“Why are you in such a hurry?”

Her long inky tresses made her appear like a black blob moving around his room. The interior of the room and the shirt she had been dressed in didn’t help much in distinguishing her from the background either. She appeared to be one with them, a long lost piece finally reuniting with its puzzle to complete the picture. She looked like she belonged there, but he knew deep down in his heart that reality was a far cry from what his eyes were deceiving him to perceive.

She loathed him, loather his very existence, abhorred the mere idea of becoming his soulmate.

Unknowingly, his hold on the book he had been reading preciously tightened, crinkling the crisp pages in the process.

“I need to meet someone in the town.”

His sensitive hearing picked a muffled voice coming from behind the door of the bathroom, followed closely by harsh brushing sounds.

“Who?”

No matter how much anger he kept suppressed inside of himself, the moment he heard her sweet voice or peered into those big pools of innocence, he couldn’t help the warmth slipping into his tone.

He was waiting for her to say something but it seemed like she had missed his question as only the sound of water droplets hitting the rough surface of marble reached his ears, causing him to let out a small sigh. He dropped his head back on the sofa cushion as the events of the night he wanted to forget desperately all came running to him.

He flinched as he recalled her cruel words from that time.

Their first meeting for both of them had occurred on different days, in different timelines.

For him, it was centuries ago, in a darkened alley where a woman from suspicious origins had called out to him in a language much foreign to his ears.

For her, it was some months ago, in the basement of the very castle he was resting in.

He had no idea whether the timeline had changed after she turned him into stone or she was straight out lying as she had told him two very different versions of their story. He didn’t want to believe the last words they had shared on the night of her departure, when she had told him that he was never turned into stone in the future, but her actions hadn’t proved to be much convincing.

Now that he was out of the frame, he was able to look at the picture much more clearly.

She had turned Henry without his consent at the exact time Cyrus arrived into the town making availability of blood scarce in the area. In result, Ares was forced to starve as he couldn’t leave his human wife alone with a nightwalker trapped in his basement. The revolt, too, had occurred the night he was returning from the capital. Her secretive behavior, the deal with Ruth, Gabriel disappearing altogether from the scene, all these little events were pointing at the same theory— It had all been a façade from the start.

She never really loved him.

His reluctance to believe her betrayal was strengthened after she severed her bond with the future Ares. Not even pausing to think that, as collateral damaged, the death of their unborn child may occur in this process.

‘Child…’

Something inside his chest clenched at the thought of the child he never got to hold in his arms. All those years he spent trapped inside that dark dimension hidden inside the stone stature, the fear of his child growing without a father was the only thing keeping him alive.

A sudden tinge of red appeared in his emerald eyes as he thought about the reason for this unwanted situation,

Her.

The crinkling pages were now starting to get ripped because of the pressure he was applying on the corner of the book.

He distinctly remembered the day he was able to break out of his curse. The sensation of air brushing past his cold flesh for the first time in centuries was heavenly. His blood stained clothes, the tarnished silver cutting into his newly turned skin, the dirt sticking to his pale soles, nothing bothered him. He felt alive. He was like a caged predator who was finally allowed to hunt after years of torture. His prey too, as a cherry on top, was left just in front of him. Immobile.

He had turned all his feelings off at that point. All he wanted to see was for her to bleed and writhe beneath him. He wanted her to suffer a punishment worse than death, but the only thing stopping him from twisting that soft neck of hers like a twig was the thought of her still being pregnant. That’s why he had given her his blood and formed a bond with her, but little did he know that he was only staring at the tip of the ice berg.

Henricus had come running to his side that night, after sensing their master-slave connection spring to life again making him realize that his worst nightmare had come to life.

Centuries had passed…

And the women lying unconscious before him was not the same woman who had betrayed him.

It was her younger self.

His castle was a private property and no one was allowed to trespass it. Henricus had made sure of that. He had followed every command of his master given to him through those letters. His could never guess the reason behind his master asking a door to be drawn in his portrait but things became much clearer after Henry witnessed Faith finding Ares’ statue through that portrait.

The creaking sound of a door opening broke his trance as he blinked twice before letting his greenish-orange irises trail after the small girl stepping inside the room.

She was tip toeing around his room in search of her flats. The smell of soap mixed with her own lavender aroma was tickling his nostriles. Without even wanting to, his ears were picking up the sounds of every cold droplet that left the warmth of her body to drip down onto the floor.

His senses seemed to intensify tenfold whenever it came to her. Everything about her was maddening.

She had his back turned towards him. Just as he had thought she’d go straight out of the door after picking her bag up, she turned back to look at him. Her eyes widened for a bit as if he had caught her off guard, but slowly they lowered down to stare at her feet as she started taking small steps towards him, stopping only when she was standing in between his legs. All that time, his eyes had remained trained on her.

The thought of confronting her for her betrayal was burning like a flame inside of him, but the day was yet to come. He didn’t even know whether he had been able to save his child from the poisoning or not.

“Do you trust me?”

He had to bite his tongue to stop himself from mentioning their past in front of her. He knew now what little value his trust will hold in her eyes one day.

Nothing.

His heart dropped into his stomach for a moment when he saw her lean down suddenly to peck his lips.

“You can trust me, Ares.”

A lovely smile had bloomed upon her lips almost fooling him into believing her words.

“Take Henricus with you.”

No matter how much he had come to despise her, he couldn’t let her die at the hands of another pureblood. She was his to take.

“Henry needs to rest and it's daytime. Nothing bad would happen. Let me go alone? Even If anything happens, you'll come for me. Won't you?”

“Yes, I will.”

She had walked out of the room, unnoticing the words he was tracing with his fingers on the glass table resting in front of him.

Credința Aresului

His restlessness knew know bounds when he realized he had formed a bond with her younger self.

He was horrified to say the least. Her words were haunting him. He had bound an innocent human to himself without asking for consent, but looking back at it there was not much he could’ve done in that situation. From the century he was, it was impossible to save someone with this many injuries with human treatment.

He knew she could overcome their bond and live a normal life. She was a human after all. Therefore he had decided on staying as far away from her as possible, all ideas of revenge forgotten. He was not going to turn into that possessive creature she was describing him to be but the women was too curious for her own good. She kept probing about him in books, her mind sought him out every night in her slumber, there wasn’t a day when her heart didn’t call out to him. It became impossible specially when she got into trouble and almost got herself killed. He couldn’t watch her die.

The woman in front of him wasn’t her.

She was different from her, different since the very start. Unlike her older self who had been aloof from the beginning, she was always approaching him first. Even after repeatedly being rejected in subtle ways, the woman came searching him to his castle, their castle.

He could feel himself falling all over again for her.

The sweet reassuring smile she had given him was playing again and again inside his head. He had no idea how much time he spent admiring her features engraved inside his memories until suddenly his eyes went blank.

He had remembered the clothes she was wearing in that alley.

Blue skinny jeans with a white button down, same as the ones she had gone out in.

‘Did she go to visit Ruth? Why would she? I didn’t cling onto her this time…’

Through all the months they’d been together after his awakening, he had never sense any malice coming from her through their bond.

Was she lying all along? Hiding her thoughts and emotions from me?’

Unwittingly, he had clenched the book in both of his hands, holding onto it for his dear life.

Out of nowhere, a weird sensation filled his insides. His guts were on fire; something was crushing his heart. He was forced to inhale huge gulps of air inside his lungs as an unknown force kept squeezing his windpipe in its brutal grip. A warm liquid had started dripping down his nose, making him lean forward to let the crimson drops stain his soft rug. Breathing was becoming more and more difficult.

The only thing he had ever experienced like this was on the night he was turned to stone; the difference being, this time the symptoms of betrayal seemed to have been manifested physically instead of emotionally.

It stopped as soon as it had begun. He had stopped feeling, not just pain.

Everything.

There was an unnamed pool of emptiness swirling inside of him. That’s when he noticed, he couldn’t sense her in his head anymore.

Their bond had broken.

“Ha.. Ha!”

Weird pants turning into crazed laughs were escaping past his lips.

“She betrayed me, again.”

He wanted to rip that mask of innocence into a thousand shreds.

Before he knew it, he was walking out of his room, leaving behind two shredded halves of the book: its pages tinted with multiple crimson smudges.