Page 71 of Love, Nemesis
Ana returned to the living room as Jasper walked in, and they sat close together as Ares walked outside, catching Lethe’s attention.
Jasper waited to speak to her, both of them seeming to sit with tense patience.
“How is Cal?” Ana asked, scanning the room.
“Out in the garden still. I don’t think he knows what to do with the infamous Ares, but he’s enjoying the garden a bit too much. He won’t stop talking about thiscute farm girlback at the State. You’d think he’d completely missed the bit about our lives being in danger. You know if Ares wanted to off us all right now, he—”
“I know.”
“What happened to you?” Jasper asked, looking her over.
“He made a run for it,” Ana replied flatly, nodding her chin in Lethe’s direction.
“Evira did too, I guess. Didn’t she?”
Ana rubbed her face. She couldn’t tell Jasper here. Not now.
Her thoughts flickered back to that moment in the rain, the discussion about The Great Light, Lethe kissing her wrist, herneck, her lips. She was embarrassed by it now. She could still feel his hands as they moved along her waist, still wanted them there.
What would Jasper think if he knew that too? Circumstances had changed so suddenly and yet not at all.
She and Jasper both perked up as Ares laughed joyously. Lethe was leaning over and pointing at something in the mountains. He was unusually talkative.
“They made friends really fast,” Jasper said suspiciously, leaning back on the couch with his arms crossed. “Did you hear that laugh? He’s giddy.”
Ana kept her eyes on them. “Yeah.”
After her most recent talk with Ares and her last interaction with Lethe, it worried her that the two men seemed to connect so easily. Both of them also seemed to have very firm ideas about the kind of person she was. What kind of people was she drawing in?
“Do we need a plan?” Jasper asked. Thank Jasper, he was her only outlier, a flag of sensibility in her vastly changing world.
She felt a pang of guilt and kept rubbing her face.
“Ana,” Jasper prodded.
“I’m not sure yet. Something tells me we’re a part of a plan already. Let’s let Ares make the first move.”
Lethe announced he was heading upstairs for the change of clothes Ares had offered him. Cal must’ve noticed from outside because he burst through the door and ran up after him.
“I’m going to check the food.” Ana took advantage of the shift of movement in the room to scope out the house, standing and proceeding back into the kitchen. She perused the kitchen, doing her best to investigate the house before returning back into the living room. Her eyes lingered momentarily on Ares’s gun hanging on the wall, but she resisted the urge to take it. Instead, she returned to the couch. Jasper had a dark look on his face.
Ana eased back down beside him as Lethe came back downstairs, wearing a blue button-down shirt and riding pants. Cal was now following after him, wearing Lethe’s coat that hung heavy on Cal’s thin frame. It dragged over the stairs behind him.
Lethe circled the staircase, writing something on a small notepad in his hand, the stopwatch hanging over his shirt. A cinnamon stick stuck out of the corner of his mouth. He noticed Ana and Jasper watching.
He stopped, raising his eyebrows. “What?”
“Where did you get that?” Jasper asked.
“I’m running out of cigarettes,” he replied, removing the cinnamon stick as if it were a cigarette before walking back into the kitchen.
Jasper and Ana exchanged glances. Jasper looked horrified. “He went through my stuff. Again.”
“Looks like you’re one of the pack,” she said, slapping Jasper on the back, eager to have something akin to comic relief. “You and Ares, initiates into the new Riders.”
“You’ll say that until he gets something of yours.” Jasper grimaced.
Cal ran back through the living room in Lethe’s coat, fumbling up the stairs and then dropping his Atlas. It bounced down each step; Cal chased it as it rolled out the door and off the porch.
