From her seat on the dragon, Averifa looked down at the two of them in the middle of the cheering square.
This was the exact future she was running from. Seeing it a second time only hardened what she already intended: to stay far, far away from it.
Then she climbed down, and crossed the stones, and made a simple and entirely stunning request.
"Hold me."
Ares turned around. "What nonsense are you spouting?"
Behind him his subordinates, Lynn among them, had gone completely speechless.
"It isn't nonsense," Averifa said. "I want a hug. That's all."
"This is very unlike you," Ares said, and turned and walked away.
Still — and she reminded herself of it, standing there with her hands empty — she had not forgotten how he had treated her in their first life. That memory did not soften with use. It only fed her resolve. She had sworn she would never love Ares again, and in this second life the thing she was most afraid of was repeating her own mistakes.
Frustrated with her own foolish heart, she let the memories come, since they were coming anyway. His betrayal. The image of him with Lorenza and their child, burned permanently into the back of her eyes. The searing pain and the piercing cold at the end of it, still fresh, still exactly as cold as the night it happened.
To survive, she had to keep her distance from him at all costs.
She turned to leave, and found that Lorenza had come after her.
"Wait."
Lorenza's voice was steady and clear, and she looked Averifa straight in the eyes and asked the one question that had been hanging in the air between them since the courtyard.
"Do you love Ares?"
The confrontation she had wanted to avoid had come and found her, and there was no escape from it.
But she was not the weak woman from her past life any more.
Unfazed, standing in the drift of pale purple petals her power sent up around her when it stirred, Averifa offered a slight, knowing smirk. She did not flinch at all.
"Whatever feelings I had," she said calmly, "were from a long, long time ago."
She let a beat go past.
"In this life, a pathetic man like him doesn't matter to me at all."
The ice-cold dismissal landed like a punch. Lorenza's expression hardened as she took it, and Averifa watched her realize that this was not the rival she had prepared for.
"Don't get the wrong idea," Lorenza said, and there was venom in it now, "just because Ares has been showing you a little concern lately."
Then her whole demeanor changed. She brought a finger to her lips with a sly, childish look, as though letting a friend in on a secret.
"I am his one true lover. He loves only me."
Averifa was worlds beyond this. She scoffed inwardly at the absolutely ridiculous display, and as her disdain rose so did her power: thorny dark vines uncoiled and manifested in the air around her, black and slow, filling the space between them.
The two of them were completely full of themselves, she thought. Both of them. A perfectly matched set.
Lorenza stumbled back a step, intimidated by the dark aura now radiating from the woman in front of her, and Averifa landed the final blow with a cutting smirk.
"You're perfect for each other."
Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Lorenza to work through it, and privately counted the round as hers.
Lorenza, stunned at being dismissed so casually, refused to let her go. She caught Averifa's shoulder and stopped her cold.
The dynamic flipped in an instant.
Averifa pivoted back, her expression turning to ice, and leaned in close to her rival.
"You're the one who shouldn't get carried away."
Her gaze dropped, deliberately, to the delicate brooch pinned to Lorenza's dress. She lifted a finger and pointed straight at it.
"Back off," she said, "or I might accidentally break something precious."
The message was crystal clear. Lorenza had nothing at all to say.
Satisfied, Averifa turned to leave.
"I have no intention of coming between you and Ares," she said coolly. And then, because she could not quite resist it: "Though of course, that only holds if his heart hasn't already strayed."
She walked away victorious, with the seed of doubt planted behind her, and moved through the palace turning her own past over as she went.
A chilling realization came to her in the corridor.
She had never met Lorenza like this before. Not once. The first and last time the two of them had ever come face to face was in the grand throne room, among the stone pillars, on the day Averifa made the fatal mistake that ended with her own execution.
Before that day — through the whole engagement, through the whole marriage, whether she was his fiancée or his wife — Lorenza had been a complete ghost. A phantom in the background who never once dared to show herself in public. Averifa had taken that as evidence. A woman kept out of sight is a woman not valued. That was what she had told herself for years.
She had been catastrophically wrong.
The truth arrived whole, the way the worst things do, and it came with an image she could not put down: the silhouette of the two of them, Ares and Lorenza, kissing.
They had been deeply in love. That was all. In their world, she had not been a rival or an obstacle or even an enemy. She had been a non-factor. An afterthought.
The sting of it was immense, and what it made her feel, more than anything else, was pathetic.