"I really mean it," he looked at her with a question in his eyes, concern that she could even ask that, and he kissed her again deeply as he lay her down on her bed. Elbow braced on the bed to prop himself up, he ran his hand over her body, touching her as she'd begged to be touched, hand splaying over her throat and her breasts, first one then the other then down over her healed stomach, the stomach that almost killed her, the one that almost housed a baby that would've stopped them ever meeting. Shit - there'd been so many things in both their lives that almost stopped them meeting. "Don't know what I'd fucking do if I never met you, don't know what I'd do if I ever lost you," he blurted the words out against her skin, then kissed her again because admitting that opened a vein of vulnerability and kicked his heart into a different gear.
His life without Ares was unimaginably grim, poverty stricken and terrible, and without Ares there was no Melpomene, and without Melpomene he would have died in the arena, but Marcie was the key that opened the whole thing up. Who shone a light onto the gods and said look, this is what they are, this is what the world is. And Marcie had shown him the beginnings of the thing other people meant when they said they were happy, relaxed and content and brilliantly lucky, the way they'd been together in Hana, so so far away from everything.