before the common room once more quieted enough for her to address it.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “I can’t give you a concrete answer to that question. Because it could be any number of things.”

This was it. The moment she’d hoped would never come. When the necessity of transparency and complete honesty overpowered her own silent hope that it she would never need to do this.

Rebecca took a deep breath and steeled herself for the massive speech she was about to make.

“Right now, Shade faces more simultaneous threat than I think we’ve ever faced all at once. Without sufficient intel or preparation for any of them. Things are still open-ended with Eduardo and his griybreki after we intercepted his weapons shipment. Though I’d say Eduardo’s the least of our worries now, it would be irresponsible to dismiss the potential for his crew to stage any number of future attacks in retribution.

“Our operations against Kordus Harkennr and his supply chain of abducted magical civilians hasn’t improved our situation, either. Not that I’m saying that was a mistake, because it wasn’t.”

She easily found Shade’s five newest members among the gathering, those who could personally attest to the good Shade had accomplished by freeing Harkennr’s imprisoned experiment subjects at the warehouse and heavily disrupting his supply chain.

“As far as Harkennr’s concerned,” she added, “I wouldn’t change a thing about our moves against him or how we handled the discovery of what he was doing. There’s still a lot of work to do where he’s concerned, and he still poses a very real threat. Even more so because Harkennr could strike at any time.

“IfIwere him, I’d come at us the second I discovered Shade now faces a lot more than just a dangerous battle with him and his criminal operations in the city.”

Surprisingly, that statement elicited a round of half-hearted cheers from her operatives. The entire task force had supported and approved of her orders to hit Harkennr where it hurt, bit by bit, one piece of his supply chain at a time.

She doubted she’d receive similar support when she got to the end of this briefing.

Once the cheers settled down again into tense anticipation, she cleared her throat and dove back in.

“On top of that, we still have no further leads on the identity or whereabouts of the enemy force that ambushed our transport convoy, took Nyx out for the count, and held Diego, Titus, and Burke ransom at the abandoned amusement park until another team could recover them.

“At this point, any one of these organizations could conceivably be behind the attacks on our network through the city. But they’re not the only ones.”

Rebecca scanned the sea of faces again, took a deep breath, and plunged forward with the new information she expected to get a much more disapproving rise out of everyone. Because this would be the first time her task force as a whole heard the full truth of what had happened.

“There’s another player out there too, who’s already acted against us once, so far known only as Big Boss.”

The confusion and curious glances shared around the common room Rebecca had fully expected, though it wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined it before this moment. She couldn’t fool herself into believing that what came next would remain nearly as mild as this.

“The confirmed intel on Big Boss is that he runs a gang in Chicago, had previous dealings in secret with Aldous Corriger, and had no idea that Shade Command had changed hands until a few weeks ago. Honestly, he might still be ignorant to Aldous’s death or the major changes made to Shade’s command structure.”

A few people around the room sniggered at the news, because yes, any idiot willing to do business with Aldous deserved to be left in the dark.

But now, Rebecca had to tell them all what came next, which she’d been dreading since before she’d called this meeting.

“This intel found us the day Blackmoon and I tracked down Aldous’s secret cache in his personal Nexus vault downtown.”

“Boo!”

“Man, fuck the changeling!”

Several other similar exclamations rose around the room, and Rebecca waited patiently for the justified reactions to die down. It didn’t take long.

“When Blackmoon and I discovered the storage vault, we were ambushed by a pair of orcs. After a short-lived skirmish, we held them and questioned them for information. Apparently, Aldous had failed to deliver his end of a previous arrangement with the orcs, explaining their employer expected full recompense for those failures.

“But when they refused to provide any other information, courtesy of a binding that made further confessions impossible on their parts, I made the decision to release them. To return them to Big Boss with a message that Aldous was no longer in charge and that Shade would not be held liable for his outstanding debts.

“I believed then, with that message delivered, we would at best have one less enemy coming after us because of Aldous’s failures, and at worst, an opportunity to meet Big Boss and effectively deal with him later should the need arise.

“But the message was never deliver, because, against my direct orders, Blackmoon decided to take matters into his own hands. He killed both orcs after I’d released them, effectively ending any possibility of learning more.

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