Page 57 of Elven Prince

“Listen,” she said, “if your bosses sent you guys to get this job done the waytheywant, that’s not such a great look. Seems to me they’d rather hide behind the front lines while the soldiers do all the dirty work for them.”

Pacing on the far wall, Maxwell snorted. “Dirty soldiers…”

She ignored him. “It makes me wonder why they won’t just head out themselves to get the job done right. No one else is capable of it, obviously.”

Lerrick snickered until Tig elbowed him in the ribs.

“You’re worried about what your bosses will do to you if you talk.” Rebecca directly in front of the prisoners and dropped into a squat, just like Maxwell had. But she didn’t reach out toward either of them. In fact, she had no intention of touching them at all. “But really, what youshouldbe more concerned about is what we can do tothem.”

15

At first, Rebecca thought her threat might have gotten through to the half-changeling, at least.

His eyes widened as he studied every inch of her face. Then he tilted his head, as if just now realizing how much trouble he and his team had gotten themselves into tonight.

His expression softened, and he leaned as far forward toward her as possible with his wrists bound in the dampening cuffs behind his back. “You really have no fucking clue what’s going on here, do you?”

Blue Hells. Itwasn’tfear or maybe even relief written all over his face, but his words cleared up that confusion.

The only thing in the half-changeling’s large hazel eyes was pity.

Pure, untainted, genuine pity.

Forher.

She wanted to swipe his head right off his shoulders with a single blow and send it hurtling across the room, but it wouldn’t get them closer to the information they needed.

So Rebecca stood, swallowing her anger, and walked away across the living room. Anything short of that would land them right back where they’d started.

As soon as the troll realized she was walking away, he burst into more cackling shrieks of laughter, bucking against his bonds on the floor and occasionally kicking his associate in the process.

The half-changeling didn’t seem to feel any of it.

Rebecca stopped beside Maxwell, who’d already abandoned his pacing to wait for her. Then they watched their prisoners together, the troll cackling and writhing on the floor while the half-changeling rocked back and forth where he sat, his eyes closed, muttering non-stop under his breath.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Rebecca murmured, leaning toward Maxwell to be sure he heard her over the troll’s lunatic laughter.

The shifter glanced at his field watch. “It’s only been twenty minutes. Let me triple that, and I’ll have two little songbirds pecking right out of my hand.”

She shot him a pert look and raised an eyebrow. “Well now I know what to get you for Christmas.”

His frown deepened so abruptly, she would have laughed if there weren’t two magicals tied up on the opposite side of the room who had tried to kill them half an hour ago.

“Did we find anything useful on any of the other bodies?” she asked.

“Nothing. No phones. No keys. No wallets. Zero identification.”

“Not surprising if they thought they were walking into a battle tonight.”

“They thought they’d be coming down on a gnome alone in his house,” Maxwell grumbled. “We were a last-minute surprise.”

Shit. That was true.

Though it did seem odd that anyone would send in a team of five would-be assassins to get rid of a single target. Especially when that target happened to be far smaller than the average gnome in or out of Chicago.

Something was obviously missing here, but so far, they’d found nothing to point them in the right direction. Nothing to clue them in. And clues were exactly what they needed.

She went over the firefight in her mind, mapping out the series of events, searching her memory for even the smallest detail she might have missed in real time.

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