Negotiating with Sean has never exactly been her strong suit. In fact, the whole past year has been nothing if not an exercise in not negotiating particularly well with Sean Renard. He's always had the power in their relationship—the control. It was probably the Royal thing—she's been conditioned since birth to suck up to Princes, and by that metric, her relationship with Sean was a roaring success.
It's only now, negotiating with Nick over whether or not to kill Edgar Waltz, that she realizes what she's been missing all these years: Give and take. A sparring partner—hell, a partner, partner. They're making plans for the future like they both plan to be there—both plan to have a stake in the outcome—and she's never been someone people make plans with before. She's always been a rogue agent or a subordinate—never a partner-in-crime—and she never realized how enjoyable being someone's partner could be.
Not that Nick is her partner. Not officially. Not yet. There's Juliette, and Hank, and oh dear lord, Sean fucking Renard.
She turns back to Sean and finds him looking at Hank, who shrugs.
"I don't know," he says. "They do this now. Actually, they've always done this, I just never realized it was flirting before."
"We are not flirting," Adalind says. "We're negotiating."
"No, this is negotiating," Sean says. "I want that key."
Adalind rolls her eyes. "No, you don't."
"I don't?"
"No," she says, raising her hands to tick off the coming list with her fingers. "What you want—in this precise order—is not to have to make nice with your brother, not to have Nick team up with your brother, and not to have to share control of Portland with—and wait for it, the answer might surprise you—no wait, yep, it's still your dickhead brother. We can give you all of that, without the key even coming into it."
Sean glares at her with narrowed eyes—glowering—and then he sighs and sits back in his chair. "You really are a managing little baggage, aren't you? God, am I glad to be rid of you."
Adalind barely has the time to register the sting of those words somewhere near her heart before Nick pushes off the wall and comes to stand right behind her, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders with a silent squeeze of support. He's warm and solid and posed for battle at her back, and even without her magic, Adalind has never felt more powerful.
"The feeling is mutual," she tells Sean. "Now do you want to be free of your brother or not?"
"Perhaps," Sean says, "although it strikes me that I'm getting the raw deal in this alliance seeing as you two are out of commission when it comes to firepower for the foreseeable future."
"Yes, but when we get our powers back, we'll be more powerful than ever," Adalind says, having no idea whether that's true or not, but feeling pretty confident that it can't be disproved either. "And that's even before considering our daughter and her actual superpowers. And in the meantime, we're going to have help coming in from the Resistance, plus some local allies with claws, and Hank, and a hexenbiest or two, and on top of that, Nick already carries a gun wherever he goes. Honestly, I like our chances, I really do."
"You always did have a nose for which way the wind was blowing. Are you sure you can trust her, Nick? You never know when she's going to get a better offer."
Nick squeezes her neck again, warm thumb sliding up to her hairline and back down each vertebrae, slowly—torturously slowly—and her eyes flutter closed while she shivers in anticipation before he ever reaches the zipper of her dress.
"I like my chances, too," Nick says, as Adalind opens her eyes again. Sean's glare has shifted upward to Nick. "I like them a lot."
Sean looks at Hank, and Hank shrugs.
"I'm with Nick."
"And Adalind?"
"If Nick's with her, then I'm with her, too."
"Oh, come on," Sean says, "you know as well as I do how well she can fake interest in a man."
Hank looks at Adalind, a wry little smile curling his lips.
"Sure," he says, "she's a fantastic fake—coy, sweet, and deferential, but unattainable, too—a total fantasy. The perfect damsel in distress. Nick, she seem all that damsely to you lately?"
Nick snorts. "God, no."
Hank shrugs. "I rest my case."
Adalind smiles at him—feeling a real warmth for Hank all of a sudden. Sean sighs, clearly frustrated to find more of an united front than he expected.
"Fine," he says, "we have an agreement. I'll help keep your power problem and your baby problem under wraps, while you help me keep my family out of town and out of my business. And when you get your little knock-off wesen council together, I want to be kept informed. I don't want to get my brother off my back just to find myself with more competition in this town."
"Sure," Adalind says. "Any advisory committee we may or may not form would be with the consent of the wesen community of Portland. You'll have just as much input as the rest of our constituents. More if you don't double cross us between now and then."
"So, I get Eric out of my life, but I have to share Portland with the rest of you, is that it?"
"What did you think was going to happen? Not really a lot of room in here for a throne."
"No," Sean says with another sigh, "I suppose not. Are we done here?"
"We're done," Adalind says, feeling the weight of those words settle around her. This is it—the end of her quest for a crown. It stops here—with Sean and his cold eyes and his clenched jaw and his erstwhile ability to make her dance to any tune. She thought he would be the love of her life once—well, maybe not. Were they ever in love? Maybe she thought he could be the point of her life—the ultimate source of her earthly power. She'd never loved him—not the way she's starting to imagine she could someday love Nick—but her ambition had, and it's been the driving force of her life for years.
But now Sean's just another player on the chess board—not the king—certainly not her king. She's never doubted that she's the queen—deadly and unpredictable—the king's best weapon—but she looks up at Nick—eyes warm, jaw stubbled, lips quirked up in that little, reluctant smile—and she finds herself surprised to realize that he's not the king, either. He's far too useful for that. He moves in mysterious ways—deadly, but methodical. Ordered. With honor.
And even though she's never been the damsel she pretends to be, she finds herself surprised to realize that somehow—against all odds—she's actually managed to find herself a goddamn knight.
Nick and Sean head off to meet with Waltz—an encounter Adalind is happy to be left out of since she doesn't have a gun and doesn't foresee any great negotiation opportunities when it comes to a Hundjäger with a death sentence. Nick was feeling nervous about leaving her without protection, so now she's sitting at his desk across from Hank, who's on babysitting duty and not looking too pleased about it.
"He's my partner," Hank says for the third time. "I should be there."
"I completely agree," Adalind tells him. "I don't need protection."
Hank shrugs. "You are kind of defenseless right now. Nick's not wrong about that."
Adalind glares at him. "I could poison you four different ways without leaving this room."
Hank nods, not the least surprised. "Sure, but how's your right hook?"
Adalind considers that. There's never been a time when she had to fight with her hands without her magic to back them up.
"Could be rusty," she concedes.
Hank hums. "That's why you've got me. You should add self-defense training and marksmanship to your running list of baby preparations."
Adalind nods. "All right. Thanks, Hank."
He looks puzzled. "For what?"
"For babysitting me and not hating me as much as you have every right to and just being a very good friend to Nick."
"He's my partner," Hank says, "that means something to me, even if it means I have to see you."
"Is it okay? Seeing me, I mean? I wanted to give you more space before I started showing up in your life."
"I'll manage. I'm glad Nick and I didn't have to handle the Captain on our own. He's way too twisty for us."
"He sure is twisted. I was thinking maybe I should find a way to hang around the precinct more—keep an eye on him while you and Nick are out in the field. Would that bother you?"
"What, you're just going to hang around in the booking room?"
"Pretty much," Adalind says. "The DA's office loves to snap up criminal defense escapees—we know where the bodies are buried—and I am between gigs right now. I bet they'd be happy to let me liaise closely with this precinct—no one over there trusts Sean as far as they can throw him. And if I'm spying for them, then I have a reason to keep a close eye on Sean and his twisty ways—if that's okay with you. It's your workplace Hank—your comfort is key."
Hank stares at her for a minute, face stern and unmoving.
"I don't get you," he says finally. "Where was this concern for my well being yesterday?"
"We were on opposite sides of a war yesterday. Today, your partner is my partner, too—or he could be, anyway. Yesterday you were a pawn on the chess board—today you're a rook, and a damn good one. I'm not going to pretend to you that I'm suddenly a better person now. I may never be a good person—not the way Nick is—but what I can promise you is that my allegiance is not as fleeting as Sean likes to think. I would have followed him anywhere if he'd offered me the same courtesy. He didn't, but Nick does."
Hank purses his lip and taps his pen against the file in front of him. "So you're saying I'm safe with you so long as Nick is your guy?"
"Yeah. Just like I'm safe with you, too, so long as Nick is my guy."
"And if he isn't your guy?"
Adalind laughs—harsh and sort of breathless—pressing a hand to her belly and the ghost of potential life lingering there.
"If he isn't my guy, we're going to have more worrisome assets to divide than you, Hank. If we go back to war, we go back to war, and you know the risks as well as I do. I hope we don't, though. I hope he's my person—and I hope I'm his, too."
Hank sighs and shrugs. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I don't think I'm ever going to understand what's happening with you two, but I know that it is happening, and you both seem to think it's real. That's probably all any of us can ask for at this point. And it can't hurt—having an ally in the DA's office and someone here, keeping a close eye on the Captain, so, yeah. Okay."
Adalind meets his eyes—sure and steady and unwavering—and she smiles.
"Okay," she says.
Another ten minutes pass in silence while Hank does paperwork and Adalind preps her pitch for the DA, before Wu approaches them with a wary look on his face.
"We've got a call for you."
"Did you get a name?" Hank says.
"Not you," Wu says, raising an eyebrow in Adalind's direction, "her."
Both of them look at her with suspicion, but Adalind shrugs.
"I wasn't expecting a call."
"Un huh," Wu says. "Line two."
Adalind picks up. It's Monroe, and he's freaking out.
"That Verrat guy has Rosalee at the shop," he says—shouting over the phone, voice laced with panic—and she has to move it away from her ear. "Nick's not picking up, and Rosalee's in danger, and I don't know what to do. Do you have a contingency plan for this?"
"Hank and I will be right there," Adalind says, as calmly as she can. "Meet us at the shop and bring your game face. Nobody fucks with Rosalee."
"Oh thank God," Monroe says and hangs up.
"Trouble?" Hank asks.
"Opportunity," Adalind says. "Hopefully."
She might just have to figure out how to negotiate with a Hundjäger after all.
A/N: This chapter is a day early and a week late, so thank you all for your patience while I took a week off and spent some time figuring out what to do with Sean and Hank. Also, you folks really snapped on the reviews on the last chapter—thank you so much!
