Page 46 of Love, Nemesis
“What are you doing?” she asked as they kept walking.
Looking forward still, Lethe replied, “Didn’t want to step on them.”
Her brow furrowed. “They’re just flowers.”
He shrugged. “Why kill something if you can help it?” he replied simply, surprising her.
Yes. Why?she asked, almost glaring.People like you don’t care about things like that.Somehow, she disliked him even more now.
He stopped and she followed suit. Lethe glanced behind her before she realized they were standing in front of the bullpen.
She hadn’t realized how long she’d been silent, trapped in her own head, and he’d done nothing to draw her out. Most wereuncomfortable with her silence and used that space to talk. She didn’t often find herself wrestling with the silence of another.
He searched her face slowly, and for a moment, she thought he might reach out and touch her. “Goodnight Ana,” he said, and there was more to his words than the aggression, playfulness, or sensuality he seemed to enjoy using. He’d put the pieces of his game aside for a moment, the board all played out.
For a moment, she only watched him, waiting for him to say something else. She couldn’t trace the feeling inside her. There was a familiarity in his eyes, in his brashness, in the fear he aroused. Standing there in the dark, he lingered with the permanence of her past, a lifeless, powerful thing, prepared at any moment to pull her under as if the new life she’d made for herself was only ever a film on the water’s surface.
She could almost feel the heat of her slave brand—burning questions from a past she’d wanted to forget.
She sensed no hatred from him; rather, something worse. In that moment, he looked at her like he knew her. To her horror, she realized that the silence was doing what silence often did. It was giving rise to some pressing truth inside her.
Lethe had put his board and game aside because now he wasn’t playing a game. He was playing her.
She took a step back, grounding herself as she kept her eyes trained on his face. “Goodnight,” she said. She moved backward, turning in time to ascend the stairs. She opened the door, the warm light in the fireplace an invitation back to brightness and security.
Before she closed the door behind her, she glanced back to see Lethe still waiting in the street. His form was a statue under the moonlight, the planes of his face highlighted only enough to show the subtleties of his expression.
He smiled at her. For a second time, she saw the wolf in him.
The truth was, despite being a slave to the Strike, her willingness to serve them made her an enemy of the ROSE by default. In a different version of the world, Lethe would have been, and possibly still was, her natural enemy.
In the face of an order that gave everything to defeat the Strike, there were no excuses to serving them like she had, no ways to dress it up and defend it. The shame she carried like a memorial yawned from its slumber deep in the recesses of her soul.
She shut the door, backing against it as she dropped her hand by her side.
Standing there in the dark, she got the sensation that her past had come for her in the form of a man, waiting out there under the moon.
Tick.
Tick.
She adjusted her watch.
Tick.
It was about time.
Chapter 12: The North
EVIRA HAD GIVEN them a briefing of their planned journey to a mountain range along the border of En Sanctus called the Dragon’s Spine. Lethe knew it well. He’d lived there with the last outpost of the ROSE.
Dressed in plain brown travel clothes with a shawl over her head, Evira almost looked natural, but her black eyes still seethed with an otherworldly glean. Ana, Jasper, and Cal were all dressed in crisp uniforms to match the brisk morning air. As they started off on their ride, Evira led, Lethe following close behind with Cal. Ana and Jasper stayed a decent distance behind him, talking quietly with each other for much of the day’s ride until Cal unabashedly started asking about the war.
Evira, in all of her wisdom, shared her knowledge, and Lethe bit his tongue.
“So, the Strike came from the North? What’s up there now? Just the Mystics forever?”
Evira looked over her shoulder when Cal asked this, so loudly that Ana and Jasper fell silent behind them.
