by Nalini Singh
However, that wasn’t the biggest discovery.
“Dmitri?” The questioning female voice came on the line as he stood with Illium and Honor surrounded by the dark scent of death. “I missed your call—I was at my brothers’ music recital.”
A kick to his chest, radiating out through his body. “You’re safe.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes.” He passed the phone to Honor, needing a minute to rebuild the emotional shields that had somehow crashed at the sound of Sorrow’s voice.
It wasn’t until evening the next day that they returned to New York, having stayed behind to ensure everything was processed and cleaned up, until no one would ever know what had taken place in that quiet spot surrounded by the bright green of hundreds of sugar maples. However, he didn’t pilot the chopper to Manhattan and the Tower, but to a derelict condemned building not far from the New York–Connecticut border. “Are you sure?” he asked the woman with eyes full of mysteries he wanted to explore as she lay tumbled, pleasured, and smiling in his bed.
“Yes,” Honor said. Amos, she’d realized, wasn’t the monster who haunted her.
It was the cage he’d put her in.
Getting out of the gleaming machine, she waited for Dmitri to join her and then she led them into the bowels of hell. The building was stickered with Do Not Enter signs, but she strode forward and through to an internal door that led to a cement-floored basement.
“He told me,” she whispered, nausea churning in her stomach, “that he planned to do up the place, turn it into an old-fashioned salon where only the privileged would gather, but first he had to make sure all his guests had the right appetites.” Appetites that meant Honor had almost died before Amos ever got the walls painted, much less replaced the mildewed carpet and broken floorboards.
A male hand closing over the doorknob. “I’ll go first.”
“I need to—”
“Face your demons.” Dmitri brushed her hair off her face with unexpected tenderness. “That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone and unshielded.”
Looking into that face that still bore remnants of the brutal gouges from the fight, she realized that he needed to do this, too, to protect her. She couldn’t pretend his protectiveness, his care, was unwelcome. Not here. Not when it was Dmitri. But—“Together.” She touched her hand to his. “I won’t hide from any part of this, not even behind your broad shoulders.”
A long, taut pause before he nodded and opened the door that led down into her own personal hellhole. But as she navigated the steps, Dmitri by her side, her nausea was wiped out by anger, cutting and bright . . . and then, as she stepped into the pitch-black room where she’d been held and tortured for two long months, by pride.
I survived this.
The thought had barely passed through her mind when the thing came at her out of the dark, teeth bared and fingers clawed, eyes glowing red.
She began to shoot, yelling, “No!” when Dmitri would’ve lunged past her. “I have it!”
The creature kept coming and she kept shooting, the noise deafening in the enclosed space. Finally it lay wheezing on the floor. Taking out her flashlight, she aimed the beam at whatever it was that had made this foul place its lair, never moving her gun off it.
“You.” A bubbling, blood-filled word.
He no longer looked anything like the photos Dmitri had shown her, his elegance buried under animalistic hunger. The skin had retracted from his mouth to bare his gums, his fangs; his face was hollow, falling into itself. As was his body under the tattered remains of his shirt, his broken ribs not yet completely fused, other parts of his torso pulverized with bullet wounds.
“I had you,” Amos whispered.
“No,” she said again, speaking to Dmitri.
“Honor.”
“He’s no danger.” Walking to look down at Amos’s emaciated form, she realized he’d somehow gotten himself here after Jiana carved him up. However, once safely hidden, he hadn’t had the strength to go out to feed, even as his body cannibalized itself to heal his massive injuries.
A pitiful creature.
But one with a reservoir of strength.
He lunged up at her with a hissing roar. Not losing her cool, she emptied her clip into his heart, blowing it to smithereens. “Will he rise again?”
“No. He was too weak.” Dmitri’s hand touched her hair. “It’s done.”
Turning, she looked around the smoke-filled room and saw just that. A room. “Yes. It’s done.”
Exhausted and emotionally drained, she didn’t protest when Dmitri flew them to the Tower and took her to his suite.
“I had a new bed delivered,” he told her as he drew her into the shower and began to help her strip. “You’ll be the only woman who ever sleeps in it.”
He owned her heart, this vampire with his scars and his darkness. “Come here.” Cupping his face as he leaned down toward her, she rubbed her nose against his, felt his body stiffen for an inexplicable second before he took her mouth in a raw claiming of a kiss, the kind of sinful, debauched kiss no good man would ever give to his woman. The resulting shower was decadent and welcome, but her body gave out when she hit the bed.
They wanted to dishonor her, the vampires with the hot eyes and the hands that roamed over her flesh as they pinned her to the wall. She knew that, understood that. “Forgive me, Dmitri,” she whispered inside her mind, and turned quiescent.
They laughed. “There, she wants it. I knew these peasants were all happy to spread their thighs for a real man.” Rough, clawing hands pushing up her skirts, another pair mauling her breasts.
In spite of her shame, her rage, she told herself to be quiet, to not fight.
But then the third vampire walked into the nursery and came out with Caterina in his arms. “So sweet and soft,” he murmured, his tone chilling in its gentleness. “I have heard such blood is a delicacy.”
Quiet, quiet, she told herself even as fury turned her blood to flame. If she protested, the monster would know he held a piece of her heart in his hands and he would hurt Caterina even more. But her silence couldn’t protect her child, and she screamed in horror—“No! Please!—as the vampire lowered his head to Caterina’s tiny neck and began to shred it like a dog. Her baby’s terrified cry pierced the air, pierced the silence, pierced her until she bled.
Jamming her elbow into the nose of one of the vampires who held her, she stabbed the other with the kitchen knife she’d hidden in her skirts when they came into her home with such evil in their eyes. “Let her go!” Escaping because they hadn’t expected defiance, she wrenched Caterina from the feeding vampire’s arms. “No, no. Oh, no.” Her poor baby was dead, her throat so much meat, her little body already cooling.
“No!” It was the keening cry of a mother as the monsters tore at her again, but she would not release Caterina. Not even when they broke her ribs, shoved her to the ground, and pushed up her skirts. She didn’t care what they did to her, not as long as they didn’t touch Caterina . . . and didn’t discover Misha.
“Stay quiet, Misha,” she pleaded in her mind. “Stay quiet, so quiet.” He’d been playing in the little space below the roof that was his “secret” place, and she’d yelled for him to hide when she’d first seen the vampires. There had been no time to get to Caterina, but she had hoped they would not be so vicious as to harm a babe.
She felt no pain when they hurt her, felt nothing, every ounce of her being concentrated on listening for her son, on holding her daughter close. “I couldn’t protect her, Dmitri,” she whispered in a soundless voice as the vampires used her. “I’m sorry.” She would die here, she knew that. And whatever else, he would not forgive that. He was so stubborn, would carry the wound in his heart till the day he took his last breath, her beautiful, loyal husband who had loved her even when an angel came to woo him.
A whisper of sound.
Looking up, she saw Misha peering over the edge of the roof space. With her eyes, she told him to be quie
t, to be still. But he was his father’s son. Screaming in rage, he jumped on the back of one of her attackers, sinking strong little teeth into the vampire’s neck. The vampire went to rip off her son and throw him to the floor as she fought to escape, to protect him.
“No!” One of the others caught Misha’s screaming, twisting form in his arms. “She wants the older child alive!” He squeezed her sweet boy tight as she begged him not to hurt her child. But the monster only laughed, continuing to crush Misha until his tiny, fierce body went limp.
Then, finished with her, they broke her spine so she couldn’t escape as the house filled with smoke, with flame. She died with her baby in her arms, holding on to the end. But there was no peace for her soul, her mind filled with the echo of Misha’s screams, the sight of Caterina’s ravaged neck, and Dmitri’s haunting words when Isis’s men came for him. “Will you forgive me, Ingrede? For what I must do?”
Such a proud man, her husband. So very, very proud. “You fight a battle,” she’d whispered, touching her hand to his cheek. “You do this to protect us. There is nothing to forgive.”
So he had gone, her Dmitri, gone to the bed of a being who saw him only as a thing to be used. And he had promised to come back, no matter what it took. But now, she wouldn’t be waiting for him.
His heart would break.
“Honor!” Dmitri shook the woman who had slept so warm beside him through the night, trying to wake her as she cried great, hiccuping tears.
Then she turned, burying her face into his chest, and he knew she was already awake. Her tears, they were those of a woman who had lost everything. Utter devastation in every hot, wet drop as she cried and cried and cried, her body shaking so hard, he worried she would shatter.
She wouldn’t hear his words, wouldn’t be gentled, so he simply held her, tighter than he ever had before. She didn’t fight him, didn’t do anything but cry—until his chest was wet with her desolation and he wanted to tear something apart. But he didn’t tell her to stop. Amos’s death, he thought, had been the catalyst for this, and if she needed it to complete her healing, so be it.
So he held this hunter whose midnight green eyes said she saw him, shadows and all, who touched him as Ingrede used to do, who made him imagine an impossible truth, held her so close that she was a part of his very soul.
37
Honor sat with her legs dangling over the side of the railingless balcony outside Dmitri’s office. It would be a terrifying plunge if she fell, but she figured one of the angels below would catch her. Of course, she wasn’t about to take the chance—there was no way in hell she planned to die anytime soon.
Not after it had taken her so long to come back from the last time.
Her breath caught in her throat at her conscious acceptance of an impossible idea . . . except it wasn’t. It was as real as the Manhattan skyline in front of her, steel against a cerulean sky streaked with white. The memories had cascaded one on top of the other since she woke in the early hours of this morning, crying so hard that her chest remained sore, her eyes swollen and her throat raw.
He is my husband.
Perhaps not in law, but as far as her soul was concerned, Dmitri belonged to her.
Always.
When the door slid open at her back, she glanced over, expecting the man at the center of her thoughts. It wasn’t. She smiled at the hunter who came to sit beside her. “How did you get up here?” Security was airtight.
Ashwini swung her feet. “I sweet-talked Illium.”
“I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I didn’t. Now I do.” Dark brown eyes full of liquid intensity settled on Honor. “He said you needed a friend. I knew that already, but I pretended it was news. What’s wrong?”
Honor turned her face to the wind, letting it push back her unbound hair, tangle it into as wild a mess as Dmitri made of it in bed. “You’ll never believe me.”
A long silence before Ashwini said, “Remember the first time we met?”
The memory was crystal clear. It had been in a raucous bar filled with hunters and mercenaries. They’d laughed over drinks, eaten deep-fried everything, sowed the seeds of a deep, abiding friendship. And then, as they were walking out the door—“You called me an old soul,” she whispered. “A lost soul.”
“Still so old you make my chest hurt”—Ash leaned in so their shoulders touched for a moment—“but no longer lost.”
Shuddering, she braced her palms on the rough surface on which they sat. There would be no more whispers, she knew, from a life long gone—there was no longer any need, the barrier between past and present wiped out in the storm of her tears until she saw the woman she’d been as clearly as the one she was now.
The reawakened memories caused her agonizing pain. The thought of losing Caterina and Misha . . . she couldn’t bear it. But she’d remembered, understood something far more beautiful, too. Loved, she had been loved. And, she thought, remembering the arms that had held her so very tight this morning, she was loved again. He might never be able to say it, the lethal blade her husband had become, but she knew.
What she didn’t know was whether her beautiful, wounded Dmitri was ready to hear what she had to tell him.
Dmitri watched the two women sitting out on the balcony and checked for the third time to ensure the wing of angels waiting below were on alert to catch if necessary. “I should go out there and drag them both inside,” he said to Raphael when the archangel walked in to stand beside him.
“Yes,” Raphael said. “It should be a most amusing sight.”
Dmitri shot the archangel a dark look. “Your consort is a bad influence.”
“My consort is now joining your woman.”
Turning, Dmitri saw Elena come to a somewhat wobbly but safe landing on the balcony. She pumped her fist in the air before sitting down next to the long-legged hunter with the dark eyes who was Honor’s best friend—and, according to the reports they had on her, an extremely gifted individual when it came to those senses that weren’t accepted by most humans. Immortals, however, had been alive too long to dismiss such things as fancy. And so they kept watch on Ashwini. “Janvier courts her.”
“I think it’s time to pull him in.” It’ll give Venom a long enough period to ensure a smooth transfer.
Dmitri nodded, feeling a wild kind of peace within him when Honor laughed, her body half hidden behind the midnight and dawn spread of Elena’s wings. “It’ll be good for Venom to work alongside Galen.” The vampire was strong but young and could be impulsive; while Galen was as stable and centered as a rock.
“I agree.” Raphael’s own wings rustled as he resettled them. “I spoke to Aodhan—he hasn’t changed his mind.”
Dmitri thought about the extraordinary, fractured angel, wondered if he’d find what he sought in this bold, brash city with its pulsing heartbeat of life. “Do you think this is the start of his healing?”
“Perhaps.” A quiet pause. “We will be his shield, Dmitri.”
“Yes.” The young angel?
Resting. His will is strong—this won’t break him.
Good.
Outside, the women continued to talk, their hair tangling together in the playful wind, Elena’s brilliant near-white strands against Ashwini’s sleek black and Honor’s softer ebony curls. It was a sight that would make any man take notice. “We aren’t who we were even two years ago, Raphael.”
“Are you sorry about this change?”
“No.”
* * *
Honor challenged Dmitri to a sparring session that afternoon and lost. He took her to his bed that night, laid her out for his delectation. When she bit her lower lip and whispered, “I thought you said something about a velvet whip?” in a voice that held both anticipation and the tang of sensual nervousness, he took her mouth with a voracious need that had her scenting the air with the sweet musk of her arousal.
Drawing it in, he made her lie on her back—her unbound hands holding on to the bars of the headboard—
and began to kiss, to taste, every tiny inch of her, from the smooth warmth of her brow to the hollow of her throat and the tight furl of her nipples. There, he stopped, took his time, until her nipples were wet and pouting, before moving to the dip of her navel, the quivering nub of flesh between her thighs, the curve of her knee, and finally, the graceful arch of her foot.
Breath coming out in ragged gasps, she shook her head when he told her to turn over.
“Honor.” It was a command.
“No.” Haunting eyes full of defiance that was an invitation, her body so sensitized that when he ran his finger lightly between her legs, she jerked up, her eyes clenched tight and her muscles tensed in readiness for a shattering peak. “Dmitri.”
“No,” he said, removing his touch and dipping his head to speak with his lips against her ear. “You don’t get rewarded for misbehavior.”
Unrepentant, she kissed the side of his face, his jaw. Soft, wet kisses that made his cock throb in the black pants he still wore, while she lay bare to him, her skin hot silk, her blood warm and aroused and whispering to him of an erotic addiction he couldn’t afford to indulge.
“Does bribery work?” Another kiss.
He pressed his hand to her abdomen, nudging her flat onto her back again. “That’s another rule you’ve broken.” He’d ordered her to lie motionless.
“You’re not going to have mercy on me, are you?” It was a husky question as he rose from the bed and went to a closet . . . but she kept the promise she’d made to him at the start, stayed in bed.
“You should know better than to expect it from me,” he said, closing his hand around the handle of a soft velvet whip he’d never before used, as he hadn’t used anything in this room. He’d built a bed for Ingrede, and in the same way, he’d put this room together for Honor.