Page 64 of Love, Nemesis
Ana’s hair lay soaked over her shoulders, a strand of it lying across her face. Her eyes were alight like an animal and the raw heat of her emotion was like steam in the rain.
The woman in the rain wasn’t Ana at all.
Not Ana from the State.
This one was from En Sanctus.
Chapter 17: Rain
IT FELT LIKE her world had ended.
Seeing Evira’s body, tied up and burning like a torch in the cave, awakened something in Ana she had no control over. Years of self-discipline and frustrating inner struggles seemed to collapse into this single moment where none of it mattered any longer.
She dropped her Atlas, and it rolled toward Lethe’s feet. He looked over his shoulder at her, but there wasn’t any surprise. His eyes were even, and she felt his apathy to her core—recognized a version of it in herself, and she couldn’t come to terms with that.
The fight started without any physical provocation from him. She moved first, and not with her Atlas, but with her hands. She wanted to use her hands, and in the moment, she felt more like an animal than a person.
He redirected the force. She dug in her heels and soon they were on the ground, rolling through the rain. He flipped her hard, her lungs seizing with the force as her body clapped against the pooling water. She hooked his leg, using the momentum to roll him away from the cave. They slipped off a nearby ridge and hurtled down a steep slope. The rocks sent jolts of sharp pain into every surface of her body until they crashed hard onto another overlook. The fall separated them, Ana’s temple seeping blood as she scrambled up against the stones. She collided with Lethe as he started to sit up, forcing him up against a large boulder as her hands curled into his clothes.
She panted with rage, straddling him. Her body throbbed, clothes sopping wet, a hole torn through the fabric on her thigh and arm. She had old military fatigues. She hadn’t seen the need to get new ones, not for this mission—not for what this mission was supposed to be.
Lethe’s expression showed her nothing and there was no wolfish smile, no chaos in his eyes. In the wake of his treachery, he seemed empty. She searched his gaze in hopes of finding evil as the rain streamed through his hair, tracing the sharp angles of his nose and the ridges of his brows. She wanted to shout, she wanted to roar, but as her spirit bucked against its restraints, no words could do her justice.
There were no words at all.
There were no questions to ask. She knew all of the answers. She knew what it had meant for Evira to die—justice, an ideal she claimed to love. An ideal he claimed didn’t exist.
She shook her head, shoving him back, knuckles ramming into his collarbone as she stumbled away. She found her footing on the plateau, a lucky landing that had saved them from the drop off a severe cliff. She ran her hands through her hair, parts of it slicked down with mud. The feelings continued to roll through her, wave after wave of emotion that boiled inside her without outlet or voice. She tried to reel back into the iron mold she’d made for herself, but her spirit couldn’t fit any longer.
She snatched the nearest rock and stepped forward, shouting as she hurled it through the air. It spiraled through the rain, clashing into other rocks on the adjacent mountain and rolling with a few other small stones it had knocked loose. She sank intoa crouch, her fingers pushing through her hair again to massage the torment from her brain.
Lightning cracked the sky.
In that moment, she felt desperately alone and desperately afraid.
She straightened, looking over at Lethe as she wiped the rain and dirt from her face with the back of her hand, her fingers and palm cut from her scramble and printed with dirt. He was still sitting against the boulder where she’d set him. One of his knees was drawn toward him as a rest for his elbow. His other leg lay bent and relaxed to the side.
His clothes were in similar condition, a fresh cut bleeding on his shin.
“Who do you think you are?” Ana asked brokenly through the storm. “Are you a hero?”
Lethe didn’t reply.
She faced him. “Answer me!”
“You were there, weren’t you?”he asked.
She stayed standing as straight as an arrow, chin up.
“The Burning of the Strike. You were there. I knew it the first time I saw you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“I know everything that really matters about you.”
She laughed, tilting her head back to the sky as she closed her eyes. Feeling the rain between her shoulder blades, she wanted to melt into it—disappear from the moment.
“I do,” he reaffirmed.
