Chapter 76 How’d They Find Us?
Elijah was quiet. Below them, the feast had fully recovered from the arm wrestling incident, and the sound of it rose up warm and indistinct. Voices, laughter, the noise of a large gathering that had found its rhythm. Maddox was visible near the centre of it, seated, talking to someone beside him with the ease of a person who didn't need to assert authority because it had already established itself.
Elijah watched him for a long moment.
Then he laughed. It was genuine, not a social gesture, the laugh of a man who found something specifically amusing.
"I sent him to open some doors," he said, not quite to his men but to the scene below. "He came back with an army that is personally devoted to him." He shook his head once. "You think I should be worried about that?"
The two men exchanged a glance.
"We think you should be aware of it," the first one said carefully.
"I am aware of it. I have been aware of it since they walked into the clearing. They’re pretty hard to miss, aren’t they? Hahaha!" Elijah slapped his knee in amusement. "A man who can walk into a room and have people choose him without being told to is not a liability. He is exactly what I need him to be." He looked at his men briefly. "So long as we want the same things, everything those people give to him is working toward our goal."
"And if that changes?"
Elijah looked at the man who had asked with an expression that was patient and slightly cooler than the amusement that had come before it.
"Then we will have that conversation," he said simply. "Not tonight."
He looked back down at the feast. Maddox was laughing at something Khan had said, a real laugh and it was unguarded. Elijah watched his nephew and drank from his cup and said nothing further.
His men exchanged another glance behind him but stayed quiet. The argument had been made and had not landed where they needed it to land, and pushing further tonight was not a calculation either of them wanted to make. Because as free-spirited as their king could be, he could also get grumpy and lash out when pushed.
The camp settled into the later, slower rhythm of a feast winding toward its end. The fires burned steadily. The two groups that had arrived in tension were not at ease exactly, but they were sharing space in a way that had become less distant and more ordinary as the hours passed, and that was its own kind of progress.
Maddox leaned back in his seat and looked up at the sky above the camp. It was clear tonight, properly clear, the kind of sky that appeared when the air was cold enough to sharpen everything, and the stars were visible in a way they rarely were with any kind of light pollution nearby. He looked at them for a moment without thinking about anything in particular, which was rare enough that he noticed it.
Khan said something beside him about the stars over the island being different from the ones above the mainland. Clearer. More present. He said his grandparents had used them to navigate and that his people had names for arrangements of them that didn't match any of the Western constellations, names that came from stories that were several hundred years old.
Maddox listened and didn't interrupt.
Then the voice came.
It arrived through a megaphone from somewhere at the edge of the camp perimeter, amplified and official. It carried the clipped, practiced authority of someone who had rehearsed the words and was now deploying them with the full weight of institutional backing.
"We have this area surrounded. All individuals are instructed to lay down their weapons and remain where they are. Do not attempt to flee. This is the police.” The voice boomed in warning.
The feast went silent.
Every head turned. The silence was that of a large group of people processing the same information at the same time and arriving at the same place.
With the grace of a panther, Silena slid off the table and grabbed a little boy who had been playing by her feet, quickly ushering him into the arms of his mother. She moved around and quietly slid some table knives off the table, testing their weight for throwing.
Khan hadn’t moved but Maddox could see his jaw locked and fists closed as he prepared for whatever was coming.
The rogue king's expression moved from satisfied to something else entirely. His jaw tightened once. His eyes swept the perimeter with the rapid calculation of a man whose mind worked fastest under exactly this kind of pressure.
Across the camp, Maddox's head had come up from his seat. His eyes found his uncle on the rise above them and the look that passed between them covered the distance without difficulty.
The same question was on both their faces.
‘What the hell is the police doing here?’