Page 66 of Love, Nemesis
“I’m sorry.” She stared forward, replaying her own rage in her head. Her apology wasn’t solely about her outburst.
She was sorry for all of it—the war, the suffering, the horror of The Great Light. Finally, it was acknowledged and yet strangely, for the first time, it felt truly livable.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, followed by a breathy chuckle. “Feels kind of good to hear that.”
He looked over at her, Ana matching the motion, and as close as their faces were, it felt natural.
“I believe you’re real,” Lethe said.
Ana averted her eyes, feeling as though she’d received a strange, deep compliment. It stirred something in her, and she was embarrassed by his blunt kindness when only a moment ago, she’d meant to, well—even she wasn’t completely sure what she’d wanted.
The rain still poured. She still hardly knew what to make of it all.
“Crow said he was going to shoot you if I didn’t get you back in ten minutes,” Ana confessed.
“You’re telling me this a little late,” Lethe replied.
“About five minutes ago, I wanted him to shoot you,” she replied dryly. “We should probably get back.”
Lethe shrugged beside her. “He hasn’t shot me yet.” He fished a stopwatch out from his shirt and clicked it open. “We have plenty of time.”
“That’s a stopwatch,” Ana pointed out before he closed it and slipped it back under his shirt.
“I’ll move when I move,” he replied lazily. “He was bluffing. There is no way he’ll find us here, and if he was serious, then we’ve missed the window already.”
“You’re impossible.” She sighed.
“I can’t believe you were going to let him shoot me.”
“You killed Evira,” Ana replied, confronting him with the fact.
“I let her drink Snake Bite,” he said. “It was painless.”
“It doesn’t justify it.”
“What does?” he asked.
Ana hesitated. She hadn’t been wholly unfamiliar with Evira. The woman’s reputation—if she was in fact the same En Sanctan woman—had preceded her. Any justification Ana could come up with, she knew, Evira’s past crimes would match. The only answer was that killing wasn’t justifiable at all, and to this day, Ana had a hard time answering that question for sure.
She knew what she wanted to say—what she’d wanted to believe, but she’d killed before too for what she’d thought was a just cause. Not as intentionally as Lethe, perhaps, but she’d been aware of the responsibilities of being a soldier.
That seemed intentional enough, and Lethe, in his own right, had acted as a soldier.
The more she thought about it, the more similarities she found between Lethe and herself, and so she stopped thinking altogether.
“You said you think I’m real,” Ana reminded him after a while. “What makes you say that?”
“Faith, I guess,” he muttered after a moment’s pause. Less seriously, he added with the slightest bit of humor, “But I’d say those feelings of yours seemed pretty real. That right arm of yours, by the way. Metal? You lost it on a mission?”
“As a slave. Amiel took it from me,” she said.
“Ah. I see,” he replied and then settled back into silence.
Perplexed by his lighthearted reaction to her rage, she found that some part of her felt relieved and exposed. A personal nightmare of losing complete control of that ugliness inside her had come to pass, and the most obvious victim of it was sitting right beside her. Granted, he was guilty in his own right.
Without thinking, she rested her head on his shoulder and released a long breath that barely captured the depth of her sudden exhaustion. She felt like a wrung cloth in the rain, each second a bit heavier. She closed her eyes, opening them again when Lethe squeezed her hand. It was an odd assurance, but welcome, and her fingers traced over his palm and wrapped between his fingers. Feeling the warmth between their palms felt reassuring, and as his thumb stroked hers, she found herself acquainted with an entirely different feeling.
It was that static again, winding its way over her skin, making her want to curl up as if it were hard to catch her breath. She kept still for a moment longer and then curiously, she released his hand, combing her fingers back through his before trailing her fingertips up toward his arm.
