25. Chapter 25

25

T he weight of Aldous’ s words landed slowly, like a delayed punch to the gut.

Hannigan . He’d been right beside her, hadn’t he?

No, he’d caught her from falling when she’d reached the garage…

By the Blood, she’d never live that one down after this.

She couldn’t help but scan Shade’s ranks for their shifter Head of Security, part of her hoping he’d disappeared so she wouldn’t have to deal with him and part of her hoping to find him, because…

What? Because he hadn’t let her fall on her face? Because for a moment, he’d actually looked concerned for her? Because she couldn’t be within ten feet of him without feeling that irresistible pull toward him she’d never felt for anyone, even people she’d actually liked ?

Who was she kidding? She’d been delirious.

“I swear to the fucking Hakali,” Aldous bellowed, “if someone doesn’t tell me right now what all this is about…”

A rustle of movement came from behind Rebecca and to the left. Before she could turn around to see who’d caused it, a warm, sturdy weight settled at the back of her elbow.

A passing reassurance—or a warning.

It was just her elbow, sure, but her elbow was inconveniently close to her forearm and that blueish-gray handprint left from the homunculus.

Rebecca started to jerk away and snap at whoever couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. But then another burst of that warm, tingling rush flared up from her elbow, and she looked up to find Maxwell stepping past her instead. “What are you—”

“Don’t get involved,” he growled without looking at her. Then the warm pressure of his hand slid away from her as he stepped past and out of the gathered crowd toward Aldous .

Don’t get involved? Because he was trying to protect her, or because he didn’t trust her to handle whatever came next?

Neither option was any of his business, either way.

If it had been anyone else, she would have called him on it and refused to be told what to do. But the feeling of his hand on her—even a split second after it had disappeared—filled her with an insanely strong urge to take off after him just so they wouldn’t have to be apart.

The fact that she was having these thoughts at all, especially about Maxwell, made Rebecca force herself to stay put and watch the rest of this play out.

She couldn’t start following this shifter around like some clueless, doe-eyed little girl. What was wrong with her?

Or better yet, what had been in those magical, invisible smelling salts Zida had given her?

The crowded task force parted for Maxwell, then the Head of Security stepped into the center of the garage to face a howling, flailing Aldous demanding to know what the hell had happened to his Headquarters building.

After a few seconds, the seething changeling whirled around again and found his trusty second-in-command right in front of him. “Finally! What’s going on, Hannigan? I should’ve had a report on this the second it started!”

Maxwell stood rigidly at attention, looking straightforward without meeting Aldous’s gaze. “The compounds under attack.”

“No shit!”

Maxwell’s lips pressed tightly together in a grim line as Aldous furiously paced back and forth in front of him.

From where she stood, Rebecca could only see Maxwell’s profile, but he really didn’t look like he had anything under control at the moment. Another softer, smaller explosion above in the compound only accentuated that point.

But if she’d stood in the shifter’s shoes, she wouldn’t have wanted to converse with Aldous, either. Especially in front of the entire task force, most of whom had recently been plotting to overthrow their Commander barely twenty-four hours ago.

Was that why he’d told her not to get involved? He thought Rebecca was about to execute Operation Overthrow Aldous without even knowing what the plan was?

He must have purposefully missed that second secret meeting earlier too.

“Well?” Aldous whirled on Maxwell again, as if he’d already asked another question, gaping like an idiot. “Who’s behind it?”

“We haven’t figured that out yet,” Maxwell grumbled .

“Unacceptable!” Aldous barked. “You have your team for a reason , Hannigan. You have this job for a reason. And if there’s someone here in my house, sitting on bombs, I expect you to be the first person who knows what the fuck’s going on!”

Maxwell dipped his head in a curt nod. “My team’s stationed around the building’s perimeter. No sign of an external breach, no sign of enemy combatants, no trail to follow. Meaning, at the moment, no assailant to apprehend.”

Aldous stopped pacing and glared at the shifter, his green-tinted skin starting to show through in splotchy patches again as his emotions grew stronger than his rational thinking—not that much of a stretch. “And then ?”

“Then I recalled my team,” Maxwell stated without the slightest change in his flat monotone.

“Why the fuck would you do something so unbelievably stupid?” Aldous howled, tossing his hands in the air.

The rest of Shade’s ranks had abandoned all other conversation now. No one spoke. No one moved. Everyone watched the shifter Head of Security get a particularly undeserved verbal beating from their leader.

For as long as Rebecca had been with them, this was the worst form of public unraveling she’d seen from their commander. She certainly wouldn’t have expected Maxwell to bear the full brunt of it. He’d been Aldous’s little lapdog the whole time.

Unless he wasn’t…

Maxwell didn’t show any symptom of discomfort or frustration or even aggression. In fact, he stood perfectly still and answered Aldous’s question as if the changeling had respectfully asked for further details. “After assessing the situation, I concluded that recalling my team to regroup with the rest of our forces here was the best plan of action—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Aldous screamed. “This is your job!”

“We can’t fight an enemy that doesn’t seem to exist, Aldous,” Maxwell growled—his first sign of contention. When the changeling leveled his blazing-green gaze at the shifter, Maxwell added a quick, firm, “Sir.”

With one of his signature rabid snarls, Aldous spun in a tight circle, grabbing greasy fistfuls of his slicked-back dark-green hair, then returned to his pacing. “We need to find these motherfuckers and make them pay! No one comes after me in my house like this. Do you understand?”

No one said a word, including Maxwell.

Only then did Aldous seem to realize he’d had one of his little meltdowns in front of the entire organization—the private task force under his twenty-four-seven command .

From what Rebecca could gather, most of them had made it down here even before Aldous had bothered to show his face.

So where had the changeling been before all this?

Blinking quickly, Aldous turned back toward Maxwell and tossed a hand in the shifter’s direction.

“Well?” he barked. “What are we gonna do about it now? Why is everyone just standing here? The armory’s over there! I want a weapon in everyone’s fucking hand, and then I want every sorry son of a bitch in this building to start looking for the morons trying to bring me down!

“And then, oh then , I’m gonna show the little pricks what happens when somebody messes with my shit in my fucking house ! They won’t get away with this. I can promise you that! I want their heads! Let’s go!”

A rousing battle cry.

It just came from the wrong leader.

A stark lack of movement among the gathered magicals greeted Aldous in response. For his everyday obliviousness, he was particularly quick to pick up on no one immediately jumping to follow his every command.

With his green eyes wide and flashing furiously in the garage’s low overhead light, he spun around once, twice, three times, searching the multiple dozens of faces all staring back at him. Then he stormed toward Maxwell again as if the shifter had set this whole thing up on purpose.

Rebecca almost laughed. If only it had been Maxwell.

Then again, she didn’t know a thing about where he’d been while she’d hidden away in her room over the last twenty-four hours. Could Maxwell have shown up at the rebellion’s next secret meeting she’d missed on purpose and taken over from there?

Would she get the boot afterward, just like Aldous?

Or maybe this whole “mystery attack” on the compound had been the shifter’s plan all along…

“What’s going on here?” Aldous snarled. “Get them moving, Hannigan!”

He whirled back toward the rest of Shade again, his entire face twisted into a tightly pinched scowl as he hopped around like a drunken curse-weaver whose threads had just backfired.

“Get your weapons! I want every useless fuck in this place with a firearm in his hands and whatever the hell else we keep down here. Now! Why isn’t anyone moving?”

Again, none of the active operatives moved to obey. Maxwell, however, nodded at their leader one more time. “We already opened the armory. Everyone loyal to Shade is armed and ready to defend against this threat.”

The shifter had the balls to break his stance for the first time and slowly turn his head just enough in Rebecca’s direction that those silver eyes of his flashed beneath the low lights as they settled directly on her face.

Dammit, what was he doing ?

She couldn’t tell if that look was supposed to be a warning for her to get ready for whatever happened next, or if he was trying to pin the blame for something else on her. Again.

Everyone was not armed and ready to defend. Rebecca wasn’t.

Unless, of course, this was supposed to be the shifter’s way of telling her he didn’t believe she was loyal to Shade.

She’d shown up rather late to the party and hadn’t gotten her chance to run through the underground armory and take her pick of automatic human weapons beside a broad selection of firearms augmented by magical technology.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t still magically armed and dangerous and couldn’t defend what she needed to defend, but still.

Maxwell was obviously singling her out as an exception. Even if it was only obvious to the two of them.

Almost as if this entire conversation had been staged, as soon as Maxwell mentioned the task force being armed and ready, the large metal cage-like door to their most dangerous weapons stores clanged shut with a reverberating jangle.

Then four Shade numbers appeared from the back of their garage, multiple weapons in hand, escorted by one of Maxwell’s security guys. When Maxwell turned around to view the last members to leave the armory, the blackhorn of his compound-bound security squad walking with them jingled a large set of keys in his hand.

Then Rebecca finally took in the full picture laid out before her.

Every single active field operative who’d sworn their allegiance to Shade was currently armed with their modified weapons of choice, all of which loaded and fully prepared to be used, because that was how they did things here.

The entire task force had been armed and ready from the moment she’d stumbled down those stares, while the rest of their compound got blasted to smithereens by who knew what was up there.

How did that even make sense?

Unless, of course, Maxwell Hannigan had been planning his own takeover from the beginning.

Unless Shade’s Head of Security had allowed Leonard and Diego’s secret meetings to go unchecked, without stepping in to intervene, because it only meant the shifter’s plans to take Shade into his own hands would go entirely unnoticed until the last second.

And, because Rebecca had refused to stay out of it, Maxwell’s plans had now gone entirely unchallenged.

Because of her, there was no one to stand up to the shifter now, and there was no telling how far he would go to get what he wanted out of this.

Even worse, if Maxwell Hannigan took charge of Shade tonight, his first order of business would be to evolve from eliminating enemies to eliminating anyone he saw as a potential threat, too.

No one was safe, least of all Rebecca.

The frigid certainty in her chest only solidified, and she’d never been more sure of one thing: the shifter viewed her as enemy number one, and this wouldn’t end until one of them was gone.