“What?”
He … loves me?
I don’t even know what else to say.
I’m too stunned.
I almost can’t believe my ears, but something about the way he looks at me with those anguish-laced hazel eyes makes me trust him.
I never knew how much it would hurt to watch him suffer.
To watch him literally bleed for me.
My hand instinctively rises to touch the gash on his chin from the fight. A small wound compared to the festering hole in his heart eating away at him. And I am the one to blame. All this time, all he wanted was to protect his mother, for his father to stay, for his family not to break apart.
And it’s been killing him to the point where he’s equated his own death with pleasure.
I swallow away the lump in my throat, realizing what a complicated individual he is, even though I initially believed he was nothing more than a rampant bully.
And just how much I’ve begun to feel for him.
My finger slowly travels up to his lip as my defiance slowly unravels from the last hanging thread.
“Show me what it’s like when you love.”
Within an instant, his lips smash on mine, practically making my heart sing. His tongue sweeps around my mouth and the roof of my mouth, desperately circling around my tongue as though he wants to mesh our hearts together just so I can feel the kind of love he feels for Ares.
He kisses me like he’s torn between loving me and hating me for making him fall in love. And I can’t blame him. He’s made me feel the same way as my fingers curl around his hair and hold on tight.
But my God, do these forbidden kisses feel so damn good.
“I can’t. I can’t choose,” he murmurs between kissing me. “I want both of you to be mine.”
His kisses are feverish, and for a second, I almost forget to breathe. “Yes.”
He slowly tears away from my lips. “Is it possible?”
I bite my lip and shudder in place. “Let me talk with him.”
He takes a deep breath and averts his eyes before he finally steps aside and allows me to pass.
“Thank you,” I say as my hand lingers on his, and I squeeze softly.
He nods as I step inside the room, where Ares is still partially hunched over in a seat, his fingers in his coal-black hair caked in blood, like he’s overthinking his sins.
I swallow away the lump in my throat and step closer to the devil himself, desperate to know whether all I ever believed was the truth … or a lie.
“I wanted to thank—”
“Don’t.” He interjects. “Don’t thank me for doing what’s right. I know you still hate me because I made you hate me.”
He stands, clearly in pain, but still turns to face me, and I’m not prepared for how my heart feels severed in two.
“You asked me why I was so eager to die …” he says, slowly unbuttoning his bloodied shirt, making me gulp as the letters begin to appear underneath. “Why your father was killed …” It’s hard to take my eyes off him as he’s never taken off his shirt before, and the abs beneath it are a sight to behold. “But all this time, you’ve been asking the wrong man.”
He turns around as his shirt slowly drops to the floor, and my jaw drops at the sight of all the scars on his muscular back, more than I could ever imagine, one slice after the other, searing red marks engraved into his skin. Some newer than others, almost as if they were welts chiseled into his skin mere days ago.
And in the top left corner, the wound caused by the knife that impaled him when he protected me from harm.
His thick, muscular arm lifts over his head, and his fingertips graze across the wound.
“Go ahead … feel it.”
I shudder as I step toward him and touch his back, the scars clearly as old as years yet as fresh as can be, as though it’s been done to him again and again.
They’re coarse, rough on all edges, like the careless strikes of a whip.
My eyes widen.
After we killed Ferry, Ares was dragged back into the Tartarus House with blood seeping through his shirt.
Did someone hurt him because of what we did?
“This. This is what your father’s death cost me.”
Oh God.
His sacrifice.
My lip trembles. “This … this was done to you because you killed my father?”
Slowly, he turns to grab my hand, his piercing gray eyes haunting my very soul. “No. I was punished because I refused.”
Ares
Two years ago
“Please. Don’t do this. I have a wife. A daughter,” the man begs.
My eyes travel across my victim’s face and down his chest, where a little patch is sutured onto his jacket with the name “Murphy’s Flowers.” But it’s the man’s pleading green eyes that make me drop the knife onto the ground.
“No.”
I get up and walk away from the man who was supposed to be my victim, knowing full well what it will cost me.
My God-given right as firstborn son, the vast empire of the Torres family, all the companies my father has under his belt … and his undying devotion.
All of it gone with one simple word.
But I have made my choice now. There’s no going back from here.
“Ares,” my father grits. “Come. Here.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” I say, glancing at him over my shoulder. “I said no.”
Kai makes a tsk sound. “Ares, c’mon. It’s not that hard.”
“Just because you have no shame who you kill doesn’t mean I don’t.”
“If you don’t do this,” my father warns, pausing midsentence, “If you won’t kill for me … That’s it. That’s the end of it. Of everything.”
I know what’s at stake here.
But I’ve already made my decision, and I’m sticking to it.
“Jesus, Ares. It’s just one kill,” Kai scoffs.
I refuse to become the monster he wants me to be, and if this is what it takes to be the man I want to be, then so be it.
“The killing of an innocent man. I don’t murder innocent people.”
“Fine. You want to betray your family? Have the moral high ground? Then stay there.”
My father snatches the knife off the ground, and my eyes widen.
I rush toward the man. “Wait! No—”
Too late.
My father jams it straight into the man’s heart, and I stop halfway there.
Fuck. I didn’t think he’d actually do it.
The man howls in pain … and then nothing.
“This is what happens when you don’t do your duty to your family.” My father marches at me and grips my shirt. “You just lost everything. My trust. My love. My fucking company. All of it.”
The look in his eyes is murderous as he shoves me away.
“Kai. Get in the fucking car. We’re going.”
Kai throws me a worried glance, but I brush it off as I waltz toward the man and hover over him, watching the light slowly dim in his eyes. I push my index finger against his neck and feel. No pulse.
Fuck.
I should’ve let him run when I had the chance. Maybe then he could’ve escaped this fate.
“Your death is on my hands,” I say as my fingers curl around the blade.
I tug it out, but the man is already lost, his heart no longer pumping blood.
This fucking man … didn’t deserve to die. But I know the cost of his life will be great.
I glare at the car being started in the distance, the car lights like a cop’s flashlight beaming onto my crime.
“Ares. Come,” Kai beckons me from the window.
Sighing, I get up and tuck the knife into my pocket while my eyes happen to connect with a pair of green eyes in the distance that strike me so much I stop breathing for a moment. They’re hauntingly beautiful and riddled with death.
Goose bumps scatter on my skin before I pull up my coat and run off to the car, jumping into the back seat as my father hits the gas.
But I still can’t help but look out the back window at the girl hovering over the man’s corpse, bawling her eyes out before a visceral scream can be heard.
It’s the kind of pain one can only feel once in a lifetime.
The kind of pain that haunts not just one but two souls.
Present
“There is nothing I wouldn’t do to turn back time …” I say, “So I could’ve saved him.”
I turn around so she can look at my chest. Her eyes gawk at the scars etched into my skin, a name which quite literally chains me to her.
Murphy.
Her last name.
“I carved this into my own flesh that night to remind me of what I’ve sacrificed. What it cost me. What I have to live with for the rest of eternity.”
She sucks in a breath, and tears well up in her eyes.
She looks completely shell-shocked.
But this is the naked truth.
“Why didn’t you tell her about the letters?” Caleb mutters from the doorway.
“Did you know?” Crystal asks him.
Caleb shakes his head. “I never saw much of the scars. I was only allowed to dab them, but he didn’t want me to look. And the letters … I only saw partially.” Caleb swallows, like he’s realizing for the first time how much Ares kept hidden from all of us.
“Because I didn’t want anyone to know what he’s done to me,” I say. “But I realize now I should’ve shown this long ago.”
I lick my lips and fish a knife out of my pocket. “This is the knife my father gave me to prove my worth to him. Instead, he used it to punish me by slicing my back open that very same night.”
I don’t hesitate to step closer, closer to the edge of oblivion, closer to the fringes where we both belong. I push the knife into her bloodstained hand as she begins to tremble.
“Every time I killed to oppose him, he would whip me raw. Every time I went against his rules, he would slice me open. Every time I tried to save those who didn’t deserve it in his eyes, he would hurt me.”
I grab her free hand and place it on the letters I carved into my skin.
“But this pain? This is my own. This is the pain I chose to endure.”
Her lip quivers. “Your father hurt you every time you disobeyed?”
I nod.
“This Ferry guy we killed,” she mutters, tears welling up in her eyes. “You knew your father would come after you, didn’t you?”
I nod. “No amount of his rage will stop me from punishing the people directly responsible for destroying my life …” I look into her eyes. “And yours.”
She shudders in place as her fingers slowly traipse over the scars on my chest.
“Your father punished you … because of my father and me,” she whispers.
“The moment I met you, I wanted nothing more than for you to fear me so all my suffering would’ve made sense,” I murmur, grabbing a loose strand of her hair so I can tuck it behind her ear. “Instead, you smiled at me. Smiled. At the man you thought was your father’s killer.” My jaw tenses. “And it broke me.”
A tear rolls down her cheeks, and I pick it up with my index finger.
When I first met her, I wanted nothing more than to see her cry. To witness the hatred that I deserved just so I could make peace with all the pain I endured. Fear was the only feeling I knew, the only feeling I trusted.
Fear was what I was owed.
But she … she wouldn’t fear me, no matter what I or any of us did, and it twisted my heart.
My fingertips slide down her cheek, spreading my own blood across her skin, which comes alive under my touch. Electricity sparks between us, and a decrepit smile slowly sneaks onto my face.
I guess there’s no escaping now.
“I wanted to hate you, little rose,” I murmur. “So badly. But the more I watched you suffer as much as I had, the more it made me bleed.” My finger slides down her neck, spreading the bloody line to her chest. “This heart I longed so hard to crumble with my bare hands just so I could die in peace. What kind of a soul-crushing monster would fall for the one girl who wanted him dead?”
Her eyes widen, but I have to push through.
This is it.
“I’ve only known cruelty. But in the end, I was the cruel one to take away your smile. The one thing that kept me alive. Breathing. Yearning. Hoping. When that smile vanished …” She sucks in a breath when I inch closer. “My soul vanished too.”
She shudders in place. “Ares …”
I look into those sparkling eyes, wondering if I could ever earn back that smile that has haunted me so.
I grab her hand, the one that holds the knife, and push it into my own abdomen. “You’ve taken ahold of my soul. Stolen it right out of my chest along with my heart. All that’s left of me is an empty vessel. I’m nothing but a ghost wandering through life, but I’m not the one who haunts. It is you. You have haunted me since the very first day I saw you, and I don’t want to let go until I’ve killed everyone who even so much as breathes in your direction.” I pause and watch her breathing pick up. “I am a man possessed. Possessed by the fantasy of owning this heart …” I push my fingertip into her chest, blood connecting with blood. “This heart that never wanted to be mine because of the pain I’ve put it through. This heart poisoned by my hatred. And no amount of pain my father inflicts on me compares to that kind of suffering.”
I sink to my knees in front of her, holding her wrist tightly so the knife is pushed into my neck. “So take your revenge, little rose, and end my suffering,” I murmur. “Please.”
“Ares, no!” Caleb shouts, and I throw him a glance.
“Don’t,” Blaine says, grabbing his arm. “Let him do this. I know it’s hard for you, but you have to let it happen.”
Caleb’s face contorts, but he finally gives up fighting the inevitable.
Crystal averts her gaze, but I want her to see me, the real me. “Look at me,” I say, forcing our eyes to find each other in our darkest moment. “He named me Ares because he wanted to raise a god. I was made to rule his fucking empire, and there is nothing in this world I would bend for, not even him … But I will for you.”
