Page 51 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

He continued, “Everyone is on a different side, fighting over The Great Light. You have”—he gestured to her arm—“that, and no help to know what you should do with it. That’s a huge responsibility.”

She looked down at her arm as if her mind hadn’t gotten there yet. She swallowed, and he was relieved to know she was distracted, at least for now.

But why? He questioned his own compulsion again—his need to hide. What would she do if she discovered what he was? What nature he would soon be forced to embrace?

No.

That wasn’t his real fear—and truthfully, he hadn’t expected to fear his awakening so much. It didn’t seem Strike-like at all.

Lethe cursed inwardly. It wasn’t just that he was a Strike; it was that somehow, Ana was becoming the object of that nature’s fixations. The thought crippled something inside of him, breaking down some internal wall that had hidden his understanding of the other Strike.

Many of the other Strike had felt this way, hadn’t they?

Evira had preached that being a Strike meant falling in love with humanity, and as if his mind had been rearranged to accept the thought, the doctrine locked itself firmly between stacks of ideologies and principles that had once belonged to the ROSE.

He still thought himself a ROSE.

He was a ROSE, still. Right?

He injected the statement into his mind over and over again like a cure against the diseased ideology of Evira’s teachings that rose from the dead and haunted his brain.

It was as if she’d known all along her words would come back to him in the end.

The Strike priests and priestesses had been experts at helping facilitate the infection of The Eating Ocean once they’d found an infected host. Had he been her intended target from the start?

His mind raced, covering a thousand things in the few seconds Ana took to respond.

“I can’t trust the State,” she said. “I can’t trust the Mystics.

I can’t trust my own friends not to lie to me.

Everyone thinks they are doing the right thing and will do anything to do it,” she said.

“We’re both En Sanctan, and we know what happened to the world and what the Strike are capable of.

I’ve been lying to myself this whole time and I’m tired of it. ”

Through new eyes, he could now see the fear vibrating through her nerves, the fierce alert in her eyes, the tension emanating off her muscles as that deep and awful wrong he continued to sense began to surface.

Some tension was beautiful—the pause in a song, taught instrument strings, sensual touch, a bow and arrow—namely because the release of that tension inspired something miraculous.

This fear, this tension, had no satisfying release.

She was wounded, and this wound wasn’t new.

This was old and deep and rotten, so profound that it divided her soul down the middle, almost cleaving it in half.

It was the reason for her stony exterior, her vacant shell, her silent reserve.

He wanted to reach through her chest and remove it.

What was she not telling him?

Ana held her breath as the dark blue thing that coiled in her stomach and ribs twisted up.

Her muscles relaxed now, but not with any sense of ease. Her bones grew dark, full of a heavy feeling, and she seemed to surrender into that.

His eyes remained trained on hers, seeing the notions in her mind, wrestling and tired and translated into words he understood. She’d wrestled this thing before, perhaps all her life, and had submitted helplessly to it over and over again before picking up the fight once more.

He reached out toward her stomach and the coiling blue grief, but hesitated, reminding himself that she couldn’t see it. He leaned forward slightly, wanting to pull her deeper into his arms.

His hand lifted to her face, grazing her cheek. Her face grew the slightest bit heavier in his hand, and she closed her eyes like it hurt.

“Why am I making it worse?” He lowered his voice, watching as the creature only coiled tighter, deeper under her ribs now as if for shelter. She didn’t look at him. He knew she couldn’t see the blue creature, but she responded as if she could.

“I’m going to go back,” she whispered. “I’ll do it alone. You risked your life to pull me out of the city. I’m grateful. I’ll do what I need to do.”

As she looked up, he kissed her.

Her breath and body seized up. Sparks of surprise dissipated and then he witnessed a sharp, reflexive flash of release, a memory perhaps of having kissed him before, and he seized that memory.

Reaching into it, he reminded her of those feelings of comfort, and he drank the grief off her lips with the flavor of a thousand words she’d spoken.

Her pulse was a drum, body and mind wrestling with color as he pushed his hand up the small of her back, and she arched her body against him as if he’d guided pain out of her.

His fingers replaced the vines of sadness across her ribs, and unlocked at last, she breathed. He felt and heard and chased it, pursuing that gasp like an invitation into her soul.

He relished that invitation, wrapped in the warmth of her spirit. Grief tasted like full wine, evidence that she’d loved something—evidence of life.

He relished the sensation of sharing it with her, entangling himself in that longing she had to be free of the feelings as he removed them from her. In this way, he couldn’t help but sense that Strike and humans seemed destined for one another

His hands coiled into her hair as he deepened the kiss, leaning forward and pushing her into the doorframe to intensify the pressure between them. One hand coiled her dress in his hands, hoisting her onto his lap as she wrapped her legs around him.

In feeling her legs draw him in, a rush went through his blood. He could sense the intensity of her experiences, her thoughts and feelings evaporating as he drew the cold from her blood and filled her with fire.

He drew away for a pause, unable to resist the temptation of looking into her eyes.

He searched them, verifying in a vivid display the effect he had on her as he saw the cocktail of feelings stir and boil inside of her.

He caught a glimpse of something that was both familiar and strange, nestled in the orb of her feelings like the eye of a hurricane, but before he could understand it, her dark, blue grief was back.

That wound was back, the heaviness inside her growing with so much speed as if it fed off of any feelings of relief he’d managed to coax forward.

One of his hands grazed her chin, catching a tear as it fled down her cheek. His touch now stirred that darkness violently, and she scrambled away from him as if she couldn’t bear another second in his arms.

“Ana,” he called in question as she stumbled deeper into the room.

“I can’t,” she choked, looking away from him.

“Ana, come back,” he urged, seeing the faintest glimpses that beneath it all she wanted to be back in his arms.

Her feelings only darkened further, and he thought the darkness would kill her, until she exclaimed at last, “You don’t understand!”

She faced him now, backed against the wall like a caged animal as she shouted with all of the suffering of a burdened soul, “I’m already dead!”

He searched her eyes, glancing down at her metallic arm before he said, “Ana, Chronos doesn’t have to be a curse.”

“No,” she choked, tears flooding down her cheeks as she shook her head. “I’m already dead.”

Lethe understood then what she meant.

She didn’t say another word to help the truth materialize, because as he watched her in her suffering, the picture formed all on its own.

Ana had never truly denied the existence of The Great Light.

“All this time,” Lethe said, remembering all of the times she’d acted as if it were simply a fable, living a life that was carefully stitched together with obscure hopes. “How do you—?” he began to ask, but she cut him off.

“I remember,” she said, breathing hard as she sank back down against the wall.

He didn’t approach her this time, getting the sense that the only reason she wouldn’t back farther away was because she was too exhausted.

“I remember how I died,” she said. “I don’t know why.

The Great Light isn’t perfect. It has…flaws.

Nothing of this magnitude could be flawless.

” Her breathing shuddered as if the removal of this secret from her core caused a hemorrhage of feelings.

Her life had been built around this secret, and taking it out seemed to risk the total collapse of what remained.

“I remember,” she said again. “I bled out in that woman’s arms. Emma, you called her. She was there for me in the end. She gave me what she had left, and I’ve never forgotten that.”

He saw Ana’s strength come to the surface, the strength forged through a lifetime of a woman who’d been haunted by the reality of her own existence.

“Hours later, I woke up in ashes without a scratch on my body.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

“I followed other survivors to the State. They didn’t remember dying, and eventually, I tried to forget too, able to accept some version of reality where all of that was just a nightmare, a really bad nightmare. But I knew the truth.”

She swallowed dryly, and he could see that the pain inside her had eased, released at last to flood the space between them.

“When you told me about Emma’s fate, I didn’t have the heart to tell you about what might have been my own, and even then, I felt relieved to have your forgiveness anyway.

But now, you have to know,” she said, rousing from where she rested before looking away from him.

“I don’t have anything to offer you. I don’t have anything real to offer anyone.

” She rubbed her face. “I tried to do what I could to make up for…any of it, but all along, I’ve been just waiting for my time to run out. I was so close to…”

“Rest,” Lethe finished.