13. Chapter 13

13

T he realization made her nauseous as Rebecca turned down another intersecting hallway toward the private rear stairwell up to the compound’s second floor.

The small comfort she took from the situation, what kept her from hating herself, was the knowledge that while she and Aldous had made similar decisions, they were for vastly different reasons.

The changeling hadn’t started taking his meals in the office to hide from particular Shade members; he’d wanted to avoid any and all conversation, the way Rebecca needed to avoid Rowan now.

For the most part, that was because none of Shade’s members had wanted to speak to Aldous that badly.

Rebecca couldn’t change the reality of being hounded by a living ghost from her past, right here in Shade’s headquarters. But she would rather avoid him altogether than submit to the impending conversation she knew Rowan wanted.

She didn’t want anything to do with that conversation, or its implications, or the weight of all the other changes it would bring down on her after she and Rowan exchanged words as themselves. Not as the empty fragments of who they truly were. Not as the reflected pieces each of them presented to the rest of the world.

Maybe, if she could keep him at bay long enough, Rowan would finally get the hint and just give up. Maybe he’d stop trying.

As Rebecca climbed the first steps of the rear staircase up to the second floor, she snorted at herself and shook her head.

Who was she kidding, thinking she could change things by ignoring him? Since when did Rowan Blackmoon ever give up on anything?

That was the problem.

Right now, it was her biggest problem.

O ver the next thirty-six hours, Rebecca poured her energy and focus into excelling in her role as Shade’s new commander. Mostly, she involved herself in anything and everything available to her within the compound, turning it into a duty worthy of the Thon-Da’al’s attention and professional opinion.

Even when no one needed her.

It had already become quite clear that the task force didn’t need Rebecca’s supervision within the scope of regular everyday duties and activities. The entire task force had already grown so accustomed to running the place on its own and answering to their Head of Security. Command oversight had been rendered unnecessary.

Shade certainly hadn’t received any such oversight from Aldous when he’d been in charge.

Rebecca was determined to be a part of it all anyway.

The busier she could make herself, the less available she would be for Rowan to ambush and start demanding private conversations—the extra cherry on top.

She spent most of her time in the security room with the members of Maxwell’s personal team responsible for keeping their fingers on the pulse of incoming intel from throughout the city and the greater Chicago area.

Ideally, something urgent would show up while she inspected the security room in person. What better opportunity to become remarkably busy than by planning and executing Shade’s first real mission after their change in leadership?

Unfortunately, she had no such luck, even when she circled back to the security room several times to double-check throughout the day.

Then she moved through every other major section of the compound to keep herself busy with inspections—the supply rooms first, then the kitchens. When Bor grumbled about inventory checks being entirely unnecessary, Rebecca agreed.

She successfully checked his temper with a reassurance that this was nothing more than routine command rounds she didn’t plan on performing very often, but, given her new role, she wanted to ensure she left no stone unturned.

No one, not even Bor, needed to know Rebecca wasn’t looking for anything in particular or that this self-assigned busywork was more of an excuse to avoid Rowan Blackmoon.

She took her time inspecting the infirmary next, then the smaller secondary armory on the ground floor used mostly for overflow munitions and weapons repairs. Then the primary armory hub at the rear of the underground parking garage, followed by the training gym, the residential wing, the communal bathrooms, and even the boiler room at the back of the compound.

Everywhere she went, Rebecca found more potential rooms and internal operations to inspect, piling on her visits to each part of the compound and each smaller team of magicals assigned to their regular off-mission duties, one right after the other. She always had one more place to go, one more group to speak to, one more item to check off her list.

Best of all, she didn’t require Maxwell’s company through each of these visits. That probably would have been too much for both of them in the long run, but she did ensure she had some form of escort through the property, either by a member of Maxwell’s security team or another operative she’d approached herself before requesting their company.

Even then, after all the pains she went through to never be alone and never look available, Rowan still made his half-hearted but ceaseless attempts to rope her into a private conversation, just the two of them. Every time, she held him off just a little longer.

It was surprisingly easy to keep Rowan away and avoid him as much as possible. Far easier than trying to keep Maxwell off her back when he suspected she was up to something he wouldn’t like.

The difference, she realized, was that Rowan had always understood how Rebecca’s mind worked. Maxwell didn’t, and somehow, he’d been so much harder to avoid. The realization made her wonder for the first time whether she’d had some unconscious part in that.

Once she finished inspecting everything she could think of, signing off on new incoming supply shipments, and getting one more update from Maxwell’s team in the security room regarding any new activity that might require Shade’s intervention, Rebecca found herself back in her office.

Scouring the entire compound had only taken her a day and a half, and she’d exhausted all her options for staying busy a lot faster than she’d expected.

All but one option, anyway, which she’d saved for last. With good reason.

Maxwell had joined her once more, fulfilling his previously established duties as Head of Security that apparently still included stationing himself inside the commander’s office whenever she happened to be there. Today, he’d even brought his own chair.

Rowan hadn’t yet attempted to find her or corner her for a conversation today, but it was only a matter of time before he figured out she was in her office, pretending to be busy. She had a feeling even Maxwell’s presence wouldn’t serve as an effective deterrent on its own for much longer. She had to stay busy.

After tapping her pen against the desk for several minutes within the uncomfortable silence of being alone with Maxwell—while neither of them looked at or spoke to the other—Rebecca had had enough. She dropped her pen and turned in the swiveling desk chair to face him where he now sat on an extra stool inside the office door.

“All right,” she said. “What else needs to be done around here?”

The shifter looked up from his reading, which she assumed was either a printed mission report or one of his personal dossiers he apparently kept on each of Shade’s members. When he met her gaze without expression, that tingling, beckoning weight of his presence doubled in intensity.

Rebecca had finally started to feel like she’d figured out how to ignore that overwhelming sensation, but that was much harder to do when they were alone.

Swallowing against the urge to be closer to him, she spun in her chair to face her desk again, trying to avoid the warmth spreading across her body beneath Maxwell’s gaze.

He cleared his throat. “On a general, large-scale timeline?”

Rebecca shot him a quick frown before the hot flutter in her belly at the flash in his silver eyes instantly reminded her why she’d looked away. “That would be nice to have too, but I’m talking about more of an immediate timeline. As in right now.”

“Oh.” Maxwell adjusted his reading material in his lap, then returned his attention there. “We’ve got it all covered. Basically.”

“Basically? Because if anyone knows how out of place basic is here, it’s you.”

“Fine. I’ll rephrase. Everything that needs to be taken care of right now already has been. Better?”

Rebecca puffed out a sigh and slumped back in her desk chair. “Not really, no.”

Maxwell’s reading material hit his lap with a muffled slap. “Why the hell not?”

Rebecca drummed her fingers on the desk this time, swiveling back and forth in the chair and refusing to look at him. “Because I can’t just sit here all day. There’s work to do. There’s always work to do. Maybe Aldous preferred to spend his downtime locked up in here, counting his stacks of gold or whatever, but I can’t do that.”

The office fell into another uncomfortable silence, but Rebecca still couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

She still felt his gaze on her like a physical weight, like gently probing fingers studying her face, examining her for fault lines and cracks in the surface of her composure that might weaken the entire mask.

That had to be what he was doing. What other reason would he have for studying her so intently in total silence?

No other reason made sense. Otherwise, she would have felt like he was staring at her for so long simply because he liked what he saw.

That was insane.

Maybe the perceived stress of commanding Shade was taking its toll. Maybe she was losing her mind.

Then Maxwell snorted, and it sounded not like his usual suspicion but like true amusement this time. “You’re bored.”

She whipped her head back toward him and narrowed her eyes.

The nearly invisible twitch across the shifter’s lips could have been his version of a smirk. He was making fun of her.

She knew it even before his silver eyes locked onto hers and made the tingling warmth of his presence ten times stronger. It took all her effort not to squirm in her chair.

What the hell was wrong with her? Rebecca Bloodshadow didn’t squirm, under any circumstances.

“I’m not bored,” she quipped. Once she said it, though, she recognized the lie, though her boredom was only one of her reasons for wanting something else to fill her time.

Now it felt like Maxwell recognized it too.

With a quick roll of her eyes, Rebecca shrugged. “Fine. I’m a little bored. I just don’t like sitting up here doing nothing and wasting my time. Wasting everyone else’s time too.”

When he didn’t immediately respond, she figured Maxwell intended to sit there with his reading and keep making fun of her within the privacy of his own mind. That was his right, but it didn’t help her solve any of her current issues.

Like how she was going to fill the rest of her day with important Shade-command duties so Rowan wouldn’t catch her with no more excuses for putting him off.

A heavy stack of paper dropped to the floor with a thick smack, then Rebecca found her Head of Security crossing one ankle over the opposite knee in his chair and folding his arms as he stared at her, his reading material now abandoned on the floor.

Something about the way his smirk had grown in the last few seconds made her acutely aware of just how alone they were right now. With no one around to interrupt or intervene.

But she didn’t want that smirk to go anywhere, either.

“We could talk about what happened the other night in Joliet,” he said.

In Joliet. Their breach of Harkennr’s operations base at the Old Joliet Prison just a few days ago.

Remember remembered that night vividly. But instead of returning to the battle they’d haphazardly fought against Harkennr’s forces guarding the property, her mind took her straight to the aftermath of that little skirmish.

Of Rebecca standing in some human’s back yard in a trailer park on the city outskirts, watching Maxwell first walk away from her completely naked to strip someone else’s clothes off the clothesline.

Of him approaching her again, wearing someone else’s cargo pants and button-up shirt he hadn’t yet bothered to fasten. Of the chiseled lines along his chest and abs dancing beneath the allure of shadows wavering in and out of the vivid starlight.

When Rebecca’s face flushed hot at the memory, she cleared her throat, sat back in her chair, and folded her arms. Then she spun away from Maxwell again so he wouldn’t see the color she was sure had risen into her cheeks.

Steeling her emotions and the effect they seemed to have on her body—which were far more frequent and more visceral than they’d been around anyone else in a very long time—Rebecca gave herself to the count of ten. The flush in her face cooled marginally, and she stopped pretending to think it over.

“Yeah,” she said. “We could talk about that. If you think you can handle it.”

She looked his way in time to catch another frown flickering across Maxwell’s brow. This time, it looked like he was trying not to smile.

“I can handle it,” he grumbled. “And I won’t even mention how you lied to me and distracted me with assembling a team so you could sneak out and almost get yourself killed in the field with zero backup.”

She snorted. “You just did.”

“Fair enough. Then I promise that’s the last time.”

It wasn’t her fault they’d almost gotten their asses handed to them by Harkennr’s soldiers that night. Rebecca had had everything under control on her own until Maxwell had arrived on the scene and given away her position.

Despite that residual irritation, however, she couldn’t help sending a small smile his way. “Good. And I promise I won’t go on and on about you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“Deal.”

Well, that was a start. A much better start than the last time they’d tried to approach the subject.

Too much had taken up their attention after they’d returned from Harkennr’s base. They hadn’t had the time to discuss what they’d seen that night, but now would have been an excellent time for a more in-depth discussion.

If the subject material hadn’t been so depressing.

She saw it in Maxwell’s eyes too as they gazed at each other across the room. He was also thinking of all those prisoners of Harkennr’s—the newest truckload of them freshly delivered to the abandoned prison, or the dozens, maybe even hundreds of others already inside those walls, enduring unspeakable torture for Harkennr’s magical experiments.

As if he could read her mind, Maxwell shifted in his chair and murmured, “Someone needs to stop whatever this Harkennr asshole’s is doing in there.”

Rebecca couldn’t have agreed more. She didn’t have all the details, but she did know the kind of atrocities of which Kordus Harkennr was capable. She also understood the importance of tearing down an operation like that before any more innocent magicals were involved against their will.

Then she remembered the way Maxwell’s wolf had looked at her when he’d stopped in front of the prison’s open front doors while the screams of Harkennr’s current prisoners mingled in the air with the desperate pleas of the newly captured innocents begging to be rescued.

She’d thought he was about to throw himself into the fray, to turn spying on Rebecca that night into what would have undoubtedly become a bungled rescue mission.

But then she’d called him back from the brink of such a stupidly reckless decision by reminding him they had somewhere else to be and other magicals to think of first before throwing themselves blindly into enemy territory they didn’t understand.

“We’ll stop him,” she said, holding Maxwell’s gaze and trying not to let the horrors they’d both seen that night catalyze into the type of rage such injustices sparked in her. Injustices that made the rage that much more difficult to control. “But we have to do it right. We need a plan, and we need to know exactly what we’re up against.”

“I know that.”

The hurt behind Maxwell’s silver eyes struck something deep inside her. Something small and buried and forgotten after so many years of neglect.

It made her want to get out of her chair and go to him. To comfort him. To alleviate all that pain brewing behind the darkening storm cloud of his expression.

But how the hell was she supposed to do that? As his commander? His superior? His boss? Offer reassurance with a handshake or a pat on the back?

That was the only appropriate response to the inappropriate urge of wanting to heal the pain behind Maxwell’s eyes. That pain wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her responsibility.

Rebecca knew that.

She also knew that if she didn’t change the subject soon, she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from going to him.

Not as his commander but as…something else. Something more.

Whether Maxwell might have accepted that kind of attention didn’t matter.

If Rebecca let herself give in to this kind of compulsion—to the irresistible allure of easing the darkness inside Maxwell Hannigan the way she’d never quite eased it within herself—it might as well be game over.

Once that door opened, it could never be closed again.

Once that door opened, all Rebecca’s priorities—her secrets, her identity, her anonymity on Earth—would be irrevocably compromised.

She knew this, and still, as she stared into Maxwell’s glowing silver eyes, she couldn’t help but wonder if it might be worth it.