Page 71 of Elven Throne

Her old trainer was the farthest thing from a parental figure as it could get.

She’d grown up convinced he meant to kill her in his attempts to make her stronger for all of Agn’a Tha’ros.

She couldn’t imagine Maxwell had been raised in the same way.

“You don’t think they still feel the same about you?” she asked.

Maxwell ran a hand through his hair and almost shrugged, though his deepening frown proved he was too focused on finding that answer to care. “Perhaps, in some way, they still do. But not enough for Jim to overturn his decision. Or for Annie to risk defying it herself. If the circumstances had been different, they would have killed me for returning today.”

She stopped dead and spun toward him. “What?”

“Another facet of pack law,” he replied dryly. “The only reason they did not is because I brought Shade with me. Because I was willing to stand for them myself when they had no other option. The Sparta pack never turns away those who are truly in need, shifter or otherwise. And I was willing—Iamwilling—to subject myself to everything to which the shadow is no longer entitled, if it gives every member of Shade what they need when they have nothing else.”

Rebecca stared at him.

Now it all made so much more sense.

Jim’s response to seeing Maxwell on his front porch and the terse way he’d treated his nephew while they hammered out the details for Shade’s benefit.

The whispers and looks of terrified disapproval from the shifter children, who were likely too young to have known Maxwell was part of the Sparta pack and who clearly hadn’t seen ashadowbefore.

The glaring disrespect every other shifter had shown him by their simple refusal to acknowledge his presence.

And it wasn’t really disrespect at all.

In fact, it was the opposite.

They’d merely been respecting their own pack laws and their Alpha’s decision, and in some disgustingly warped way, they’d been respecting Maxwell’s sacrifice in daring to show his face here again. Not for his own benefit but to help those in need.

The new motley pack of nearly every other race but shifters, who had accepted him and whom he’d accepted in turn when no one else would.

Rebecca’s eyes were open now, but the truth remained no less horrifying.

Nor did what she’d witnessed without any prior understanding of it.

“Do you really believe that?” she asked, no longer concerned about how the asking might make him react. All she wanted now was to understand as much as she possibly could about the most violently tense circumstances surrounding Shade’s stay with the Sparta pack.

Surrounding Maxwell.

“Believe what?” he asked, surprisingly calm for this conversation despite how utterly broken and empty he’d been just half an hour before, sitting on that log in his uncle’s back yard.

“That they would have killed you for coming back alone,” she said. “Just for yourself.”

His eyes flashed again as he regarded her with open curiosity. “It is no different than your own people wishing to use you for what you can do, regardless of howyoufeel about it. Politics, or dictates of the law, or duty… Call it what you will. I imagine they are much the same for both of us.”

He certainly wasn’t wrong there, either.

“What about your parents?”

“Dead,” he replied simply. “Killed in some skirmish with a rival pack out of St. Louis, I was told.”

“Oh.” It sounded so stupid coming out of her mouth, she had to follow it withsomething. “I’m—”

“No need.” Maxwell shook his head, chin lifted high as he gazed around the forest, hands once more clasped behind his back. “I was not even two years old when it happened. I remember nothing. Jim and Annie took me in afterward. The only next of kin I had. They never wanted their own children, nor did they have any, but they raised me as if I had always been theirs. They did their best.”

“But you weren’t born here.”

“I may as well have been. But no, I was not. And before you ask, I do not know where Iwasborn. That information, apparently, was never shared.”

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