Eternal Rider - Larissa Ione [104]
In his arms, Cara jerked. “Of course not. The police caught them.”
Jackson was a damned puss. Ares would have hunted those fuckers down and showed them how justice was served back in his day. Which was why Ares had sworn on his very soul that he would see Chaos die.
“Are they in prison?”
“They served their time,” she said quietly, and he detected a note of bitterness. Ares made a mental note to do a little research into the crime and these guys. Maybe Hal would like in on the action too. Excellent way for them to bond. And Christ, he was thinking of getting buddy-buddy with the kind of creature he hated most?
Let a woman too close, and while she sucked your cock, she sucked your brains and manhood right out of you, too. An enemy had told him that, back in Ares’s human days. They’d called a truce between their armies, had shared wine as they negotiated terms of battle. In truth, Ares had liked the guy, and had they not been fighting on opposite sides, he might have called him friend.
One week later, in the thick of the fighting, Ares had shoved a blade through the man’s skull.
“So basically,” he continued, “this Jackson asshole abandoned you, and the guys who tortured you spent a few months in jail?”
“Basically.”
Damn, she’d taken a lot of blows in a short amount of time. “How long before the puss, ah, Jackson left?”
“He made it a couple of months. He couldn’t look me in the face or deal with my issues.”
Maybe Ares would hunt down Jackson after he found the punks who had traumatized Cara.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. The quiet was comfortable, though, something that had never happened between Ares and a female. It was nice.
Until Cara brought up the one thing he really didn’t want to talk about. “Ares… you have a lot of guilt about your family, don’t you?” She pushed up on one elbow so she was looking down at him. “Guilt that your wife and children died, and you never told them how you felt about them.”
He tensed. “I loved my children.”
“I don’t doubt that you did.” Her soothing voice brought him down a little, and then she traced her finger over his sternum, and he settled even more. How did she do that? He’d seen her turn a damned hellhound into a gentle ball of fur, had witnessed her charming Battle right down to his hooves. “But you’re afraid they didn’t know that. So you built a shrine to them, but you don’t want to actually see it.”
He seized her hand, stilling it. “Stop with the psychology bullshit. What makes you an expert on shrines, anyway?”
A breeze made her hair fan out over his skin. Felt good. Too good. “After my mom died, I had all these things of hers… weird things, like ponytail holders. Her toothbrush. I packed them away, but I never looked at them.”
He frowned. “Because you felt guilty about her death?”
“Because I don’t remember telling her I loved her. I was little, so I probably did, but I don’t remember. I guess I didn’t want to keep her stuff where I would be reminded of that, you know?”
Yeah, he knew very well. But he didn’t like that Cara saw so easily through him.
“Ares!” Ares jackknifed into a sit and twisted his body to shield Cara from Limos, who popped out of the open door between the patio and the bedroom. “Ares, we got—” She cut off, a blush coloring her tan cheeks. “Oh, um, hi, Cara.”
“This had better be important,” Ares said.
“Well, duh,” Li huffed. Then she flashed a broad grin. “We nabbed a fallen angel.”
Ares’s heart skipped a beat. “Where?”
“He’s hanging out in the great room. Thanatos popped Armageddon in the DVD player for him to watch. You know, a reminder.”
“We’ll be there in a minute.”
Limos winked at Cara and flounced away.
“Does this mean what I think it does?” Cara asked, and it was Ares’s turn to grin.
He’d been afraid to hope for this, for so many reasons. Yes, the end-of-the-world thing had been his primary concern, and it still would be; transferring the agimortus to the fallen angel didn’t change