by Nalini Singh
"I have decided it's time to join them--you were the only one who seemed a suitable choice." The cool calculation of an immortal. "Whether or not I would ever trust you in my bed, the invitation stands. Consider how much power you would have at your command as my consort." With that, she flared out wings he'd once caressed as she arched naked above him, and swept off the balcony.
Making a call to ensure she'd be tracked out of the country, Dmitri turned his face into the cool night winds that held strands of the Hudson intertwined with the frenetic beat of this wild, living city of steel and glass and heart. Favashi didn't understand and likely never would. The fact was, Elena was weak, far too weak to be consort to an archangel, and yet Raphael loved her.
While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael's Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he'd once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown . . . that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.
Scorching heat.
Charred flesh.
Screams.
Words she should understand but couldn't.
Pain, searing, blinding . . . but overwhelmed by anguish.
"No, no, no."
Jerked out of the nightmare by the sound of her own voice, Honor touched her face to find a single tear splashed on her cheek. It startled her. Most of the time when she dreamed of the basement, she woke up rigid with terror, nausea churning in her gut. Sometimes she surfaced enraged, her hand bloodless around a weapon. The one thing she did not do, hadn't done since the rescue, was cry. Not when awake, not when asleep.
Rubbing her sleeve over the wetness to eradicate the evidence of her loss of control, she took a self-conscious look around the library. It lay deserted, and a glance at her watch showed her why--it was five a.m. Ashwini and Demarco had left her and Ransom here sometime after one, and she remembered muttering "Bye" to the other hunter as he, too, went to bed after about an hour.
Now, packing up her laptop and the photocopies she'd made from a number of texts, she headed back to her room. Her small, stifling cell of a room--exhaustion or not, she knew sleep was going to be an impossibility. Figuring Ashwini would be up, since the other hunter had left after being called in for a local hunt, she picked up her cell phone.
"Honor, what do you need?"
"Can you talk?"
"Yeah, just got home after pulling in the idiot vamp."
"Already?" That had to be some kind of a record.
"He had the bright idea to--get this--hide at his mom's. Like that isn't the first place we'd look."
It was at times like this that Honor was forcibly reminded that vampires had once been human. The echoes could take decades to fade . . . though she was sure none remained in Dmitri. "You said something about an apartment being free in your building last time you were here," she said, angry at herself for being unable to stop thinking about the lethal, sensual creature who'd looked at her with eyes full of unhidden intent. "Don't suppose it still is?"
"Nope. Because I put your name down for it."
Honor's butt hit the bed. "You knew."
"It's open plan," Ashwini said, instead of answering the implied question. "Glass everywhere, and while that would be a security hazard lower down, you'll be on the thirty-first floor. I might've sort of picked the lock on your storage unit and moved all your stuff in last week, but if you tell anyone, I'll say the gremlins did it."
At any other time, with any other person, Honor would've been angry, but this was Ash, who had understood that Honor needed to escape before she had herself. "I owe you one."
"Want me to come pick you up? I still have the car I signed out for the hunt."
Honor glanced around her room. "Give me a couple of hours to pack up here." She didn't have much, but it was an unspoken rule that the bed was to be stripped, the floor vacuumed, and any trash removed, before departure. "I'll meet you by the front gate."
"Honor?"
"Yes?"
"It's good to have you back."
5
He'd lied to Favashi.
Dmitri maneuvered the Ferrari back into Manhattan, having made an early morning trip across the river to the Angel Enclave--to Raphael's home.
During the time he'd been caged, he had once threatened to feed Isis to her hounds. But in actuality, after he'd stabbed the angel so many times that her heart had been nothing but thick, bloody pulp, Raphael had wrenched off her head with a single vicious pull. Then together, the two of them had cut the bitch up into small pieces, but not to throw to her hounds. No, they had burned her to ash in a blaze set in the center of her courtyard. Unlike an archangel, Isis hadn't been powerful enough to return from that.
Dmitri had never regretted the brutality of what they had done. It had been necessary to make sure she would never again rise. He only wished they could've taken longer, made her scream and beg and plead . . . as his Ingrede must have. But Misha had been alone and scared in the cold, lightless place beneath the keep, returning to him Dmitri's number one priority.
"Papa! Papa!" His son, attempting to crawl across the stone, small hands swollen and bruised from his futile attempts to claw away the manacle around his neck, the unspeakable thing neither Dmitri nor Raphael had been able to remove without hurting him.
"Shh, Misha." He tried to keep his voice calm, to not allow his agony to show through as he took those broken hands into his own, brought them to his lips. "It is only a scratch. Papa is fine."
Having taken the key from Isis, he unlocked the iron that held Misha bound, threw it far away. "I'm here now." His eldest child's small, feverish body in his arms, holding on tight, so tight. "It'll be all right."
Chest taut with a pain that had never lessened, Dmitri pushed the remote that allowed him access to the sprawling parking lot beneath the Tower. Silent and fast, the gate opened at once. The Ferrari purred into its usual spot, and a couple of minutes later, he was out and heading toward the elevator, his memories contained behind walls no one had ever breached.
Just as the doors opened, his cell phone rang, the receptionist advising him of Honor's arrival. A dark anticipation hummed through him, intense enough that there was no chance he'd set her free before satiating his hunger. "I'll escort her up," he said.
The receptionist looked up at him the instant he exited onto the lobby floor, tension around her pretty mouth. "Sir, there's--"
"Dmitri." An airy, breathy female voice.
Turning, he found a voluptuous blonde pushing off the wall where she'd apparently been waiting. "Carmen," he said, conscious of Honor standing a couple of yards away. "Do you have business in the Tower?" He waved off a guard who approached--the reason why Carmen had been allowed to make it to the lobby was the reason why she was Dmitri's problem to handle.
The stunning human, her hair tousled as if she'd rolled out of bed a second ago--though her lips were painted to perfection, her big blue eyes outlined in kohl--put her hand on his chest, stroking down to curl her fingers into his lapel. "I have business with you." Nothing if not elegant in her sultry sexuality, she angled her head a fraction to the left.
He didn't miss the invitation. Placing his hand on her wrist, he pulled off her own with a gentleness she mistook for care. Until he said, "We fucked once, Carmen. It's not happening again."
Her face colored, eyes glittering with an emotion that wasn't anger, but ran as hot. "God, you're a bastard." A flush across the creamy tops of her breasts, exposed by the deep neck of the businesslike sheath that encased her body. "I'll do anything you want."
"I know." It was part of the reason he'd never again take her to his bed. She'd been too willing from the start; and while Dmitri had nothing against willing--liked his women soft and wet with welcome--Carmen wanted more than sex.
Dmitri didn't. Not with her. Not with any woman. "Go home, Carmen."
She pushed herself into him instead, her nipples pressing through the dove gray material of her dress to make it clear that, eleg
antly sexy or not, she wasn't wearing a bra. "Just once more, Dmitri." Thudding hunger in her pulse. "I want to feel your fangs breaking through my skin." The shudder that rolled through her was almost orgasmic. "Please, just once."
"Any vampire will do, Carmen. We both know that." She'd become addicted to the pleasure a vampire's kiss could bestow, something he hadn't realized until after he'd taken her to bed. "I don't fuck and feed from the same woman." It was an ironclad rule.
Her hands clenched on the lapels of his suit. "Anything, Dmitri."
"You don't want to say that to me." He allowed the cold, dark predator within him to rise to the surface, to fill his eyes as he lowered his voice to hold pure, silken menace. "I don't play nice and I never stop when asked." Raising his finger, he touched it almost delicately to her cheekbone, the violence in him a pitiless blade as a result of the memories that had suddenly begun to surface. "Do you want me to hurt you?"
Carmen went white, didn't resist when one of the vampires on watch put a hand on her arm at Dmitri's minute nod.
Watching her go, he turned to Honor. "Now, you," he murmured, having never lost awareness of the staccato beat of her pulse, the jagged spike of her breath, the subtle complexity of her scent. "You, I want to say those words to me."
A sucked-in breath. "I don't sleep with men who get off on making me bleed." A biting anger in those words . . . and something older, richer, darker.
Having reached her, he smiled and knew from the look in her eyes that he'd let a little too much of himself bleed through, the blade too lethal. "Good," he murmured. "It'll make it sweeter when I do have you."
Spots of color on her cheeks, though he could hear her heart beating like a small, trapped creature's, panicked and stuttering. "I don't fuck."
"You," he said, wanting to place his mouth over her pulse and suck, "I wouldn't fuck. Not the first time anyway."
Regardless of the words he'd chosen, Honor wasn't sure Dmitri was talking about sex at all in that dark purr of a voice that was both the most sinful decadence and a deadly warning. He'd terrified Carmen with quiet, calculated menace, was feared by every other vampire in the city--and yet she found herself standing her ground, her courage coming from some hidden part of her she didn't entirely understand.
Maybe she'd collapse into a gibbering mess when she was alone, but she would not break in front of this vampire who'd looked at a former lover with the same detached distance as another man might an insect. "If you want to know what I found out, get the hell out of my personal space."
He didn't move. "Pity you're not one of the bloodhounds."
"Scent," she said, breath catching as she felt the faintest caress of black fur and diamonds entangling her senses, "Sara told me you can lure with scent." It made her wonder how many hunters he'd called, naked and willing, to his bed with nothing but the intoxication of his ability. "I'm not hunter-born," she argued, though it had just become clear that she may well have had one of them in her lineage.
And Dmitri knew it.
Those beautiful lips setting in the slightest curve, he angled his head toward the elevators. "Come, little rabbit."
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to follow--though her heart threatened to punch out of her chest at the thought of being trapped in an elevator with him. Unfortunately, escape wasn't an option. There was nowhere she could go in this city where he wouldn't track her down.
And he would, because she had what he needed. The fact that he wanted to sleep with her was an adjunct, a diversion. "Did your people discover anything else about the victim?" she asked, sweat beading along her spine as they reached the elevator.
"He died perhaps a day before the head was discovered." Dark, dark eyes lingering on every curve and shadow of her face. "You need to slow down your pulse, Honor. Or I'll take it as an invitation. And we both know just how much you'd enjoy my fangs."
Her stomach clenched, roiled. "Carmen was right. You are a bastard." In the pit, one of the vampires had used his fangs to pump something into her bloodstream that was meant to make things pleasurable for the donor, forcing her to orgasm over and over again--a wracking rape of her senses that she couldn't fight.
She'd vomited after he finished, much to his disgust. Ice-cold buckets of water thrown over her had been her punishment. "I'd rather eat nails than let you near me."
"A colorful analogy, but I don't have to force my food." Extending his arm to keep the elevator doors from closing, he waited. "As you saw, it comes begging to my door." He continued to hold the elevator even when it began to beep.
No way in hell would she let him win.
He smiled when she stepped in, and again, it was the smile of a predator. Without warmth or any hint of humanity. "So, the quivering rabbit has some spine left."
The doors whooshed shut.
"How's your face?" she asked, hand itching for a blade.
He turned so she could see the cheek she'd cut. The dark honey of his skin was smooth and warm with health once more, the kind of skin that invited touch . . . if you forgot the fact that he was as dangerous as a cobra watching its prey.
"The tattooed vampire," he said, leaning lazily against the wall, his voice a languid stroke, "was barely-Made. Two months old at most. He shouldn't have been out of containment."
Frowning, she bit the inside of her lip. "Hunters don't usually have anything to do with vampires that young. I've heard they're relatively weak."
"Weak is one word." Glancing toward the doors as they opened, he nodded at her to step out.
She locked her feet into place. "After you."
"If I wanted to go for your throat, Honor," he said in that same deceptively lazy voice, "you'd be pinned to the wall before you saw me move."
Yeah, she knew that. Didn't change things. "I can stay here all day."
Once again, Dmitri held out his arm to block the door from closing. "Who were you before they got to you?"
It ripped at the pride Honor hadn't thought she still had that he knew how she'd been debased and degraded, how she'd been made less than an animal, but she found her voice in a rage that had grown in brittle silence since the day she stumbled out of the pit. "I have a question of my own."
A raised eyebrow.
"Why the fuck are the worst of them still out there walking around?" While she was trapped in this body that couldn't forget the bruises, the broken bones, but most of all, the agonizing loss of her right to make a choice, to allow or not to allow a touch.
A cold, cold something swam behind Dmitri's dark eyes. "Because they don't know they're dead yet." Icy words. "Would you like to watch when I make them scream?"
Her blood froze in her veins.
Dmitri smiled. "What fantasies have you been having, little rabbit? Stabbing out their eyes, perhaps, letting them grow back so you could do it again?" A terrible, sensual whisper. "Breaking their bones with a hammer while they're conscious?" Not waiting for an answer, he stepped out of the elevator.
Following, she stared at the black suit jacket that sat so very perfectly over broad shoulders graceful with a liquid kind of muscle. Nothing about Dmitri was less than sophisticated. Even his violence. And yet he'd come scarily close to guessing at the vicious dreams she entertained when she thought of having her attackers at her mercy--in a cold room devoid of light as they'd had her.
"I know," he said, as if he'd read her mind, "because I once cut out the tongue of someone who had held me prisoner."
Something slumbering in her stretched awake, some waiting, old part that hungered for his answer to the question she was compelled to ask. "Was it enough?"
"No, but it was satisfying nonetheless." Pushing through the door to his office, he walked over to the windows. "Those who say vengeance eats you up are wrong--it doesn't, not if you do it right." Glancing over his shoulder, he gave her a razored smile that both fascinated and terrified. "I'll make sure to invite you when I track them down."
"You sound certain you will."
He didn't answer-
-as if it was a given he'd hunt down his prey. "Come here, Honor." A command twined with the faint taste of some exotic spice that made her breasts swell, her breath catch.
It was a good thing she appeared to have only the merest drop of the hunting bloodline. "Even before the attack," she said, digging her nails into her palms, "I wasn't the kind of hunter who played with vampires." While she had nothing against those of her brethren who took vampiric lovers, she knew herself well enough to know she needed commitment of a kind the almost-immortals couldn't give. Their lives were too long, love an amusement, fidelity to a mortal laughable. "Being food has never appealed to me."
Dmitri turned to lean against the plate-glass wall that looked out over Manhattan, his masculine beauty starkly outlined by the piercing light of the sun at his back. "Ah, but I think you'd be a delicious snack."
Dmitri watched the hunter across from him tug her laptop bag off her shoulder and place it on his desk before pulling out the slim computer. Her face was flushed, her breasts pushing against her sweatshirt, but there was nothing less than unyielding focus in her words. "We can play games all day, or I can show you what I've found."
"Dmitri, stop playing games."
Words spoken in a distant language, as clear to him as the sunlight. She'd been angry with him that day, his Ingrede. And yet in the end, he'd tumbled her into bed, stripped her down to her skin, and kissed every inch of her small, lush body. He'd loved sinking into her, of having his hands full of her breasts, his thighs wedged between her softer, plumper ones as he sucked and licked at her mouth, her neck. That was the day Caterina had been conceived, or so Ingrede had always maintained.
"That's why she is such a bad-tempered child, your daughter."
"Dmitri?"
Lashes lowering, he fought to hang on to a memory that held nothing of the pain or horror that was to follow, only to have it flitting out of reach. "I'm listening," he said, eyes on Honor.
Her gaze lingered on him and, for an instant, he felt the most disconcerting sensation--as if he had been in this moment before--but then she blinked and looked down and it passed. "The tattoo isn't in our database. However, I've sent out some discreet feelers along the international hunter network."