Green.
That made no sense. “Why not just kidnap them and be done with it?”
“She needed Ares to commit a crime against the pack of such severity it would cut her ties to us,” Midas realized. “When Ares took your family, she violated the trust given to her as your friend and as a pack enforcer. She struck a blow to her beta and his mate. She forsook her vows.”
So that’s what Liz meant.
Not that Ares had shrugged off her pack bonds, but that she had smashed them with a hammer.
“She was isolating you,” Linus said. “She wanted you alone, with no allies and no one to ask for help.”
And once Liz had spent Ares’s reputation down to the last penny, Liz would have killed her. There was no point in adding Ares to the coven’s closet, not when Liz had torched her credibility. That had to hurt.
Head down, she gave no indication she heard, but the hitch in her indrawn breath made me want to hug her. Right up until I remembered how we got into this mess.
She could have killed my entire family. Wiped them out in a blink. The mercy she showed them would leave scars. I was as grateful for it as I was furious about it. “That’s why you left me Boaz’s ring.”
Guilt had forced her to give me hope, maybe even direction. Subconsciously, she must have wanted the truth to come out, whether it damned her, Liz, or both of them.
“We had hostages, so we might as well use them.” Ares’s feet twitched with muscle spasms. “That’s what she told me when she found me at the clinic. That’s when I knew I had been set up since Choco-Loco, the night Boaz and Addie got into town.” She tucked her legs under her. “I made them as comfortable as possible. I left them food and water and buckets for…”
The buckets, and their stench, wasn’t one that would soon fade from my memories.
“You kept them alive,” Midas coaxed, drawing out her confessions. “That matters.”
There was one last hurdle to truly understanding how far this relationship had soured, and I tasted the question on my tongue when I asked it. “Liz is coven, isn’t she?”
The ambiguous phrasing wasn’t intentional, but it worked in my favor.
“I thought at first she was infected. A host.” Ares’s shoulders hunched even more. “It was almost a relief to believe it was curable. That if Ford had survived, she could too.” Tears glittered on her cheeks. “The way she acted, I—I knew she must be coven. That a witchborn fae had… That my mate was…” A sob lodged in her throat. “But it was so much worse.”
Green.
What had Liz told me?
I’m not wearing anyone.
I hadn’t believed her then, not with so much glamour at her fingertips.
“Liz is a witchborn fae,” I realized. “She’s a member of the coven, not a skin or a host.”
“She quit practicing,” Midas said slowly. “Otherwise, we would have smelled black magic on her.”
“I thought she was human.” Ares shook her head. “I had no idea…”
Green.
“When did you learn the truth?”
“I walked her to work last Friday, like I always do when time permits.” Her tears hit her pants with wet plops. “I was halfway back to the Faraday when I noticed I had her ID badge in my pocket, so I circled back to the hospital and hit the help desk. I had them page her, but she didn’t show. An older man, another surgeon, came to explain she had been on leave for a month.”
Green.
“What did you do next?”
“I thought maybe if she got fired, she would have been too embarrassed to tell me. The hormone therapy was hard on her, and she got written up a few times for losing her temper. I checked our apartment in case she had gone home. She knew I was working, so she would have had the place to herself, but she wasn’t there.”
Green.
“Where did you find her?”
“She came home at dawn, still dressed for work. I confronted her, but she made all these excuses.” Ares shifted on the bed to get more comfortable. “She told me stress was bad for the baby, and I was driving her nuts with all the questions. I was worried she was right, so I let it go.”
Green.
“You didn’t really let it go,” I asked gently, “did you?”
“I started staying up days, following her. Liz—” She shut her eyes briefly. “My Liz wasn’t the type to have an affair, but I couldn’t turn a blind eye. She was finally pregnant, and I became obsessed with tracking her. I had to know the child didn’t belong to an ex-boyfriend or…”
A current one.
How much simpler infidelity would have been compared to all this.
Green.
“You were there,” I said, prying her heart open wider, “at Choco-Loco.”
“There was no reason for Liz to be there that night, so I followed her inside.” Ares swallowed. “Chef Daaé… He was already dead. A stake through the heart. I didn’t understand. I stood there, but I...” It was clear she still struggled with it. “That’s when I got it, what she meant to do. I begged her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t fight her…” She turned bloodshot eyes on us. “The baby. I couldn’t risk the baby. Not after we tried so hard.”
Quiet sobs broke the harsh lines of her shoulders then, and my heart shattered into razor-sharp pieces.
“Have you considered Liz didn’t want a baby?” I hated to twist the knife, but it was already in my hand. “That she never had trouble conceiving?”
The lowest of the low wouldn’t wield a woman’s desire for a child with her mate against her, but Liz had used the struggle to bring them closer, to tie their goals tighter, to blind Ares to what else she might be doing under her nose.
Watch the left hand while the
