Page 29 of Elven Prince

The silence in the vault continued for so long, she started to think she’d taken it too far. Not that she’d ever seen Titus get his feelings hurt, but there was a first time for everything.

But then another of his booming, ear-splitting laughs preceded him as he stepped out from behind the stack of crates, smiling and shaking his head.

“What’s so funny this time?” Rebecca wasn’t entirely certain she actually wanted the answer.

He stopped halfway across the room and grinned. “Damn. You really got no idea, do you?”

Her next laugh didn’t sound very genuine at all. “What does that even mean?”

“I asked what’s going on between you and Hannigan, and you’re giving me this hemmin’, hawin’, workaround-denial shit instead of a real answer. Youcan’tgive me a real answer, because you don’t evenknow.”

Damn. Another point to the big guy.

“Well, don’t expect me to come running to you first thing if I ever do. You know, figure it out.”

“Whenyou do.”

Rebecca looked sharply up at him again and found one giant gray finger—glinting with pilfered rings that didn’t even make it past his first knuckle—pointing at her face.

“Because itwillhappen, Knox,” he added. “But hell, if it takes youthatlong to figure out on your own… You know what? I’m not sure I even wanna know.”

Well that was… perceptive of him.

Now she’d be second-guessing every interaction with Maxwell from here and out, again. Plus every interaction they’d already had. Analyzing each of them for its hidden meaning. Which, apparently, was glaringly obvious to everyone else.

Or at least just to Titus, but that felt like enough.

“All right.” Rebecca decided to snap herself out of it, because second-guessing never helped anyone. “I got what I came here for.”

“Yeah, me too.” Titus tried to strut back across the vault toward her, but his enormous frame and the cluttered space made strutting downright impossible. “Ready when you are, boss.”

“Uh-uh.” She pointed at him. “Not the ringsandthe bear, buddy. Pick one or the other. That’s my final offer.”

He stopped and stared at her like a pouting child before heaving a massive sigh and slumping his hulking shoulders. “Fine…”

“While you’re deciding, why don’t you grab these crates right here and take them with you?”

“Just two?”

“Yep. Two is all we need for now. Don’t worry, they’re full.”

Chuckling, he crossed the rest of the room and hardly bent over at all before hoisting both crates, one on top of the other, and hefting them like a pile of laundry onto his shoulder. “Got anything else?”

“No. You head out. I just gotta check one more thing in here.

Without another word, Titus ambled slow and steady out of the vault and back to the level-five lobby, chuckling to himself the whole way.

Rebecca allowed herself a small smile at the big guy’s hidden talents of picking out the deeper meaning of things right in front of him. This trip had been more than worth it for that little surprise alone.

But when she rounded the closest desk, she turned around to peek back through the open vault door to make sure he wasn’t watching.

Titus might have been able to see what she couldn’t yet let herself fully admit existed between her and Maxwell Hannigan. Not out in the open to someone else, anyway. But she couldn’t let him see the small, four-inch doll made of burlap and sand she pulled from her jacket pocket.

Rebecca gazed at the hex doll and knew she was making the right choice in this, at least.

If this thing really was the Darkspawn, she’d be as much of an idiot as Aldous was to keep carrying it around with her on her person.

She still didn’t know if she believed what Rowan had told her about this little trinket filled with old-world magic and disguised as an Earthside child’s toy, but she didn’t want to risk it. She certainly didn’t want to use it again, accidentally or otherwise, until she knew exactly what this thing was.

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