14. Chapter 14

14

R ebecca’s heels clicked sharply across the library floor, her forced calm a brittle mask over the fury boiling inside her. She was done playing nice. Done pretending Maxwell’s shadow didn’t press against her every nerve.

Could she have taken the emergency exit through the magical wall-portal? Sure. But that wasn’t the point.

The point now was that she wanted Maxwell to see her on her way out. She wanted him to get a good look at how much he hadn’t rattled her, even when what she meant to show him was a complete lie.

Especially when it was a lie.

She felt his gaze on her even now—an unrelenting pressure. The shifter thought he could corner her, could read her, but if Maxwell wanted to play games, he was in for a nasty surprise.

Rebecca could play games. She was done playing by his rules.

Which was, unfortunately, just one more dangerous tightrope she’d have to walk with all the others until the tension within Shade blew over.

Until this insurgent rebellion either fizzled out with a dying gasp, or they succeeded and forced Aldous out of command for good.

She risked tossing a scathing glare across the library in Maxwell’s direction when she stalked past him and his security team on her way to the exit.

As if he’d always known she’d come this way, the shifter looked up from an open book in one of his guys’ hands to meet her gaze. Just a casual lift of his chin, but the mockery in it was palpable.

He wanted her to know he was watching. Fine.

Rebecca tossed her hair over one shoulder, flashed him a tight smile, and winked.

She didn’t get to see his reaction before the library door gave under her quick shove, but it was probably better that way. What mattered was that he’d seen what she wanted him to see—that his intimidation tactics hadn’t bothered her one bit.

That she had nothing to hide.

Maxwell had to see those things, because the only other option was that he uncovered the truth. Including how much he was getting to her, unraveling her thoughts, setting her blood to boiling beneath her skin.

If he even knew that much, it would undoubtedly ruin everything.

Everything she’d seen of him in the last twenty-four hours made it impossible to tell whose side he was really on or where his loyalties truly lie.

From this point on, the only thing she could really count on was that Maxwell Hannigan would do everything in his power to make every second of her day that much harder to control.

Whether he’d been spying for Aldous or really did support the other operatives in their covert plans didn’t matter anymore.

If Rebecca didn’t get out of the compound soon, she was going to explode.

And when she exploded, that generally meant things went dangerously wrong for everyone around her, too.

She tried all day to keep her frustration and impatience in check. The secret meeting in the library had thrown a serious wrench in her plans, mostly because she had no idea what the others expected from her, and it hadn’t been explained.

Worse than that, Leonard and Diego seemed to have disappeared entirely. Or they were avoiding her on purpose. She couldn’t quite tell.

Either way, there was no denying her role within Shade had taken on a different meaning, a different flavor soured by the fact that all her attempts to keep sliding by under the radar had failed.

Rebecca had been sucked into Shade’s inner workings anyway, far deeper than she’d ever wanted, and she couldn’t find an immediate escape route.

The pressure had built so quickly, she didn’t know what to do with it.

The common room was off limits; she couldn’t blow off steam in the compound’s main gathering space without anyone noticing. If she headed for the training rooms at the other end of the building, she’d be more likely to kill someone in an accidental sparring match.

And no matter where she went, Maxwell Hannigan seemed to find even the smallest sliver of a reason to be there too.

For the rest of the day, the shifter had apparently made it a point to follow Rebecca from a distance, showing up at the last second with his infuriating habit of watching her from across the room and glaring at her unendingly.

As if the whole in-house-rebellion thing had been her idea in the first place .

As if he was just waiting for her to slip up, to do something stupid, so he’d finally have a solid reason to petition for her removal from the organization right along with Aldous’s impending removal too.

Maybe even instead of Aldous.

But even Maxwell’s actions made no damn sense.

If he was so intent on continuing to do his job as Head of Security, who answered to Aldous and Aldous only, why the hell had he even been in the library with his security team in the first place?

To spy on the budding rebellion? To take all their secrets back to the changeling in charge and turn them in for extra brownie points?

Whose side was he really on?

The avalanche of unknown factors tumbling down on top of her from all sides drove Rebecca insane, and she didn’t even have a safe space within the compound to vent her frustrations at the horribly shitty timing of it all.

Because everywhere she went, the shifter was somehow seconds behind her, always watching.

Even the idea of locking herself up in her room—the one place that had brought her some peace and quiet and solitude over the last six months—felt like a trap.

She was sure she’d end up putting holes in the walls and destroying everything just to let off the worst of the maddening pressure inside her, but even that came with a guarantee of someone else noticing and asking questions.

So for the rest of the day, she milled around the compound, unable to release the energy she desperately needed to release, avoiding Maxwell whenever possible, and waiting for the moment when it would be hardest for him to make her the target of his incessantly creepy vigil.

That moment eventually presented itself at dinner.

With Aldous apparently taking a break from commanding obnoxiously arbitrary missions at the last second and breaking up Shade’s ranks for pointless objectives, the compound’s common room was exceptionally crowded tonight once Bor rang the bell for dinner chow.

Rebecca forced herself to wait until she was almost certain every single Shade member had made an appearance in the common room. At that point, there were already too many of them to count.

Which also made maintaining a constant visual on any one specific person damn near impossible.

She’d been counting on it.

As per his newfound MO with Rebecca today, Maxwell had already found her in—or followed her to—the common room just before Bor rang that bell .

She felt his eyes on her even before the first wave of off-duty operatives entered from multiple hallways feeding into the beating heart of Shade’s headquarters building.

Forcing herself not to make eye contact with one extremely suspicious and overbearing shifter intent on rooting out her secrets was particularly difficult. Especially when she’d felt his gaze on her at almost every second since the library meeting and now had to fight back the urge to poke those silver-glowing eyes out of his head.

Add that to the pressure of maintaining her composure when all she really wanted was to rip something to shreds with her darkest magic before obliterating it out of existence—all so she could clear her mind enough to think properly again—and Rebecca was walking on eggshells in a way she hadn’t needed to in decades.

Around herself.

Still, she had to wait for the perfect moment, the ultimate cover—just enough chaos within an everyday occurrence in the common room that the normal and the mundane became an unexpected bit of concealment to make her escape.

If Maxwell saw her leave, he would no doubt follow her wherever Rebecca’s pent-up energy led her.

If he followed her, he would undoubtedly see exactly what she’d been hiding for so long—from him, from her enemies, from her alleged allies, from her past. Sometimes even from herself.

At this point, with insurrection brewing from the ground up and so many magicals on edge as they maneuvered through whatever plans had been forged for dealing with Aldous, Rebecca couldn’t afford any more of her secrets or her anonymity to be snatched away from her.

She had to blend into the crowd. Become invisible. Make herself practically nonexistent until she got the hell out and finally found enough space to do the one thing she’d been born and bred and conditioned to do.

Until she could be herself .

And if she didn’t get out now, Rebecca’s true self would end up revealing itself all on its own, beyond her control, and everything would change.

No one in Shade could afford that kind of change. Not before she’d apparently been selected as “the perfect elf” for Leonard and Diego’s secret plan, and certainly not after.

The growing crowd quickly filled in the available space. The deafening clash of countless conversations echoed through the room. The commotion of bodies bustled back and forth as plates and trays and silverware clashed in the kitchen .

With all that happening, no one else noticed the elf making her way toward the hallway leading straight back to the private living quarters at the other end of the compound.

No one but Maxwell, of course.

Dammit, could the guy just not take a hint?

Rebecca watched him from the corner of her eye as she pretended to pay attention to some nonsensical argument taking place in front of her. If he was still this diligent about watching her, getting out from under his constant scrutiny might be harder than she’d anticipated.

Then the opportunity she’d been waiting for finally arrived.

An enormous roar of surprise and approval erupted from the entire gathering when a new hulking shape emerged from the hallway she’d chosen.

Cheers and whistles filled the common room with a deafening strength, and all heads turned to see Titus ducking beneath the archway, finally making a Zida-approved entrance for the last meal of the day.

The vuulbor’s head was still wrapped in bandages, as were several patches of his bare back, chest, and arms. Presumably from his electrifying contact with their enemy target’s protection wards last night.

Though the majority of his wounds were covered by those bandages, Zida had done nothing to hide the darker streaks of slate-gray scarring zigzagging across Titus’s already stone-colored flesh.

Burn marks, most likely.

Whatever that magical RPG launcher had been created or even programmed to do—before Rebecca’s systematic destruction of it to save her team’s asses—the griybreki had nearly perfected their protection wards to double as a last-minute offensive strategy. The shock of touching live magic like that was undoubtedly meant to kill on contact.

If it had been anyone but Titus stumbling backward into the wards, those wards would have killed. And everyone in Shade knew it.

Which made everyone here really fucking happy to see the vuulbor alive and kicking.

Feeling Maxwell’s gaze on her as she moved through the press of bodies, Rebecca plastered a smile onto her face, gaping like an idiot at the side of Titus’s head as if she meant to make her way toward him to celebrate the guy’s return with everyone else.

To anyone else watching her—like the shifter—she made it look like she just couldn’t wait to clap a hand down on Titus’s shoulder and congratulate him for surviving.

As soon as his enormous body blocked her view of Maxwell, though—and his view of her —Rebecca veered off the hallway leading to the common room at the last second and headed instead for the narrow staircase at the back of the building.

Only when she reached the door into that stairwell did she dare look over her shoulder, but there was no sign of Maxwell.

Hopefully, she’d lost him in the confusion. That was the goal.

Frustrating him and his attempts to spy on her simply weren’t Rebecca’s problem.

She grimaced when the door into that stairwell let out a raucous squeal of protest as she opened it. But knowing how disturbingly loud the common room got when everyone gathered there for a meal, she was counting on no one being able to hear the sounds of her quick getaway.

It wasn’t like they weren’t allowed to leave the premises when they weren’t on an active mission.

It wasn’t like she was breaking any rules.

After the way she’d been singled out in the library, though, the idea of capturing anyone else’s attention tonight almost made her nauseous.

No. It pissed her right off.

It made her resent everything she’d done to get to where she was and everyone who’d forced her hand to this point.

The point where sneaking out of a magical-vigilante headquarters compound just after dark was something she actually had to deal with now.

That was what made her nauseous. The frustration and disappointment and a dash of helplessness thrown in for fun.

It wasn’t supposed to have turned out this way. Yet here she was, unable to steer the direction of her current ship.

Living the last six months as Rebecca Knox of Shade had already garnered her way too much attention. A dangerous amount.

That shouldn’t have happened, but circumstances had stacked up against her until she’d given herself no other choice.

Now she couldn’t afford any more attention. This was her max. The threshold.

She was teetering on the edge.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t still blow off some steam where nobody else was looking.

And if some random stranger happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to catch the brunt of Rebecca’s vented magical frustration, well…

That was a risk she was willing to take.

Random strangers were harmless. It was the monsters she knew that gave her the most trouble. The monster every member currently believed her to be within the underground vigilante task force .

The monster she was , though?

That was far worse than anything Shade had ever seen and anything else Shade had yet to see within their blinded future.

The monster Rebecca Bloodshadow had spent a seeming eternity being crafted and molded and tortured into becoming had no team. She was alone.

She had to keep it that way, or everyone currently in her life—whether they knew her or only thought they did—was entirely screwed.

The hard part was finding a dark, quiet place in the middle of Chicago where the real Rebecca Bloodshadow could be alone long enough to keep from losing her mind.

Where everything she’d buried deep inside could break free, unseen, unobstructed.

Otherwise, there would be no hiding the monster lurking beneath the surface.