Sebastian’s hand clamps around mine with desperate urgency, pulling my attention to him. His eyes shine with remorse, fear, relief, everything tangled into a single expression that nearly cracks me open.
“Harper, I never meant for any of this to happen,” he murmurs, voice frayed. His thumb strokes the back of my hand, as though by touch alone he can rewind time.
I swallow hard. “I know, Seb-”
I reach up, pulling his forehead down to mine. He kisses me before I can finish speaking, a frantic, hungry press of lips that carries every apology he doesn’t know how to voice. His hands slide around my waist, gripping too tightly in his need to anchor himself.
Pain lances across my side.
I wince, breath catching, too quiet for Sebastian to hear but not quiet enough for Ares to ignore.
A touch grazes my hip. Not a soft one. A directional one.
Ares’s hand slides between Sebastian’s and my side, shoving Sebastian’s fingers lower with a swift, irritated pressure.
“She was injured there. You’re tearing her wound more.”
His annoyance rings clear, even through the strain in his voice. A curled line of blood starts beneath the fresh strain on my stitches.
Sebastian rounds on him with a brutal snap of temper. “Someone should kick your teeth in.”
My hand flies to Sebastian’s chest, pushing him back before he can lunge. Ares doesn’t even flinch, he only watches him with a feral, entertained sharpness.
“You keep tossing empty threats like that, Harwood,” Ares says, a grin spreading slow and dangerous across his blood-streaked mouth, “and I might have to show you what a real one looks like.”
Before Sebastian can respond, before the bite in Ares’s grin can deepen, Liam gasps.
Not a breath. Agasp. Violent enough that his whole chest jerks.
All three of us freeze. The forest seems to stop breathing.
I tear myself away from the boys, knees hitting the earth as I drop beside my brother. Liam drags in another breath, shaky and uneven, his hands blindly reaching until they find Theo’s trembling frame. He fists his fingers in the fabric at Theo’s back, anchoring himself to the boy who won’t stop sobbing against his chest.
“Theo…?”
Liam’s voice is sanded down to something thin and bewildered. He brings a shaking hand to his mouth, smearing across his lips. When he tastes the blood, confusion deepens across his face.
His eyes lift, sweeping the scene before him, Poppy’s tear-stained cheeks, Sebastian’s clenched jaw, me hunched over him, Ares looming nearby with blood smeared down his neck and a new wound cracking open across his back. He looks as if he’s woken from a long nightmare into another one.
“What happened?”
His hand finds my leg, squeezing, searching for an answer that won’t destroy him.
The silence stretches, taut and fragile.
And then Ares fills it.
“I brought you back from the dead,” he says simply, arms crossing over his chest as though nothing monumental has just transpired. His voice is steady...too steady, considering the tremor still clinging to his limbs. “Second time’s the charm… isn’t that the saying, Liam?”
The clearing goes still.
Poppy stops breathing.
Sebastian’s jaw locks so tight it trembles.
Theo lets out a tiny, broken noise.
And Liam, alive but pale, breathing but shaking, stares at Ares with an expression that fractures something deep inside the air between them.
