Grounds me.
Our blood mingles when I clasp his hand.
“It’s a deal,” I say, voice cold as iron.
Ares’s fingers tighten once around mine, firm, sealing the vow, before he lets go.
The pact between us settles like a curse.
Ares watches me with that infuriatingly calm expression, as though he’s the only one in the room allowed to breathe easily. The moment slows under the pull of his attention, thick as smoke.
And then he moves.
Not with violence this time, but with the same unsettling decisiveness he’s shown since the moment he appeared. His hand closes around my wrist again, but not to restrain, more like he’s tethering me in place so I can’t back away from what I’ve agreed to.
The cut on my palm stings sharply, blood gathering at the edges before slipping along the curve of my thumb. Ares’s eyes track it with almost clinical interest, his jaw ticking once as though something inside him tightens.
He steps closer.
Closer than before.
Closeenough that I feel the warmth of his breath against my cheek, grounding and dangerous all at once.
“Let me see it,” he murmurs, not quite a request, not quite an order.
His fingers close around my hand, turning it gently, even reverently, palm up. It’s the first careful touch he has ever offered me, and somehow that makes it worse. More unsettling. Something in me reacts, not with fear, not with anger, but with a quiet awareness that this man is not like Sebastian or Liam or Theo. Nothing about him softens. Even kindness, when he gives it, is carved from something primal.
The blood pools, a dark bead in the center of my palm, before another joins it. Ares watches both form, unreadable, then raises his eyes to mine.
“Blood seals everything,” he says softly. “Oaths. Betrayals. Truths.”
His thumb brushes the edge of the cut, slow enough to test my reaction. I refuse to flinch under his touch, though the burn travels all the way to my elbow.
He seems satisfied.
His attention returns to the blood. He lifts my hand higher, the gesture deliberate, almost ceremonial. For a heartbeat I assume he’ll press his thumb into the cut to mix our blood further.
He does nothing so harmless.
Ares brings my hand to his mouth.
Warm breath ghosts over the wound, then his tongue drags slowly across the blood pooling there, collecting the copper-dark line as though tasting something he has long expected to savor. The motion is smooth, unhurried, obscene in how intimate it feels. My breath stutters, not from pain but from the shock of the act, its quiet brutality, its strange gentleness.
Ares’s eyes remain on mine the entire time.
When he finishes, he straightens, holding my hand for a moment longer before releasing it. The air between us feels altered.
He wipes the remaining blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his wrist. His voice drops, nearly a whisper, but it slides through me like a blade dipped in honey.
“And you just signed the dotted line.”
The oath settles between us like a storm cloud waiting to break.
Ares doesn’t look away.
And neither do I.
27
