Page 66 of God of War

The blood pooling underneath him, covering his uniform, isn’t Delaney’s — it’s his. In an instant, he’s nothing to me, forgotten about, as I lean into the car and spot her. Delaney lies still, her eyes open and staring. For a heart-wrenching second, I think she’s dead too. Then she blinks.

“Del… Baby.” I lean in, touching her tentatively. Her eyes flash to me and she squeezes the knife in her hand. The switchblade I gave her.

“It’s okay. He’s gone, honey. He’s gone. You did it.”

I wrap my hand around her wrist and pry the knife from her trembling fingers. She lets me have it, which is probably a good sign, and then, even better, lets me help her from the car. She looks down as her feet bump over Flores.

“Don’t look,” I prompt her, tipping her chin to focus on me, and then we move slowly to the front of the car, clinging to each other. I prop her ass against the bumper and the flash of her panties through the open zipper of her shorts makes a new rage pulse in my chest.

“He didn’t,” she says.

I swallow hard and meet her eyes. Two sparks of green through the sea of red smeared across her skin.

“I got him before he could.”

I nod, a little relief easing the tension in me. I cup her face with my uninjured hand and try to clean off some blood with my thumb.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’m not.”

She means it too, and all of a sudden I’m faced with the little girl that stumbled into my yard in the middle of the night. That crashed into me and fell on her ass and looked at me like I was a monster.

That little girl who was already drowning in darkness. I wonder, if I had done something differently back then, could I have saved her from all this?

I yank her close, suddenly desperate to feel her against me, make sure she’s alive and unhurt. Her arms snake around my waist and I bury my face against the top of her head. When I breathe in, I smell only her. Not the blood or the stench of Flores’s cop car. Just Delaney.

“How do you it?” she mumbles into my chest.

“Do what?”

“Deal with it. After you’ve… killed someone.”

I take a deep breath and I feel her matching it. “Do you feel bad about what you’ve done?”

“No,” she says simply. “But it’s like… My body feels wrong. My heart is racing and I feel… I’m all shakey and my head is…”

She shakes her head, her hair whispering back and forth across my lips.

“Adrenaline. And probably shock too,” I reply.

When Delaney pulls back, she looks hollowed out. “What do you do, after you do that?”

She tries to crane her head, searching out Flores. I catch a fistful of her hair and yank her back. It’s an accident, how sharply and desperately I grab her, and I feel like an asshole until she makes this little gasp and her eyes flare.

All thoughts of her as a little girl disappear. Now, she is a woman and my thighs are pressing into her hips and I want to kiss her so fucking bad.

“I…” I swallow against the dryness in my throat. “After I’ve killed someone, I get drunk, I get stoned… And I fuck.”

Delaney inhales sharply. Her throat bobs. “Well… You got any booze on you, Ares?”

“No.”

“Weed?”

I shake my head.

“Will you fuck me, Ares?”

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