The Return Of the God Of War

EMBERS IN THE DARK

The bunker smelled of oil and old secrets. Somewhere above, rain hammered rusted metal sheets, each drop echoing like a drumbeat in Ares Kane’s skull. The old space heater wheezed in the corner, its orange coils struggling against the damp chill creeping through the cracked concrete walls.

On the crate in front of him, the laptop’s screen flickered once, twice, then dissolved into static. Mira shut the lid with two fingers, her face pale in the single bare bulb that swung overhead.

For a moment, there was only the storm and the low hum of the heater trying to fight it off.

“Rourke’s dead,” Mira said finally. Not a question - a verdict. She knew it the moment the confession hit the wires. The moment the silence on the other end of the phone stayed silent too long.

Ares didn’t flinch. He sat still on the rickety chair, elbows on his knees, hands folded tight enough to whiten the scars along his knuckles. On the crate beside him, an old, dog-eared photograph lay face up - his sister at sixteen, half-smile frozen in sunlit grain. She looked like she believed in tomorrow.

“He confessed,” Ares said. His voice was flat, no triumph in it, no grief either. Just a stone dropping into deep water. “That was enough.”

Mira kicked at a coil of tangled extension cord near her boot, metal toe scuffing the concrete. She crossed her arms tight over her chest, hugging the cold out - or trying to.

“They’re not gonna sit back now,” she said. “You just made them bleed in daylight, on every newsfeed in the city. That wasn’t a warning. That was a declaration.”

Ares turned the photo over with two fingers. His thumb ran along the frayed edge, memorizing the ridges. He wondered if the men who signed her fate away had ever felt the weight of what they’d done. He doubted it. Men like Rourke didn’t feel anything until the knife was already in their ribs.

“Good,” he said at last.

Mira let out a sharp breath, half a laugh. “You know, normal people run away when the wolves start closing in.”

Ares pushed himself to his feet. The chair squealed on the concrete, metal legs scraping like chalk on stone. He moved to the battered locker near the far wall - the same locker where he kept what little he had left: a black duffel, his old combat boots, and the leather - bound journal that had survived more than he had.

He opened it now. The pages smelled of oil and time. Names scrawled in thick black ink - some crossed out with single, angry lines, others circled like prey waiting for the blade. His fingertip hovered over one name near the top: Derrick Hale.

Mira stepped closer, reading over his shoulder. Her breath misted in the bunker’s chill.

“Hale,” she murmured. “You really think he’s gonna be like Rourke? He’s not some fat city councilman who’ll piss himself when you breathe on him too hard. He’s armored - guards, lawyers, muscle, fed contracts. He’s got an army.”

Ares closed the journal. The leather creaked like old floorboards. He slipped it into the duffel and reached for his boots. The leather was cracked at the seams, but it still held. Like him.

“I’m not going after his army,” he said, tying the first boot tight. “I’m going after his heart.”

Mira arched an eyebrow. “Man like Hale doesn’t have one.”

Ares didn’t look up as he tied the other boot. “They all do. Somewhere.”

He stood and shrugged on his jacket, the same faded canvas thing he’d worn since the day he clawed his way back to the city that buried him. Bullet holes patched. Bloodstains older than last winter.

He pulled the photo of his sister from the crate and slid it into the inside pocket, close to the place where his heart still beat - steady, patient, promising ruin.

Mira leaned back against the locker, arms crossed, watching him with that hawk’s gaze that missed nothing.

“You ever think about an end to this?” she asked. Her voice was softer now, too quiet for the rain to steal away. “An actual end? Where you don’t bleed out in an alley or disappear into another cell?”

Ares paused at the locker door. He met her eyes, the flicker of something almost human in his own - grief, maybe. Or the ghost of hope.

“I did,” he said. “A long time ago.”

He snapped the locker shut. The clang echoed off the bunker walls, rattling old bolts loose in the concrete.

Mira sighed, then pushed off the wall and grabbed her battered leather jacket from the nail. She tugged her ponytail tight, zipping the collar high against the chill.

“Where do we start?” she asked.

Ares slung the duffel over his shoulder. “We watch. We listen. We find the cracks.”

Mira chuckled. “And when we find them?”

Ares’s eyes hardened. “We break them open.”

Outside the bunker door, the storm waited like a promise. Mira cracked the door and the wind howled in, cold and sharp. She paused with one hand on the latch, glancing back.

“You know there’s no going back after Hale, right? He goes down, the others come crawling out of their holes – bigger fish, nastier teeth.”

Ares stepped past her, the wind whipping his hood back. Rain slicked his hair to his forehead.

“That’s the point,” he said.

They stepped out into the alley behind the bunker. The old sedan waited near a flickering streetlight, its rusted sides glistening wet. Mira unlocked it with a fob taped together with electrical tape. The engine sputtered to life like an old smoker coughing up secrets.

They climbed in. Ares stared out the rain - specked window as Mira pulled onto the cracked asphalt.

Somewhere across the city, Derrick Hale toasted contracts and wrote checks with other men’s lives. Somewhere in that tower of steel and glass, he slept soundly, convinced the world owed him its silence.

Ares Kane smiled - just a flicker, a ghost of a grin that vanished before the next heartbeat.

The city thought it had buried him. Forgotten him. But now the streets would remember.

He was the promise they thought they’d buried. And tonight, he’d remind them - some ghosts don’t rest.

Not until the whole rotten empire burned.