ARES
Gods and goddesses. Not able to heal Charolette. The hounds. War.
We spent the next hour talking to Elijah about it, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around all of this. There was too much going on for all of us to handle alone anymore, and sometime during the chat, I realized that I missed seeing my mate smile often.
All we did was stress lately.
And I wanted to change that tonight. I wanted to help her relax. To give her an unforgettable night.
After talking to Elijah, we walked back into the pack house to find Charolette curled up in Marcel’s arms in the living room while watching a movie. She looped a piece of his silver hair around her finger, tugging on it slightly and staring up at him instead of the TV.
Aurora bounced on her toes beside me, creepily watching them from the kitchen and grinning at me. “How cute are they?!” she whisper-yelled at me, placing a hand to her mouth and giggling behind it. “Oh goodness, I have butterflies.”
I playfully rolled my eyes at her. “I can be cute too.”
“And how’s that?” Aurora asked, one hand on her hip and her lips curled into an evil smile.
“How’s that?” I asked, stalking closer to her, forcing her to walk backward into the kitchen and then trapping her between me and the kitchen counter. “I’ll show you how that is.” I wrapped my arms tightly around her waist to pull her closer to me, and when she was flush against my chest, I dug my fingers into her sides to tickle her.
She giggled and squirmed in my grasp. “Oh Goddess, Ares!” She slunk down to the ground, maneuvering her way out of my hold until she doubled over in front of me and grasped her sides. “You know how much I hate being tickled.”
“You don’t hate it, Kitten,” I said.
She loved it. Secretly.
Once she stood, she pointed to the door. “I’m making pretzels again. Mama is hungry. Go get the bedroom ready. We can”—she wiggled her brows—“have another tickle party later, if you know what I mean.”
Amused, I walked toward the door and glanced back at Aurora’s sexy, pregnant ass. She had a goofy smile on her face and couldn’t stop laughing as she took the pretzels from the box and stuffed them into the microwave.
Ruffles meowed at me to go into the other room, telling me to follow Aurora’s orders. I arched my brow at the gray ball of fur and walked down the hall, and then I collapsed on the bed in our room.
A couple moments later, Aurora walked into our bedroom with a plate of soft pretzels, the salt and bread rolling around on the plate. Ruffles followed her into the room, swaying her gray tail from side to side and shutting the door behind her.
“No cheese?” I asked, grabbing the plate and setting it on the unsteady bed.
Snatching it back, Aurora pulled out a folding serving tray she stored under the bed for times like these and set the plate on top of it. Then, she hopped onto the bed and stole a pretzel piece right from my hand.
“You like the cheese?” she asked, sticking the pretzel into my mouth. “I thought that was a Mars-only thing.”
My lips curled into a fragile smile, a lingering warmth spreading throughout my chest. Earlier, when I’d brought out pretzels without the cheese to Aurora on the porch—by complete accident—she’d looked so sad.
Maybe she had always thought that both of us liked the cheese, but only Mars really had. I ate it sometimes for her because she loved it too. Never quite for me. Yet for her to make that distinction meant everything to me.
It was such a small, almost-laughable thing.
But Mars and I weren’t the same person. Over the years, sometimes, people might have thought that we liked the same things, even our closest family. And to have Aurora recognize that this was mainly a Mars thing made me feel different.
“You could’ve still brought it for you,” I said.
“Yeah, but”—she shrugged and plopped another into her mouth—“this is good too.”
We continued to eat in silence. I brushed my toes against her every now and then, the feel of her skin against mine calming even the worst parts of my mind down for a bit tonight. After we finished, she set the serving tray to the side and glanced over at me.
“Are you still hungry?” she asked, lips curled into a smirk.
I arched my brow. “Why?”
“Because”—she spread her legs and placed her hand on her cunt through her soaked panties, instantly making me hard—“I’m horny, and I have something for you to eat. Your kitten’s cunt is aching for you.”
“Is that right?” I asked, drawing my tongue against my canines.
“My big, bad alpha must be hungry.” She grasped her panties in her fist and pulled them right between her glistening pussy lips, her swollen clit stuffed between them. She ground her core against them, soaking them even further. “Come eat.”
Gliding my tongue against my lips, I crawled between her legs and yanked her toward me. I dipped my head and grasped her underwear by my teeth, ripping them off by their seams. After stuffing them into her filthy mouth, I placed my hot mouth on her folds.
Tongue rolling over her clit, eyes gazing up at her, I thrust a finger into her pussy and ate her like the wild, savage alpha that I was. I groaned against her, dragging my tongue down her folds to her entrance. When I pulled my finger out of her, I sucked it into my mouth and licked off all her juices.
Kissing back up her body, I pulled up her shirt, sucked one of her nipples into my mouth, and tugged on it gently. Aurora arched her back, and I ground my hips into the mattress to relieve some of the pressure in my dick.
Aurora squirmed under me as I sucked harder on her breast.
“Beg, Aurora,” I grunted against her, pressing my cock against her entrance and aching to thrust it right inside her. I dragged my teeth against the pink bud. “I love hearing your sweet little moans.”
She grasped the sheets and tugged up on them, whimpering.
“Come on, Kitten,” I taunted, pressing the head of my dick a bit harder against her drooling cunt. I tugged up on her nipple between my teeth and let it go, her breast bouncing back down. “You can beg, can’t you?” I slipped a hand between her legs and rubbed her clit until she clenched. “Your pussy is aching for it.”
“Please, Ares,” she pleaded desperately.
Just as I was about to thrust it inside of her, I cocked a brow at her and shook my head at my mate. “You know better than that. Please what?”
“Please, Alpha.”
I slowly pushed myself inside of her, letting her feel every inch of me. “Good girl, Kitten,” I murmured into her ear, brushing some long brown hair out of her face. I moved my knees closer to her ass, lifting her hips off the bed slightly to get deeper inside of her.
“You’re so”—I thrust hard and deep into her—“fucking”—another thrust—“good for me.”
Instead of viciously pounding into her, I placed my lips on hers, kissing her softly. Our tongues moved together in a gentle rhythm as I gently thrust in and out of her.
“More,” she mumbled to me. “Please, I want more.”
I sucked her bottom lip between my teeth, thrusting faster into her and staring down at those big eyes that I had fallen madly in love with. “Fuck,” I whispered, moving faster. “I fucking love you.”
When she shuddered and relaxed into the mattress, I grunted at the sight of my mate’s orgasm and spilled my load deep in her cunt. When I finished, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me down to kiss me.
“I love you too, Ares. I will be with you through everything. You’re never alone.”
Collapsing by her side, I closed my eyes and breathed in her calming scent, finally relaxing for tonight.
“I told everyone that I’d be with Nyx,” Dawn whispered into my ear, her soft and plump lips moving up the column of my neck and lingering right below the angle of my jaw. “Nobody thinks I’m here with you.”
“It’s dangerous,” I said, shaking my head, but I couldn’t help drawing her closer.
Something about Dawn had always exhilarated me. When I was in the middle of battle, seeing the morning light flicker through the trees or feeling the dew under my feet instead of blood, it was tranquility—a feeling that I never thought I’d be able to explain.
I was war.
Yet she felt like my peace.
I wrapped my arms around her legs and pulled her on top of me, pushing her brown hair out of her face so I could see her refreshing smile. “It’s dangerous to tell everyone that you’re with Nyx while you’re with me,” I continued. “Hella wants to kill you for being with me, and Nyx’s brother doesn’t like outsiders.”
“Hella has wanted to kill me for being with you for years, and she hasn’t yet. She hasn’t even tried. She’s not strong enough to kill me, especially not when you’re by my side. And, plus”—she drew a finger up the side of my neck, touching my scars—“gods can’t die.”
My lips curled into a smile, and I grasped her waist and rolled us over, burying my face into her neck. “I thought you hated me,” I said, fingers digging into her sides to make her giggle. “What happened to you being terrified of me, Dawn?”
She let her fingers glide against my chest. “I’ve realized that the god of war has a soft side that not many people get to see.” She smiled at me and pushed some hair away from my face, drawing her fingers down the scar that cut through my eyebrow. “I’m one of the lucky ones.”
“You’re the only one,” I corrected.
Nobody else saw this side of me.
“The only one,” she whispered, as if the words meant everything to her.
In the midst of a battle, I clutched a spear in my left hand and Aurora’s hand in the other. With enemy blood smeared across my chest and an insatiable ache to kill, I pushed Aurora back. “Get behind me.”
Yet she walked ahead of me with a pack of rogue wolves behind her, who were ready to pounce on our enemies from the underworld. Each rogue bared its long, bloodied canines, lowering their heads and analyzing the hounds.
“I’m not one of your men, Ares,” Aurora said, eyes shifting between hundreds of dawn colors and shades—pinks and oranges and yellows. “I’m a goddess who will always fight beside you. You don’t need to save me.”
Someone slipped a silver sword right through her heart. She stared at me with wide eyes, blood dripping from her lips, gushing out of her mouth, pouring onto the ground. “Ares,” she whispered, dropping to the dirt.
A hound ripped off her arm, throwing it across the forest.
They started to close in.
I couldn’t find her.
She was gone.
Gone …
I’d let her die.
The last thing I saw was her.
She wasn’t there with me, but I saw her spirit, could feel her fingers glide over my shoulders and chest, could see her pretty little smile warm me.
Yet all I could feel was helplessness.
I stood in Medusa’s ancient home, shaking my head back and forth. “She’s not gone for good. She can’t be. She’s still alive. She always comes back to fucking life.” My teeth were clenched.
I couldn’t lose her for good. I fucking couldn’t.
Aurora was the only fucking person who calmed me the fuck down.
She was the only fucking person who I loved.
“She’s gone, Ares,” Medusa said. “Her soul will live on, but her body is gone.”
“It can’t be. It fucking can’t.”
Aurora lay on Medusa’s kitchen table with claw marks and bite marks all over her body. I brushed my fingers against all the fatal scars that should’ve killed her in the past two thousand years we’d been together, but hadn’t. Why had this one been different? Why had she died now?
I should’ve been with her to protect her, but I hadn’t been.
I hadn’t been there.
I gripped one of Medusa’s ceramic vases in my hand and threw it against the wall, watching it shatter. Rage rushed through me. I wanted to fucking kill all the people who’d had a hand in this. I would kill them. Nobody would get away with this.
“Ares, settle down,” Medusa said. “Getting angry will only get you killed too.”
I stormed out of the house. “She’s the only woman I’ll ever love.”
I didn’t care if avenging her would kill me.
She was mine, and I’d failed to protect what was mine yet again.
Mortals would pay. Wolves would pay. Gods would pay for her death.