AURORA
With trembling hands, I opened the front door and stepped into the eerily quiet pack house. Ruffles met me in the foyer with her eyes wide and her fur raised, as if she was scared or nervous, and then she meowed and looked up the stairs.
I pet her backside, pushing her fur back into place, and blew out a deep breath.
How would we keep our baby girl alive when we traveled to the underworld? We barely had a plan on how to defeat Hella, and we had absolutely no idea what the underworld looked like or how it worked. When we got there, everything could be different from what we thought it was.
Tears formed in my eyes, but I pushed them away and ran a hand over my belly bump. If Ares saw me crying, he’d ask what happened with Medusa, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him what she had suggested.
Especially not after what Charolette had admitted earlier.
“Meow,” Ruffles said, pushing her head into the back of my calf and toward the stairs.
Hazelnut drifted through the house from our bedroom. I inhaled Ares’s scent deeply, letting my shoulders slump forward and relaxing only slightly. When Ruffles meowed again, I walked up the stairs to our bedroom and smiled softly to myself.
Thank the goddess that I was mated to that man.
Even when I was a wreck, he could always calm me down.
Stepping into our bedroom, I found Ares standing over the sink in our connected bathroom. I walked over, peeked my head into it, and stopped dead in my tracks, tears welling up in my eyes. “Ares, what are you doing?!”
Blood ran down the sides of the white sink bowl, dripping from above. The mirror was shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, littered on the floor and in the sink too. Ares’s body was violently heaving up and down.
He turned around in shock with a large piece of glass lodged into his forearm, deep enough to leave a scar, even on an alpha who had superior healing abilities. When Ares saw me, he pulled it out of his flesh, as if he didn’t want me to see, but it was too late.
Tears immediately poured down my cheeks. My heart pounded in my ears.
“Ares!” I sobbed. “Ares, why?”
I wiped the tears with the backs of my hands, but they continued to cloud my vision. I wanted to both hug him and slap him, scream at him for ever doing that to himself and tell him that I would always be there for him, no matter what.
But, Goddess, I didn’t know what to do.
Knowing that Ares had cut himself in the past was one thing. It was another to see the man I loved forcing himself to hurt and bleed in private because he couldn’t deal with the pain anymore.
“Aurora, I’m sorry,” he said, dropping the glass.
The bloody edges clattered against the sink counter, the blood splattering in the bowl. My gaze landed back on his forearm and on the huge gash in it that wasn’t healing. He placed a hand over the wound, so I couldn’t see it.
“Please, don’t hate me.”
I parted my lips to speak, to say something, anything, but I couldn’t. After Medusa had told me to give away my pup to now coming home to see my mate hurting himself, it was almost too much to handle.
Ares stepped closer to me, and I had the urge to move back, but I stopped myself and stared up into his wide, wavering gaze. Tears filled his wide brown eyes, and he grabbed my hands.
“You weren’t supposed to see that. I’m sorry. Don’t hate me,” he repeated again.
Trembling, I walked past him into the bathroom, grabbed the closest towel, and pressed it against his wounds, my fingers shaking as I clamped it around his forearm. Blood stained the towel, drenching right through it, and I bit back another sob.
“Aurora, talk to me, please,” he said.
Yet I couldn’t look him in the eye.
I didn’t want him to see my hurt and sorrow—from not only what Medusa had told me, but also from my mate harming himself again. This was my fault for not knowing that this was how he felt. If I had focused on him a bit more or asked the therapist to come over more often, I could’ve done something to stop this.
Fuck, I should’ve been here.
I should’ve never left to talk to Medusa.
“Sit down,” I whispered, voice shaking, nodding to the toilet. “Please.”
Ares sat immediately. I turned toward the sink to wet the towel and gasped when I saw the sheer amount of blood in the bowl. I clutched onto the counter, nearly doubling over at the sight of it, and blinked away tears.
While I had seen more blood before, I hadn’t seen anything like this.
Ares stood. “Aurora.”
“Sit back down,” I said to him, not wanting him to comfort me.
I should’ve been able to hold myself together for him. He was the one hurting.
“Aurora,” Ares said again.
I turned on my heel toward him and pointed a sharp claw at the toilet. “Sit,” I said strongly, not letting my voice waver this time. It had come out too harsh—I knew that it had—but I couldn’t help it.
After Ares sat, I turned on the sink and let the water wash away the blood in the bowl. I pushed the towel under the rushing warm water and then turned back to Ares. I still couldn’t look him in the eye as I knelt in front of him and grasped his wrist.
As I wiped away the blood from his forearm, I stared down at every old and new scar on his skin. My lips trembled, but I vowed to stay strong and finish cleaning all the blood before I broke down into more unruly tears.
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry, Kitten. I’m so sorry.”
My fingers dug into his skin, and I finally looked up at him through watery eyes. I grasped his face in my hands, promising myself to be strong. “Don’t apologize. I told you that I’m going to be here with you through everything, Ares,” I whispered through the tears. “You’re not alone in this. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
Ares stayed quiet for a few moments and then doubled over, his entire body collapsing in on itself. He stared at me with trembling eyes, all his walls finally shattering. “There is a war going on in my fucking head, Aurora. And it never stops.” His voice broke. “It never fucking stops.”
“You don’t have to keep it all in,” I whispered, pushing some hair off his sweaty forehead. “Talk to me about it. Tell me everything that makes you hurt. I’m here with you forever, Ares, and I won’t ever leave you.”
Ares enveloped me in a hug for a long time, just resting his head on my shoulder. When he finally calmed his breathing, he picked me up and placed me on the sink counter, standing between my legs. And even then, he held me close to him.
I ran my fingers across his back and laid my head on his shoulder, staring at his sculpted face.
After forty minutes of holding him, I lifted my head and brushed some hair out of his face. “We need to talk about Medusa. She had a lot to say when I met her earlier.”
“Go ahead,” Ares said, voice gruff.
While she had told me so much, I didn’t even know where to start. This was so much—almost too much—to pile on Ares’s shoulders, but he needed to know now. The war was here, whether we wanted it or not.
We needed to survive.
“We are gods. Medusa told me herself. During the War of the Lycans, I died, and you died shortly after. Our souls were reborn into these bodies. She will find us a way to the underworld,” I said. “And she’ll put in a word about Marcel taking the place of Charolette’s life. Though I do hope that Hella doesn’t think this is a trap. With Marcel in the underworld and under her control, we’ll have him feed us information about what’s going on—as long as he doesn’t break and let Hella control him.”
“Charolette can be saved?” Ares asked, eyes widening.
“But we’ll lose Marcel.”
Ares stared down at the bathroom floor. “Marcel is strong and is her mate. He’ll do whatever we require him to do and get whatever kind of information that we need from Hella in order to destroy her.”
“Is that it?” I whispered.
He doesn’t have any other questions about Medusa telling us we are gods?
Rocking forward, he glanced between us for a quick moment. “I actually have something to admit to you. I’ve been having visions of the past. Every night, I see you die, Aurora. Every fucking night, I watch you reach out for me as someone kills you. I don’t think I’ll be strong enough to protect you and our baby.”
Visions? Just like mine, I suppose.
“You will protect her,” I told Ares, grabbing his hands and placing them on my stomach. “And no matter what happens, no matter how hard life gets for us, no matter how much you think that you won’t be enough, remember that we created her. She’s ours. She will grow up, knowing how strong and protective you are of her, even before she was ever born.”
Ares rubbed the scar on his chest. “In all those past lives, we could never be together. We were always hiding our relationship from someone or something. This life … I finally have you, and I can’t let you go.”
After a long few moments of silence, I cleared my throat. “But we have to think about her in all of this too,” I said, glancing at the sink and frowning.
There was no way that I could tell him about Medusa suggesting that I give the baby away, not after what I had just seen him do. He needed this baby just as much as I did.
“I’m going to give birth anytime now. Our baby is getting bigger and stronger by the day, and she has grown far faster than a wolf does. We can’t bring her to the underworld, and I can’t go like this.”
Ares paused. “What are you saying?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “We just have to prepare.”
“You’re saying to give her away, aren’t you?” he asked me, staring me deep in my eyes with nothing but pain and anguish. His top lip twitched—in disgust or anger, I didn’t know. I couldn’t quite tell how he felt about it.
“No,” I said to him honestly. “I can’t give her away. I need her.”
After Mom, Dad, Jeremy, and Mars, I couldn’t lose anyone else.
“I can go to the underworld alone,” Ares said.
“No.”
If I let him go down there alone, he might not ever come back up, just like Helios. If Helios was as strong as Medusa had made him out to be, I didn’t know if Ares would be strong enough to handle it alone down there for so long without me.
Ares grasped my chin in his hand. “Then, what do you suggest we do?”
My gaze drifted to him and then to the bare wall behind him. There wasn’t a way that we could win. If we brought our girl to the underworld, Hella would try to kill her. If Ares left for the underworld by himself, I might never see him again, and this war might never end. If we left her up here … maybe we could stop the war soon, so she could live safely.
“I’d rather you stay here,” he finally said. “That way, I know you’re safe. Every other time you’ve been at war with me, you always end up dying, and I can never protect you from those evils. If you come with me, I’m fucking terrified that this time, it won’t be any different. I won’t be able to protect you or her.”
I rested my hands on his chest, curling my fingers into the thick muscle. “I’m not leaving you. This time is different. You said it yourself,” I whispered, brushing some hair from his forehead. “This time, we get to finally be together, stand together, and fight together. And when we’re together, nobody can stop us.”