Poppy, cheeks flushed, squares her shoulders like someone trying to be braver than she feels. She steps forward, hand brushing the grip of her wand.
“Lead the way,” she says.
Ares nods once, pushes aside a dense curtain of brush, and holds it open for her. She slips through, her braid snagging on a branch before she frees it gently. I move next, stepping toward the tight opening as he waits.
He doesn’t step back.
When I pass him, his body moves with mine, close enough that the brush drags across both our arms, catching fabric and skin alike. Thorns nip at my forearm; the heat of him radiates at my back. Neither of us makes a sound. It feels like stepping through a doorway built from tension.
When we emerge on the trail again, most of the flowers Poppy wove have fallen, forming a scattered trail behind us. One blooms stubbornly near my temple.
Ares notices it instantly.
He plucks a crushed blossom from the front of his shirt, one that must have landed there when we squeezed through the bramble. Then he steps toward me, slow and unhurried.
His fingers lift the remaining flower from the fragile hold of my hair. For a second I think he means to toss it aside, but instead he tucks it back, this time with meticulous care. Hisknuckles skim my cheek. More intimate than a touch that brief has any right to be.
His fingers hover a moment longer than necessary. His eyes flicker, a flash of molten gold, pulse-bright, so quick I almost doubt I saw it.
Then the mask settles back over him. The unreadable calm. The neutrality that makes everything more dangerous.
He steps away.
“We move now,” he says, voice steady again. “Before they shift positions.”
But the ghost of his touch remains.
And despite the cold shadow of what waits ahead, despite everything I should fear, something low in me thrums to life, heat threading through my veins like a warning, or something far worse.
34
LIAM
Sebastian’s pacing grinds into the stone floor, each footfall sharp enough to spark. His nails take the brunt of his nerves, what’s left of them, torn by restless teeth. Every pass of his fingers through his hair leaves it wilder, darker, the way it gets only when fear starts to masquerade as fury.
Not a single moment of stillness lives in him.
“Ares may be a bastard,” comes out of me before thought catches up, “but he’s not incompetent. Harper and Poppy are safer with him than they’d ever be on their own.”
Sebastian stops so abruptly the air seems to lurch with him. His eyes cut toward me with something jagged underneath.
“Where does this ‘vast knowledge’ of him come from?” His voice is low...dangerously so. Theo’s foot, which has been tapping a frantic rhythm, stills entirely.
Memories of the manor flicker, dark corners, cold marble floors, the sharp clatter of plates while two children sat at the far end of a table too large for any family. A smaller, angry face glaring from the shadows. Ares, half-starved, half-feral, forced into obedience and punished for any moment he wasn’t.
“He lived in our house,” the words finally manage to steady themselves as they leave me. “More servant than child. His father was everywhere ours wanted him, and Ares followed like a shadow. He watched everything. Listened to everything. Said nothingunless spoken to.”
Sebastian drags both hands down his face. For a heartbeat he looks young, too young to carry this kind of dread.
“Now he slips through the cracks like smoke,” he mutters, voice rough, “gets near her again and again. Makes deals with her. Blood oaths. Takes up space in her mind. In her choices.” His fist crashes into the wall, knuckles splitting, stone giving before his temper does. “He’s a parasite and somehow still manages to get too close.”
Theo rises then, the scrape of his chair startling against the charged quiet. Arms fold across his chest; shoulders square in that deceptively gentle way he has, like a warning dressed in silk. He steps toward Sebastian without hesitation, closer than most would dare.
“Perhaps the problem isn’t him,” Theo says, the softness gone from his voice. “Perhaps the problem is how little trust you give her. Both of you.” His head flicks briefly toward me. “Harper doesn’t need constant guarding. She isn’t fragile porcelain. She’s fire. And you two keep trying to box her in.”
The words land like a blade. Sebastian’s posture wavers, only a fraction, but enough. A crack forming under the weight of guilt he never allows himself to acknowledge.
Theo doesn’t let him retreat. Fingers catch the front of Sebastian’s shirt, not threatening, simply anchoring him in place. Their breaths mingle in the narrow space between them. Tension coils, heavy and electric.
