3. Chapter 3

3

R ebecca had barely reached the end of the stockade’s back hallway before the door slammed open and Maxwell stormed through like a raging hurricane, his silver eyes flashing as he closed the distance between them.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he growled without stopping, like he intended to keep going until he’d succeeded in an impressively violent clash between them.

The darkness inside him pulled at the darkness inside her—the intensity, the need, the intensifying strength of some deep, dark hole growing deeper and deeper…

A hole she couldn’t name, because it wasn’t like she’d had a lot of spare time to pour into studying whatever this new thing was between them.

But now she felt it as if she’d been smacked in the face and simultaneously punched in the gut instead. The ferocity of the emotion pouring off Maxwell in waves and careening right into her made Rebecca pause in the hall and turn around to face him.

She shouldn’t have.

The second she opened her mouth to answer his rather pointless question, Maxwell had already reached her. Now he loomed over her by at least a foot, thrusting his face down toward her as if he still thought he could force his new commander to back down through physical intimidation.

Hadn’t they already established that wasn’t going to work?

“You said five minutes,” he added with another flash of his silver eyes. “I gave you five minutes to interrogate the bastard, and you offered him a chance at The Striving?”

He was so incredibly close now, thrusting his face into hers, swaying slightly as he loomed over her and growled with every heavy, furious exhale.

Her neck already ached from craning it to meet his gaze, and it didn’t help that the physical tingling weight of his gaze on her was more intense now than ever—or that the scent of dew-studded grass and moonlight overlaid with earth and sandalwood made her want to do nothing but breathe him in forever.

Rebecca sucked in a sharp breath and tried to rip herself out of his intensity with words that actually made sense. “I was—”

“You were supposed to interrogate him,” Maxwell snapped, “not throw around The Striving like it’s some kind of game any two-bit wannabe can start playing the second they come in off the streets!”

Time froze again as Rebecca’s steadfastness silently battled the will of this angry, lonely, dangerous shifter who also happened to be her second-in-command. Her Head of security. Her go-to guy for anything and everything the Roth-Da’al wanted to delegate onto someone else’s capable shoulders.

Why the hell was she just standing here letting him speak to her like this?

So she tried again. “It’s really not—”

“Now we know nothing about him,” Maxwell spat, “but we have to accommodate him through The Striving anyway. If I’d known you were going to offer it to him—”

“And why shouldn’t I have made the offer?” Rebecca finally blurted, overcoming that strange hold that unknown darkness in him seemed to have over her at all the wrong moments. Coupled with the electrifying tingle of warmth and pressure and calling that overwhelmed her whenever the shifter was close, it was almost crippling.

“We have The Striving for a reason,” she continued, finally remembering how to stand up to him when he went off the rails like this. “And the challenge comes with its own failsafe. Why shouldn’t the elf get a chance to prove himself, too?”

“He’s an outsider,” Maxwell growled through clenched teeth.

Rebecca blinked slowly at him, hoping it looked more like the expression of someone who wouldn’t be swayed or intimidated than the look of someone who still couldn’t ignore the effects his presence had on her physical body.

“I was an outsider too when I first showed up.” Her voice had gone cold now, hard and steady. Nothing like the raging force of an almost undeniable pull between them only growing stronger the longer they stood here, squaring off in the hallway. “And in case you forgot, I was held in that exact same room when I first got here, just like every other member of this task force before they completed The Striving and proved their worth. That’s the whole point.”

“This is different.” His eyes blazed with an even fiercer silver light as he gritted his teeth and tried to stare her down. It only lasted two seconds before he pulled back.

Or at least it felt like he had. The intensity of him looming over her, boiling over with anger and exasperation, backed off enough for her to feel the change, even if Maxwell hadn’t physically backed off just yet.

“This is different,” he grumbled again.

“And how is that, exactly?”

“To start, I don’t remember you disarming wards and our entire security system before beating a dozen operatives to hell, just for fun.”

If she’d been speaking with anyone else right now, she would have laughed.

Rowan had chosen his own unique approach to entering Shade headquarters. That much was certain.

But Rebecca couldn’t even bring herself to smile now. None of this was funny.

“No.” She held his attention with her own unwavering gaze. “ I just knocked on the front door, and I still got locked up for twenty-four hours first.”

Maxwell scoffed. “You should’ve let me interrogate him before anything else. Even before you spoke with him. Then we’d have real answers about this asshole to help us make the right call. But instead, you went straight to rewarding him before he’s even done anything worth rewarding!”

In lieu of shoving him away from her the way she wanted, just to get him out of her face, Rebecca took a single step backward and inhaled deeply through her nose.

The Thon-Da’al didn’t shove around her subordinates. Not this one, anyway.

“Trust me, Max,” she said, “you wouldn’t have gotten anything else out of him.”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“And if you had , it wouldn’t have mattered.” She folded her arms and raised her eyebrows, daring the shifter to keep arguing with her.

He seemed to realize this conversation wouldn’t change what had already happened. Rebecca hoped he could eventually come to terms with the reality that questioning everything she did wouldn’t make either of their jobs any easier.

“Taking out a dozen operatives is only a fraction of what that elf’s capable of,” she added.

“How do you know what he’s capable of?” Maxwell’s gaze roamed across her face, flickering up and down and side to side before another half-snarl escaped him. “You know who he is. Don’t you?”

Dammit, why did her second in command have to be literally the most suspicious person on this planet?

Rebecca could use her position and the mask of certainty she’d perfected to an effective degree with literally everyone else in Shade. But Maxwell Hannigan had to be the one who consistently tried to see through her and her act.

If she wasn’t careful, one day, he eventually would.

She couldn’t outright tell him she knew Rowan. That would create more questions about how these elves knew each other, why he would have looked for her here , and why she didn’t want anyone else to know they had a history. It was far too dangerous.

At the same time, the thought of lying to Maxwell’s face, even while they squared off in the hallway, formed an equally strong knot of guilt and distaste in Rebecca’s gut. Almost like a physical weight pressing down on her, the pressure of which could only be released as long as she told him something that wasn’t a complete lie and almost the truth.

“He’s a Blackmoon Elf, all right?” she finally hissed before directing a last-minute glance toward the holding room she’d just left. “I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I recognized it instantly. Putting him through The Striving is the only way to handle this. It’s not a reward, okay? It’s a test. Which is why it exists in the first place. A chance for him to prove himself, and then we go from there. I don’t want him here any more than you do, Max. I can promise you that.”

She didn’t expect her final words to have such an effect on him.

Maxwell’s eyes widened at her promise, almost as if she’d taken a solemn vow that meant as much to a shifter as it would have to an elf.

No, she hadn’t had to bury that truth inside a little white lie of omission, like almost everything else she’d just told him.

She didn’t want Rowan here at all. That part was completely true. His presence jeopardized absolutely everything about her new life in Chicago—her identity, her affiliation with Shade, her command of the entire task force, the secrets she’d spent centuries learning to hide and to keep hidden.

All the effort she’d put into reinventing herself as Rebecca Knox, an Earth-dwelling elf who didn’t technically exist.

At least she’d skirted around Maxwell’s interrogation of her now without relying on an absolute lie; until recently, that was something she wouldn’t have had a problem doing.

Now, she suspected that even if she wanted to tell him a bald-faced lie and got it into her head to try, something she didn’t understand and couldn’t explain would be there to stop her. To make those lies impossible.

But that didn’t even make sense.

After studying her a moment longer with his hooded silver eyes and that stony, cold, unreadable expression hinting at constant disapproval and disdain more than any other—if he even had other expressions—Maxwell sighed heavily through his nose and pressed his lips together.

When he spoke next, his voice had calmed enough that the wild growl behind his every word disappeared. “If this elf is as powerful as you say, The Striving won’t even be a problem for him. And if you knew that, you wouldn’t have offered him something so easy to attain.”

Damn.

That was as close to uncovering the truth as he’d ever gotten. For some reason, it made Rebecca break into a wide grin she was almost certain made her look insane. “Well then, it’s a good thing you have an elf as your new commander, isn’t it? Don’t worry, Maxie. I’ll take care of it.”

Then she slipped past him to continue down the hall and leave this part of Shade’s headquarters referred to only as the stockade. Thanks, she assumed, to Maxwell Hannigan’s military background no one else seemed to know that much about, either.

He stayed silent behind her long enough for Rebecca to feel like she’d finally made her point and that he’d leave her alone for more than five minutes.

Then his boots clomped across the linoleum floor behind her before he hissed, “How is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Clearly, she’d been wrong.

Rebecca stopped again and looked at him over her shoulder. It wasn’t supposed to make him feel better. He was just supposed to take what she said and leave it alone.

“Because no one knows how to push an elf’s buttons like another elf,” she said matter-of-factly. “If he passes every challenge I have for him, we’ll know he’s worthy. And then it won’t be a problem anymore.”

“That doesn’t make him worthy.”

“Well it was good enough to let me in,” she snapped. “But now you clearly think what was good enough for everyone else no longer is. And in case you’ve also forgotten, that last magical to successfully complete The Striving was me.”

While her gaze registered Maxwell storming toward her again, his fists clenched and his scowl darkening by the second, a little voice in the back of her mind told her she just needed to get out of here before something integral snapped.

But the surge of excitement and expectation and rightness growing stronger with his every step closer drowned out everything else.

Was she just coming up with random, stupid excuses to keep talking to him when this conversation needed to end two minutes ago?

Then she was out of time. Maxwell had reached her and stopped to loom over her once again, barely containing his own frustration.

“I remember,” he murmured.

Blue Hells, he stood so close. Again.

Rebecca wondered if he would barrel into her and try to shove her aside so he could be the first through the door instead.

Or maybe he was sick of following the rules and had just been waiting for her to screw up so he could justify acting against her in a much more permanent way than he’d been willing to risk.

He wasn’t chasing her down through this hallway because he wanted to be up in her face, right?

That would have been ridiculous.

That was exactly what it felt like.

“In case you’ve forgotten,” he added, leaning in so close, the heat radiated off his chest while his breath fluttered against Rebecca’s face as he spoke, “ everything has changed since you completed The Striving.”

“Of course it’s changed,” she spat back. “It had to. It would have anyway, one way or the other.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Rebecca’s breath hitched in her throat as another surge of that tingling pull between them—like crackling electricity leaping from anode to cathode in a battery—intensified at his closeness. She could have sworn the sensation made her dizzy, though her vision never blurred as she stared up into those glowing eyes.

“You can’t honestly think I’m responsible for everything that’s happened since I showed up here,” she said.

The corner of Maxwell’s lips twitched, as if he were fighting back a bitter laugh.

Part of her wished he would laugh, that he would exhibit anything but disdain and distrust whenever they had a real conversation.

“I’m not saying it’s all on you,” Maxwell replied slowly. “But I’m not saying you’ve had nothing to do with it, either.”

That darkness inside him wormed its way toward her, latching onto something Rebecca couldn’t name. Something she recognized anyway—an indescribable need .

Was he seriously trying to blame this on her now?

In that moment, Rebecca would have taken all the blame if it meant Maxwell Hannigan stopped trying to gift-wrap his own suspicion as half-assed attempts to take her seriously.

She might have done anything just to release herself from that all-consuming pull his presence had on her physical body.

Whether the same could be said of him was anyone’s guess.

But his eyes flashed again with a renewed challenge as he leaned in closer, his energy washing over her with a confusing mix of desire and demand, an offer and a threat, before he murmured, “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”