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I f the crumbling brick wall at her back hadn’t been there, she might have backed away a second time when Maxwell stepped even closer, nearly pressing his entire body against her to pin her there.
She had nowhere else to go, anyway.
She didn’t want anywhere else to go.
Then Maxwell lifted a hand, brought it toward her throat, seemed to change his mind, and reached for her hair instead. But he withdrew his hand again without touching her, just enough to hint that he was afraid to touch her at all.
His hand trembled.
“I felt the explosion,” he rumbled. “When it happened. I felt…”
Oh.
That was what had been bothering him this whole time.
Why hadn’t she been able to feel that in him? How deeply had he tried to bury it?
“That makes a lot more sense,” she said, surprised by her own breathlessness and the fact that now she didn’t even try to get away from him. “Ripping off heads with your teeth isn’t normally your style.”
“I thought you had…” Drawing in a trembling breath, he lowered his hand a bit more and dipped his head even closer, exploring every detail of her face with an urgently flickering gaze. As if something compelled him to memorize every part of it, and only he knew he was running out of time to do so.
When he opened his mouth again, nothing came out. The audible click of his next heavy swallow matched all the agony suddenly etched across his features.
Maxwell’s stony mask had not only cracked but shattered completely.
He looked like he was about to break at any moment.
“It didn’t seem possible that you had survived,” he added, his voice barely above a whisper. “I had already tracked down the grimbúl by the time it hit me, and I…”
Another shaky exhale, and the desperate flicker of his gaze across her face—lighting up Rebecca’s skin with their burning intensity—and of his closeness slowed onto a calmer dance of relief he seemed not quite willing to fully accept.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he whispered.
“So it was a present, then,” Rebecca muttered, thinking instantly of Eduardo’s head tossed at her feet and unable to stop her every thought from bursting out of her mouth. Obviously, now was the least appropriate time for it.
Maxwell blinked through his surprise and tilted his head. “What?”
“Never mind,” she hastily replied. “But you don’t have to wonder what to think now. I’m right here. Somehow, we’re all still here.”
“I…” Hissing, he spun away from her and stepped back. Apparently, that was only so he could look at her again with wide eyes. To take in all of her from a distance as his fists clenched his sides.
“I realize this now ,” he growled, “but what I felt? It wasn’t…”
His voice broke, and he turned away from her again.
“It wasn’t what you thought it was,” she finished for him, fighting the urge to gasp beneath the overpowering weight of his churning emotions. His relief battling with an acute fear of losing again what he’d already thought he’d lost. All of it tinged with an underlying fury that he’d been forced to endure such a fear in the first place. “That’s what matters.”
Rebecca caught her breath, trying not to sag against the wall at her back beneath the intensity of so much feeling inside the shifter. Far more feeling than she would ever have given him credit for if she weren’t experiencing it all for herself, in real time.
“I didn’t mean for you to feel any of it,” she murmured. “I knew what I was doing. And if I distracted you with what you felt and whatever you thought you—”
He lunged at her with a snarl, as if she had any intention of running from him. As if there was even anywhere for her to go. “I felt all of it, Rebecca. The heat. The energy. That… power . And then…”
Then he stepped even closer, again. Far too close for any type of comfort. Tempting the need and longing against which they both struggled.
Rebecca instantly realized she was now struggling against it completely on her own.
Maxwell didn’t stop.
He pressed himself viciously against her, pinning her to the crumbling brick wall at her back, as if convinced only this would save him.
“And then I didn’t feel you at all,” he whispered.
Every racing beat of his heart thundered through his chest and into her, crashing through her mind, filling her with a wave after trembling wave of its desperate, urgent rhythm.
She tried to breathe, somehow missed the mark, and tried it again, nearly incapacitated. Unable to do anything but stand there and let herself fall endlessly into the shifter’s silver eyes.
Maybe she didn’t fight off the need of their connection as fiercely as she once had, or as fiercely as she probably should have right now. But enough of her awareness remained to not let herself give into it entirely.
Maxwell, however, had clearly already crossed that bridge.
His chest heaved against her as he studied every inch of her, the heat from his bare chest radiating against her face.
Or maybe that was the heat of this damn connection. Or of another flush in her cheeks Rebecca was just as helpless to prevent as the last time. And the time before that.
Did it even fucking matter anymore?
This time, when he lifted a hand toward her face, he didn’t withdraw it but brushed loose hair away from her cheek, his touch as gentle as the breath of a sleeping kitten. Then his other hand rose toward her as well.
The sudden jolt of electrifying energy racing between them when he cupped when he cupped her cheeks in both hands did make her gasp.
Was this new tightness in her chest really hers? Or was it or his?
Maxwell’s silver gaze flickered back and forth between her eyes. “How?”
By the Blood, he was making this impossible.
If it hadn’t been for the pressure of all their immediate safety bearing down on her so forcefully after this last battle, she probably would have submitted to everything.
But several very real dangers loomed over all of them, still, and it was just a matter of time before another threat rose to thwart them.
Rebecca was somehow far more capable of keeping her head in this moment. Of denying for a little while longer the complete surrender their connection demanded of them, even while Maxwell had clearly lost all sense of trying to do the same.
Because she still didn’t know the truth. Maxwell’s truth.
Whether she could trust him with anything else beyond what she’d already risked.
Where that fucking rune on his chest had truly come from, and why it was there.
She could have sworn she felt that ancient elven mark pulsing on his chest with its own nefarious rhythm.
That tiny thread of lingering doubt was enough to keep her from total submission.
Maxwell didn’t seem to notice her continuing struggle, his hands still pressed so gently against her cheeks, the surprising softness of his palms nearly searing her flesh.
“How did you survive something like that?” he asked, pressing himself against her even harder, as if it would squeeze the answer out of her. “How could anyone?”
She’d lost the ability to move now. Too late to slip away from this, or to shove him away just so she could get a full breath.
How had she survived the devastating bomb Zida’s greatest power had become?
She swallowed and hardly heard the words flowing from between her lips. “Most of your questions seem to have the same answer lately.”
He dipped his head even closer. It could have been a nod, or he might have still been fighting this pull, knowing just as well as she did what happened when they let themselves get close enough for this thing between them to take over.
When they willingly relinquished even a fraction of their will to its hold.
But she felt the understanding in him even before he voiced it.
“Because of who you are,” he breathed.
It wasn’t a question.
“Basically,” she whispered. “Yes.”
She had to stop this before it went any further.
Whatever this thing was pulling them together, it had almost seized every ounce of control from her once before, during one kiss in the infirmary.
Imagine what it might do now, both of them on their feet and uninjured, no immediate excuses to make them pull away…
Rebecca’s gaze dropped on its own to Maxwell’s chest and landed on the edge of the black-inked rune still peeking out from beneath the unbuttoned side of his open shirt.
She couldn’t figure out why her fingers tingled so fiercely with every possible sensation—heat and cold. bitter sharpness and tantalizing softness,; repulsion and desire. All at the same time.
Until she realized she had already lifted her hand to Maxwell’s chest and now traced her fingers so achingly close to the damn rune across the rise of his hardened muscle.
Close to the edge of the black mark, but no farther.
Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to touch it directly.
But in that moment, she knew the secret behind this mark, on this shifter, was the key to answering every question either of them could possibly raise.
She didn’t want to touch it now, but she couldn’t make herself stop touching him .
Was any of this even real?
“I’m starting to think we might have more in common than either of us is willing to admit.”
Maxwell sucked in a startlingly sharp breath and grimaced, as if the brush of her fingers across his chest had burned him.
With a hint of golden light flashing at the edges of the black mark, right there at her fingertips.
Before she could be sure, he grabbed her wrist—not forcefully enough to hurt her but merely to draw her finger away from his chest.
And just like that, he had her full attention again, without having to share it between himself and the elven rune he understood as little as she did.
“If that’s the case,” he murmured with another growl, “if we have more in common than we want to admit, I imagine our excuses for avoiding the truth have just run out.”
Our excuses. As in both of them, together, on the same side of this.
He was right. No explanation necessary.
Shade now had nothing to their name but their own lives and a number of pre-existing enemies, however diminished, who would jump at the first opportunity to take that away from them.
Rebecca and Maxwell couldn’t afford to avoid this any longer.
The shifter didn’t have to tell her where he stood on the issue. She felt it all surging out of him.
He was willing to tell her everything she wanted to know, right here, right now. All she had to do was ask.
But was Rebecca willing to return the favor of honesty—and most likely their own survival—in kind?
In the woods, under Rowan’s dome, he’d already told her he had no idea what the rune on his chest truly was, or how it had gotten there in the first place, permanently inked into his flesh. He’d been as surprised by and clueless about the elven symbol’s flaring glow and the pain it had caused him.
And when he’d claimed it had always been there, Rebecca had believed him.
Now, the shifter asked for the truth of things on both their parts, and Rebecca wanted nothing more than to trust him with all of it.
She’d never wanted anything so badly, it hurt. She couldn’t help it.
Probably their damned connection pulling the strings again…
But even if it wasn’t, she had every reason to want more with him. They’d already been through so much together, and still, after all of it, Maxwell hadn’t turned on her despite countless available opportunities.
She hadn’t turned on him, either.
But she still didn’t know , and now, having the Azyyt Ra’al on her trail only made the danger of giving in to the shifter that much more deadly, if he turned out to be someone she should never have trusted in the first place.
The Azyyt Ra’al…
That was it!
The one piece of the puzzle she now had to give her certainty, one way or the other, of just how much she could really trust him. Of whether any of this between them was genuine or merely part of her enemies’ nefarious long game.
She hadn’t had this tactic at her disposal before the Azyyt Ra’al’s attack beside the bridge, and she certainly hadn’t had time to realize she finally possessed a viable way to test Maxwell for sure.
To really know the truth, even if it was a mere sliver of the greater whole.
Until now.
One question. That was all it would take.
If Maxwell revealed even the barest sliver of hesitation, the smallest flicker of pain as he answered—which would mark it as a lie she would then feel radiating off him like needles as he stood so close like this, pressing himself against her—she would know .
It would prove in an instant he was either lying to her or avoiding the whole truth. Their connection would make it instantly clear.
If he did lie to her or twist the truth in any way, Rebecca would then be certain the shifter she wanted so badly to trust and to understand and to keep on her side was just one more enemy to add to the endless list.
It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d made such a discovery. Rowan’s betrayal had cut deeper than she’d had the chance to truly acknowledge.
But if she lost Maxwell to the same kind of betrayal…
If that happened, Rebecca would have nothing. No one.
It was almost too unbearably painful to even imagine, but the pain alone wouldn’t stop her.
Pain had been an old friend for a long time, returning again and again, always there to remind her she was still alive.
And if she wanted to stay alive, to remain free, to have any life at all…
She had to know .