Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,63
as all hell. More than once, I’d thought of her as crazy, but I’d never quite made the jump from “crazy” to “clinically insane.” Until now.
“I’m trying to help her,” Cyrus said, “but I don’t think she’s too interested in being helped. I made it very, very clear to her what the consequences of disobeying me would be, but I’m not sure she doesn’t have a death wish. I’ll try to keep an eye on her, but watch your back, just in case.”
My stomach felt sour. I’d be the first to admit I’d disliked Emma from the moment she’d recovered from the catatonic state she’d been in when we first dragged her from the pond. She’d started out being merely annoying with her self-centeredness and bitchy comments, then graduated to being downright mean, consumed by unfounded jealousy and her understandable desire for revenge. She’d stopped having any redeeming features in my mind when she’d threatened Steph. And yet . . .
And yet, I had saved her life. Saved her from an eternity of repeatedly drowning to death. Finding her and rescuing her had been the single greatest victory of my life. I didn’t want her to die after all that, didn’t want to undo the good I had done.
Of course, I also didn’t want her setting another fire.
“You’d better keep more than an eye on her, Cyrus,” I said, though I had no ammunition with which to back up my ultimatum.
“I’ll do my best.”
His assurance didn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but then nothing he said would. I picked up the incriminating screen shot. “Can I keep this?”
Cyrus nodded. “Be my guest. And if you tell Anderson and he takes the news as badly as I fear he might, let me remind you that you will always be welcome among the Olympians.”
I paused with the paper halfway to my purse as a disturbing thought hit me. “How do I know this isn’t all some kind of twisted setup so I’ll have a falling-out with Anderson?” I asked. That would certainly explain his reluctance to break the news to Anderson himself. Hell, if I was going to be paranoid, I could even imagine he’d created the screen shots just so he could give me bad news to deliver.
He laughed. “An interesting idea. My father is capable of scheming and manipulation on that level, but I’m not as complicated as he is.”
“Yeah, you’re just a plain old everyman.”
“Well, I didn’t say that. But I wouldn’t make trouble for you with Anderson unless I was sure it would make you join the Olympians. I’m not much of a gambler. Give me the sure thing any day.”
Is it weird that Cyrus admitting his own potential for dishonesty made me more inclined to believe him?
What tipped the scales in the end was my absolute conviction that Cyrus wasn’t an idiot. He knew that if Anderson kicked me out, I’d make a run for it rather than join the Olympians.
“I’m never going to become an Olympian,” I told him, just to hammer home the point.
There was a glint in his eye when he smiled at me, and I wondered if making myself into a challenge to be conquered had been a tactical error. “Never is a long time, Nikki. A long, long time.”
FOURTEEN
I wasn’t in any hurry to deliver Cyrus’s news to Anderson, so I decided to go for a run as soon as I got back to the mansion. As luck would have it, Maggie had the same idea, so I had company. I wasn’t exactly feeling sociable, but running with Maggie isn’t much of a social occasion for me anyway. She’s five eleven to my five two, and she can cover a daunting amount of ground in a single stride. I have to run like my life depends on it to keep up, and I don’t usually last all that long or have the breath to do a lot of talking.
On a day like today, running like my life depended on it was just what I needed. The effort of keeping up the aggressive pace left no room in my mind for inconvenient thoughts and worries. For just a little while, I left my problems behind me and didn’t think about anything at all. My muscles burned and protested, my chest heaved with effort, I was sweating buckets despite the chilly temperature, and I adored every painful, oblivious moment of it. I pushed well past my usual limits and didn’t even notice I was