Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
The moment Evelyn closed the door behind her, she leaned against it and spent a few minutes trying to get her breathing in order. When that didn’t work, she then spent the next half hour getting reacquainted with her shower nozzle.
When she could finally function, she reached for her shampoo and lathered her hair as she thought through her options.
Plan one, as she saw it, was to take a set of fake documents from Corrie and fade into obscurity. She could go farm chinchillas on Proxima Centauri or buy a condo on a mega-metropolis and read books until her eyeballs fell out.
Didn’t sound half bad.
Plan two: get back on the Rising Dawn with the crew, and Aiden, and head back to her planet. Embrace her talent without becoming a monster. Wrest political control from a militaristic lunatic. Save the day.
Sounded fucking horrible.
Evelyn had no desire to be a hero. She’d never read books about avenging heroes and longed to be the one wielding the sword. She’d wanted to be, at best, back-line support. Or the love interest. Heroes were always super hot in the kind of books she read.
When presented with the chance to step up and save the day, she’d opted to go and nap for a decade.
Seemed like a no-brainer. Granted, no one else in her family had been doing anything, at least not as much as she could see.
Lots of thumb twiddling and concerned speeches.
Her impulsive action had seemed sensible when the alternative had been sitting in on another debate on the merits of yet another round of arbitration versus contacting the GPC again.
She now knew she’d played right into Emil’s carefully laid trap.
Her fingers were starting to cramp from furiously working the shampoo through her hair. She rinsed her head off and reached for the conditioner and a wide toothed comb. She slicked the rich cream through her locks and worked it through as she went back to ruminating.
If she went through with Corrie’s plan, she could actually save her family from Emil’s.
She couldn’t deny she’d like to see the looks on their faces when they realized that they’d been saved by soft, quiet, book-obsessed Evelyn.
Secret Monster Evelyn, more like. And sure, the satisfaction would be sweet.
But the more she thought about it, she knew that going back and trying to fix the mess she’d helped make was The Right Thing To Do. Capital letters and all. A two-fer.
She could live with that.
And if that meant that she got to spend more time with Aiden . . . Well. She wasn’t going to complain about that. One had to take their motivating factors where they found them.
She wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the homework that Corrie would no doubt have prepared for her. If she knew her aunt at all, she’d already gotten things ready to start whipping Evelyn into shape.
Evelyn had never wanted to embrace her talent.
But it seemed that the time had come, like it or not.