Page 39 of This Cruel Fate

“Xo. What are you doing here?” he asked.

She scoffed. “Oh, just listening to Helen order you around for her political aspirations.”

“How much did you hear?” he asked in a drawn voice.

Xolia made her way up the freezing stones until she was standing in front of him. Even in the dim lighting he looked wan, a far cry from the easy confidence he normally espoused. “What game are you playing? You tell me you want to help me. You want me to run as Peter’s vice chancellor, then I come out here and Helen seems to be under the impression that you want her in office.”

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“Then explain it,” Xolia demanded. “Because all I saw was a bitch on a leash.”

He shouldered past her, checking her harder than strictly necessary. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then tell me, Adonis.”

Adonis gripped the back of an outdoor chair. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Find someplace.”

“I made a bad deal. With Helen. I’m trying to get out of it.”

Xolia pushed at his shoulder, goading him into looking at her. “So you’re using me to fix your own mistakes?”

At that, Adonis sneered at her. “Please, like you haven’t been using me this whole time too. The victim look isn’t a good one for you, Xo.”

She recoiled. “I haven’t been using you.”

Adonis titled his head. “You lied to me about being in a relationship, and you’ve jumped at every opportunity I’ve given you to fix your own pathetic life. We need each other.”

“I’m the pathetic one?” Xolia snarled. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Fuck, Xolia.” Adonis ran a hand through his hair. “I saw you at the gala. I know you, and I know you want more than what you’ve been telling people. I do too. I’m a renter in my own life. All my money belongs to my parents or it’s tied up in the fights. Which, surprise, are controlled by Helen. She could ruin me. You were gone, and I met her when things were really bad.”

He deflated, sinking into one of the chairs. “All I wanted when the war ended was to be my own person. I mean, isn’t that what we all wanted? But my parents barely tolerated me. The only variants I had any contact with were the twins. Then I met Helen.”

Xolia sat down on the chair opposite his, her back rigid against the cold wicker.

“She’s a variant too. Unregistered. Her father would’ve lost everything if President Gornne had found out. He saved her from the barracks, but that doesn’t mean the general was a good father. She hates him just as much as I hate mine. It was perhaps the only thing we have in common, but at the time it seemed like enough.”

“So you started the fights with her?” she asked.

Adonis shook his head. “The fights were already there. I just organized them, made things better for the variants who were fighting. Weeded out the traffickers. Helen funded everything. So all the money the fights bring in, most of it goes to her.”

“Am I just a means to an end to you?” Xolia asked, her voice pitched low. It wasn’t the point of his words, and she knew that, but it was really the only question that mattered to her.

Adonis looked at her, his face exasperated under a cold sliver of moonlight. “You’re not just a means to an end.”

She exhaled heavily. “What changed with Helen?”

He leaned back against the chair, closing his eyes. “It started when she took the twins from me. My closest friends. And now they’d kill me if she asked them too. Her idea of government is just as bad as Clemont’s.”

“I talked to him tonight,” Xolia said, letting the conversation stray from him for the moment.

“How’d that go?”

She shrugged. “About as well as could be expected from someone who still harbors the same beliefs as the Gornne Administration.”

“Helen would see humans subjugated. We’d be in a civil war if either of them win, surely you can see that.”

---