Chapter 32 Harper #2
The truth lands like a blow to the chest.
Ares lifts one hand, slow enough to give me the choice to move. I don’t. His palm meets the tree beside my head, his body angled just enough to trap me in a cage of heat and shadow without laying a finger on me. His presence wraps around me like smoke, dense and impossible to ignore.
“Tell me,” he murmurs, breath warm against my cheek. “Tell me you didn’t believe I did it.”
He isn’t trying to pull trust from me. He’s pulling the truth… and somehow that feels infinitely more dangerous.
He wants an answer.
And the worst part is, I’m afraid of the one forming on my tongue.
His question hangs between us like a suspended blade, gleaming, waiting to fall. I try to swallow around the tightness in my throat, but the breath stutters halfway down. The forest is too quiet. Even the wind holds its breath.
Ares doesn’t move, not a shift of muscle, not a tilt of his head, but the air around him changes.
It becomes charged, humming faintly, as if recognizing a predator it has learned to fear and respect in equal measure.
He’s close enough that his shadow blends with mine on the ground, one shape swallowing the other.
“Harper,” he murmurs, voice almost gentle, though it vibrates with something sharp beneath. “Say it.”
Something inside me buckles.
The admission drags itself out of me, raw and trembling, before I can stop it.
“I didn’t believe you did it.”
The forest reacts before he does.
A shiver of magic breaks loose under my skin, violet light threading through the air like veins waking beneath frost. It rolls off me in slow, widening circles, bending leaves, stirring the dirt, carrying the scent of something metallic and dangerous.
My breath quickens, magic unfurling as if it’s been waiting, aching, for an excuse to break free.
Ares doesn’t recoil.
He watches the flare behind my ribs as though witnessing a truth he’s been expecting. A breath passes, one long, suspended moment, and then his own magic slips its mask. His pupils tighten, and his irises flash a molten gold. It happens fast, too fast, like lightning caught in the surface of water.
A blink, a crackle of power, and it’s gone.
Almost..
He steps closer with barely a sound. Leaves shift around his boots. The cold air seems to warp around the heat radiating off him. And suddenly he’s close enough that I feel the uneven rhythm of his breathing brushing the space just above my cheek.
“You feel it,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t phrase it as a question. He says it like a certainty, like a truth he’s been circling for days waiting for me to catch up.
I try to steady my breath, but it comes out uneven. Another pulse of violet flickers through my fingers, un-contained and sharp.
His lips curve, not a smirk, not amusement, but recognition.
“You’re just like me,” he whispers. His voice is low, coaxing, almost intimate. “Give it time.”
The moment expands, hanging heavy in the cool air, too heavy, too charged. My magic stirs again, pushing outward like a heartbeat that doesn’t belong only to me. His gaze traces the movement, lingering at my hands, my mouth, my throat, drinking in things I’d rather him not see.
I swallow hard, grounding myself, trying to answer with something coherent. But the words tangle.
He tilts his head down the smallest fraction, a shadow falling across his eyes.
“You know I’m right.”
Before I can deny it, or admit it, a voice breaks through the trees.
“Harper? Harper, are you here?”
Poppy.
The spell around us snaps, though neither of us steps back. Ares shifts only enough to angle his body toward the sound, but he doesn’t retreat. Not even a fraction. His presence stays pressed up against mine, heat radiating, magic humming in the air like a low, vibrating chord.
Leaves rustle. Footsteps approach quickly, too quickly, but he still doesn’t move away. If anything, he leans a hair closer, as if wanting my reaction before anyone else’s.
“Harper!”
Poppy bursts into view at the edge of the clearing, breath uneven, hair pulled loose from her hood. She stops instantly when she sees us, Ares a dark, immovable figure half-shadowed in the trees, me flushed and breathless and too visibly caught in his gravity.
“Harper,” she whispers, almost stunned. Her gaze flicks between us, confusion blooming to concern.
Ares doesn’t give her the mercy of distance.
His head turns slightly, not enough to face her, just enough to acknowledge she exists, and then his eyes return to mine, gold flickering beneath the blue for a heartbeat so brief I nearly think I imagined it.
He lowers his voice so Poppy can’t hear, his breath brushing my jaw.
“We’re not finished.”
Heat coils up my spine despite everything in me screaming this is reckless. Dangerous. Wrong.
Poppy takes a step forward, instinctively reaching for me.
“What’s happening? Why is he-?”
Ares cuts her off, but not with words. With presence.
He straightens, his shoulders squaring, his gaze slicing through the clearing like the cold edge of a blade.
For the first time, Poppy gets a full hit of the weight he carries, the wrongness, the authority, the promise of violence in his stillness.
She stops in her tracks.
Ares doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t posture. He only watches me, watching how I react to her concern, to his nearness, to the betrayal the boys accused me of, to the truth I just admitted.
His magic flickers again beneath his skin, another barely-there pulse of gold, and something in me answers despite myself.
Poppy whispers my name again.
Ares doesn’t look away.
And he doesn’t leave.
He stays.
Waiting.
Watching.
Poppy hovers at the tree line, shoulders bunched, fingers twisting the hem of her sleeve as if trying to make herself smaller. She keeps flicking glances between me and Ares, wide-eyed, unsure, sensing the charged air in a way that makes her swallow hard before she attempts speech.
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” she blurts at last, voice catching on the edges of panic. “I’m sorry I was late. Sebastian and Liam were demanding to know where you were. I didn’t think I should tell them. Not after what you said…”
Her gaze tilts nervously toward Ares.
Heat blooms beneath my ribs. My attention snaps to him before I can stop myself.
“What did you say to her?” The bitterness under my words shocks even me. It carries too much fear, too much something. And it makes Ares’s eyes cool in that infuriating, unreadable way that gives nothing but takes everything.
He doesn’t rush to answer. He doesn’t bother with excuses or placating tones. He simply crosses his arms and studies me with a patience that feels like a blade.
“I told her,” he finally says, voice low and unhurried, “that if your entourage came sniffing around for you, she should keep her mouth shut. Or at least give them something vague. Enough room for you to breathe without a leash tugging you back.”
Poppy flinches, but Ares doesn’t spare her a glance.
Instead, he reaches out and plucks the folded map straight from her hand.
She startles, blinking rapidly, while he turns the paper between two fingers with a laziness that borders on taunting.
Then he throws her a wink, a calculated tilt of charm that knocks her balance just enough for her knees to tremble.
He sees it.
He registers it.
And his expression barely shifts, but something faint, almost amused, passes behind his eyes before he turns fully back to me.
“They don’t control what I do,” I snap. It comes out sharp, sharper still because I don’t know if I’m saying it for him or for myself.
The first real emotion I’ve seen on his face tonight crosses him in the form of a quiet, derisive exhale. Not loud enough to be mocking. Not soft enough to be gentle. Just a small, sharp thing that lands right between my ribs.
“Now who’s lying to themselves?”
There’s no cruelty behind it.
No gleeful twist.
Just certainty. .
He watches me carefully, the way someone watches a fuse burn too close to the powder.
His gaze drags down my jaw, over my shoulder, lingering on the tightness of my grip around my own wand.
He’s picking apart every emotion I try to hold steady.
Every flicker in my eyes. Every tremor I wish he hadn’t noticed.
And then, because he always seems to feel the moment right before I do, he steps closer.
Not enough to crowd me.
Not enough to touch.
Just enough that I feel the warmth of him roll across my skin, subtle as breath, deliberate as a threat he doesn’t need to voice.
“Tell yourself whatever lets you sleep,” he murmurs, tone dipping low, not seductive, not cruel, but dangerously honest. “But don’t insult both of us by pretending they don’t pull the strings you pretend not to see.”
The words slide under my skin like heat.
Poppy holds her breath again, shrinking back, sensing she’s witnessing something she should never name.
Ares’ gaze drops, just briefly, to the dried blood at the heel of my palm. Then slowly, carefully, he lifts his eyes back to mine. His stare is heavy. Too steady. Every part of him is still, but not calm. More like a locked door with something violent and brilliant smoldering behind it.
“And don’t pretend you came out here alone because Poppy asked,” he adds, voice even quieter.
The air thickens.
The trees around us seem to lean in.
My pulse trips over itself, traitorous and loud.
He’s not taunting me now.
He’s naming something I hadn’t said aloud.
Something I hadn’t even admitted to myself.
Poppy shifts her weight, her fingers twisting anxiously again, as if trying to make sense of what she walked into.
“A-Are we… going?” she whispers, voice pitched too high, too fragile. Her eyes dart between us like she’s expecting one of us to crumble or explode.
But Ares doesn’t break the stare.
Doesn’t pull back.
Doesn’t give me an inch of space.
He waits, like he wants to hear whatever excuse I’ll muster, and wants to catch me in the lie the moment I speak it.
The wind pushes through the clearing, stirring the leaves around our feet, but the heat between me and him doesn’t budge. It only coils tighter, hotter, until breathing feels like something I’m doing for his benefit, not mine.
And when Poppy shifts again, nervous, hopeful, trying to wedge herself back into the moment, Ares finally speaks.
His voice is quiet.
But the truth in it lands with the precision of a blade.
“Next time,” he says, eyes never leaving mine, “don’t pretend you didn’t want me to find you.”