Chapter 10 #2
“So you want to make it equal?”
He shakes his head.
“Then tell me why.”
He runs a hand through his hair, a jerky movement of frustration.
A shiver runs through me, tingling across the nape of my neck, and I feel suddenly and intensely alive to every sensation—the brush of my dress against my skin, his scent of earth and flame, the stir of the wind that rustles the leaves.
I understand what drew him here even as I think it can’t be true.
“I came because since the moment you left Mount Haemus, I haven’t stopped wondering,” he says, his voice so low I can hardly hear it.
A delicious thrill races up my spine. My lips part around a question I shouldn’t ask but can’t stop myself from saying. “What were you wondering?”
“I was wondering,” he says as he draws closer and all I can see are his dark eyes looking into mine. I notice the touch of bronze in the black and I want to silence him before he can say it, but I don’t. “Wondering what it would have been like if you’d stayed. If you’d come inside.”
It’s the festival sweeping me up in its fevered atmosphere; it’s the rites that have made me so lightheaded, so reckless, I’m sure of it.
That same urge I had at his sacrifice, to jump without knowing where I’d land, only then the blood and the violence stopped me.
Here, in my fragrant garden, there is nothing to hold me back.
“Why don’t we find out?” I whisper.
—
His helmet and spear are on his chariot.
He lifts them out of my way, settling his helmet back on his head as he helps me up.
The touch of his hand on my elbow sets my skin aflame.
Now that I’m leaving my own celebrations behind me, now that he’s next to me with his face armored in bronze, my head begins to clear.
There are dozens of reasons to turn around and no reason at all to stay at his side, in the silence that holds us both.
But I don’t move, and his horses gallop on through the night, until the twisted peak of Mount Haemus is before us again and we’re landing in that same desolate courtyard once more.
No wraithlike attendant materializes this time. Ares jumps down from the chariot and then reaches out his hand to me.
I take it.
“Will you come in?” he asks. “Or will you disappear again?”
Part of me wants to take flight.
But another, more insistent part of me wants nothing more than to step into the home of the War God.
He opens the ebony doors and gestures me inside. Blazing torches light the way, the fire glinting off onyx pillars and silver chairs.
He told me before that his battle camp was no place for me, and neither is this. I can feel how hostile it is. A place devoid of love. But still I gaze around, taking in every detail.
He stops by a long table, lined with low benches at either side, carved from oak.
I wonder if anyone else has ever sat here with him.
Maybe his warriors come here to celebrate after the battles they survive; maybe their whoops of victory ring from the cold stone and metal.
Maybe that woman who stared at him so hungrily at the sacrifice, or others like her, have looked on all the same things I’m looking on now, their eyes flashing and wild.
It’s only me here now.
“Does Zeus know about this place?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I never want him to know where to find me. But let’s not talk about Zeus.”
“Do you trust me?” I ask. “Not to tell him?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
Doubt crawls under my skin, urging me to run, but he looks so sure of himself. “How do you know?”
His eyes are steady on me. “We aren’t as different as you think.”
“Aren’t we?” I haven’t moved from the doorway.
I need to keep this distance between us.
If I take a step closer, I will be lost. I sweep my hand around, gesturing at the stark hall, the cold silver and dark onyx, every surface unyielding.
“Everything about you is different. This place is so bleak, so unforgiving.” As far removed from the scented groves of Paphos, the lushness of my forest pool and the radiance of the sunlight sparkling on the sea as it could possibly be.
“Death isn’t something the other gods understand,” he says.
He starts to pace toward me, slow and measured.
“They never come close to it. They’re never there, in the struggle at the end, not like I am.
And it isn’t bleak, Aphrodite. It’s the opposite—it’s a mortal’s whole life, blazing against the darkness.
When they fight, they’re the most alive they’ve ever been.
Everything else is stripped away, and they’re raw and vulnerable and intensely themselves.
I feel it with them, and so do you. You’re with them in their most passionate moments too. ”
My eyes widen. “It’s hardly the same.”
“Isn’t it?” he says.
I hesitate. What he’s saying horrifies me.
His gift is death—not just death but the most terrifying and monstrous kind, the kind that leaves devastation in its wake, the kind that breeds and multiplies, surging with brutality and rage and destroying everything in its wake.
That he can compare it with what I do—when I bring bodies together in love, not hatred, when I celebrate the joy of abandon and pleasure—feels so wrong.
My feet seem to move without my thinking. I’m drawn irresistibly closer, step by step.
I know what I felt when I saw him in Cyprus. I felt it in Thrace, and when I saw him by the fountain. I felt it even when he infuriated me at council, talking about his wars. I can’t deny it any longer—the connection between us that shouldn’t exist, that should be impossible.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I say slowly, “if Zeus will make you so angry one day that you’ll leave and never come back.”
“And if I did?” His gaze is so intense, and we’re so close now, that I could reach out and touch him. “Olympus wouldn’t miss me.”
I can’t seem to get enough air into my lungs. “I would.”
My words hang between us, a fatal moment of honesty I can’t take back.
I don’t know what he’s going to do, and then in an instant his lips are crushed against mine.
I reach up and lift the helmet from his head, letting it fall to the stone floor with a crash, and then my hands are in his hair, his arms wrapped around me.
I slide my hands down over the cold metal of his armor and I pause, confounded for a moment.
The bronze is hammered into the shape of a muscled chest, pleasing to look at, but I want to feel his skin against mine.
This might be a mistake in more ways that I can even think to count, but, despite all the power at my disposal, there is nothing I can do to stop myself.
He hoists me onto the table and reaches for the buckles down the side of his armor. He’s kissing me again, greedy and eager, and I scrabble to unfasten them too. As the last one gives way, the chest piece swings forward and he pulls it off, letting it clatter to the floor like his helmet.
I break away from the kiss, pressing my palms against him. I take it all in—the amber glow of the torches glinting in his dark eyes, his chest heaving under his leather tunic, his body finely honed by battle, sculpted as if it were a statue made for worship.
He pulls me down from the table, leading me through the gloomy hall and past another set of doors.
My heart is pounding, blood rushing through my body, and I can hear it like the frenzied, ecstatic drums at a sacrifice, like I’m one of his followers lost in helpless yearning—except I’m not a fragile mortal; I’m the Goddess of Love and this is what I was made for.
Another door, and we’re in his chamber: dark stone and a low-burning fire that conjures writhing shadows across the floor.
He yanks his tunic over his head and my fingers scramble at my knotted belt, pulling it open, letting it fall to the ground.
I pause, taking him in, and my lips curve in a smile.
He’s as glorious as I thought he would be.
I run my fingers down the fine, dark hair on his chest and he lets out a low moan, almost a growl.
He can’t tear his eyes away from me; I can feel his need, his hunger to see more.
I’m aching to feel his hands on me and his skin against mine.
It’s torture, sweet and delicious torture, but I force myself to slow down, lifting my dress over my body.
It’s worth it to see his eyes widen and hear him gasp before he seizes me.
Everywhere he touches me, heat trails across my body, igniting a sweep of flames through to my very core.
He’s urgent and intent; all his reserve stripped away with his armor, all his simmering anger and volatility transformed into raw passion and naked desire.
He works his way down my body, and I sink onto the soft bed beneath him, losing myself to the surges of pleasure.
Then I’m astride him and he’s as lost as I am, like an ocean wave exploding against rocks, crashing to the shore, gasping for breath.