Almost..
He steps closer with barely a sound. Leaves shift around his boots. The cold air seems to warp around the heat radiating off him. And suddenly he’s close enough that I feel the uneven rhythm of his breathing brushing the space just above my cheek.
“You feel it,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t phrase it as a question. He says it like a certainty, like a truth he’s been circling for days waiting for me to catch up.
I try to steady my breath, but it comes out uneven. Another pulse of violet flickers through my fingers, un-contained and sharp.
His lips curve, not a smirk, not amusement, but recognition.
“You’re just like me,” he whispers. His voice is low, coaxing, almost intimate. “Give it time.”
The moment expands, hanging heavy in the cool air, too heavy, too charged. My magic stirs again, pushing outward like a heartbeat that doesn’t belong only to me. His gazetraces the movement, lingering at my hands, my mouth, my throat, drinking in things I’d rather him not see.
I swallow hard, grounding myself, trying to answer with something coherent. But the words tangle.
He tilts his head down the smallest fraction, a shadow falling across his eyes.
“You know I’m right.”
Before I can deny it, or admit it, a voice breaks through the trees.
“Harper? Harper, are you here?”
Poppy.
The spell around us snaps, though neither of us steps back. Ares shifts only enough to angle his body toward the sound, but he doesn’t retreat. Not even a fraction. His presence stays pressed up against mine, heat radiating, magic humming in the air like a low, vibrating chord.
Leaves rustle. Footsteps approach quickly, too quickly, but he still doesn’t move away. If anything, he leans a hair closer, as if wanting my reaction before anyone else’s.
“Harper!”
Poppy bursts into view at the edge of the clearing, breath uneven, hair pulled loose from her hood. She stops instantly when she sees us, Ares a dark, immovable figure half-shadowed in the trees, me flushed and breathless and too visibly caught in his gravity.
“Harper,” she whispers, almost stunned. Her gaze flicks between us, confusion blooming to concern.
Ares doesn’t give her the mercy of distance.
His head turns slightly, not enough to face her, just enough to acknowledge she exists, and then his eyes return to mine, gold flickering beneath the blue for a heartbeat so brief I nearly think I imagined it.
He lowers his voice so Poppy can’t hear, his breath brushingmy jaw.
“We’re not finished.”
Heat coils up my spine despite everything in me screaming this is reckless. Dangerous. Wrong.
Poppy takes a step forward, instinctively reaching for me.
“What’s happening? Why is he-?”
Ares cuts her off, but not with words. With presence. He straightens, his shoulders squaring, his gaze slicing through the clearing like the cold edge of a blade. For the first time, Poppy gets a full hit of the weight he carries, the wrongness, the authority, the promise of violence in his stillness.
She stops in her tracks.
Ares doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t posture. He only watches me, watching how I react to her concern, to his nearness, to the betrayal the boys accused me of, to the truth I just admitted.
His magic flickers again beneath his skin, another barely-there pulse of gold, and something in me answers despite myself.
