AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Why we shared?” I asked, resting a hand on the doorframe. “It just happened.”
“It just happened.” A muscle in Flint’s jaw twitched. “With our prisoner.”
“Well, I wanted to do it,” Arden said with a shrug. “So, does that really matter?”
Flint didn’t have an answer for that. He left, shutting the door harder than necessary.
“He’ll get over it,” Jagger said to Arden, putting his arm around her.
“He will?” She cuddled up to me when I got back into bed.
“Eventually.” I hoped.
Chapter16
Flint
Lex, Jagger, and I had a regular status meeting every day, though we didn’t have a set start time. Usually, both of them arrived around the same time as I did—early, with coffee and their focus on our kingdom. It was vast, spanning a few massive fae islands in what the humans called the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Not only did we have to keep them hidden from humans, but we also had to make sure that the Lords that oversaw the operations there reported how the fae there were. Just because Rouhaven was the capital and the most populated didn’t mean we could ignore everyone else.
But today, I was alone in our shared office with a to-do list and an enormous amount of frustration. Were they still in Arden’s bed? Both of them? I wasn’t prudish, so the fact that they’d shared her wasn’t the issue. It was the fact that she was still our prisoner, and she hadn’t delivered the artifact. We’d extended a small amount of trust to her, but did that mean succumbing to lust?
She didn’t seem like the kind of female to use her sexuality to get what she wanted, but we’d never dealt with anyone like her before. I planned to keep my guard up, even if the others didn’t. One of us had to have some sense.
“Morning,” Lex said, strolling into the office with a steaming hot mug of coffee in his hand. His usually easy-going energy was even more relaxed, which only annoyed me more.
“Morning. Glad you finally decided to come.”
Lex sighed, sitting down at his desk. “Are you still upset about yesterday? You know we’re allowed to relax, right? Let the tension out? Not be all business all the time?”
I ignored his grin.
“I’m more upset that we still don’t have the artifact and you two have gotten sidetracked.” I glanced at the door. “Where’s Jagger?”
“He’s coming.” Lex used his element to blow cool air over his drink. “He and Arden are. We actually talked about a few things, too. She has a plan.”
“Fine.” I thumbed through a book about prophecies that I had our historian pull for me. It wasn’t helpful—I already knew that prophecies weren’t cut and dry, and that most of the time, you had to wait for them to happen to see what they truly meant.
We worked in silence until Jagger and Arden finally arrived. Both of them were unusually relaxed, just like Lex. The calmer they were, the more wound up I became inside.
“Morning. Arden has a plan,” Jagger said, picking up an armchair—my armchair—from the corner and putting it down closer to our desks.
Arden sat in it, crossing her legs and cupping her mug with both hands. “I don’t have all the nitty-gritty details, but I have a lead and some ideas.”
“Go ahead.” I sat back in my seat and crossed my arms over my chest. “Tell me what the plan is.”
Arden wasn’t intimidated by my stare in the slightest. “I heard a few rumors that the Forsaken Lunars are lying low and not committing any crimes at the moment. They aren’t from my most credible sources, but I figured you guys would get reports of crimes connected to them. Right?”
Suddenly they were criminals to her? The progress steadied me in the face of whatever was going on between them.
“We haven’t had any reports of activity from the Forsaken Lunars in a while, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing anything,” I said.
“You told me I had a month to find it, so I’m going with whatever leads I have,” she shot back. “If they’re lying low, that means they haven’t done any big jobs or, more importantly, made any big changes to the location of the headquarters. I think I should ask my contact if there are any jobs for me so I can get back into the HQ. Then I can steal the artifact from the safe, which is probably where they’re keeping it.”
I waited for her to sip her coffee.
“That’s the plan? Why did you not think of it sooner?” I asked. “Keeping the artifact in the safe in their HQ feels like an obvious place to start.”
“Because I know how they work.” Arden’s eyes narrowed. “Sometimes they move around to other headquarters or offshoots after a big job, but sometimes they don’t. I had to wait and see what they did after they got the artifact. They haven’t moved it yet. At least not that I’m aware of.”
