Archangel's Blade

by Nalini Singh

  "The offenses are mounting up." Dark, dangerous words.

  They made her thighs clench, images of the most erotic of punishments running through her head. Dmitri would be no easy lover--like the faceless man she'd seen in her dreams, he would demand and control and possess. "You," she murmured, using both hands to undo his belt, "are the sexiest man I have ever met." He made her think bad thoughts simply by breathing.

  Undoing the button on his pants after successfully releasing his belt, she pulled down the zipper. And slid her hand inside to close around hot, rigid flesh covered with velvet-soft skin. He threw his head back against the headrest, one hand still on the steering wheel, the other curving around her body to fist in the back of her top. The taut line of his throat was an irresistible temptation. Continuing to caress him with firm strokes that had the tendons in his neck turning white against the warm seduction of his skin, she kissed her way up one of those tendons . . . and then she bit him.

  His hand flattened on her back in a single, sudden move before fisting in her top again. An instant later, they were kissing. It was no light brush this time, no exploring touch. This was all tongues and teeth and wicked wetness as he kissed her like a man who had rough, sweaty, dirty sex on his mind and didn't care if she knew it.

  Gasping in a breath when they parted, she fisted him, stroked hard and fast. Once. Twice. His eyes glittered. "If I didn't know better," he said, "I'd say you'd been taking lessons in how best to please me."

  "I should stop this right now for that comment, but you're in my blood, Dmitri." Not giving the fear a chance to rise, she dipped her head and took him into her mouth.

  "Fuck!" His hand fisted tighter in her top but he made no move to shove or otherwise direct her head, as if he knew how thin a line she was walking.

  Dmitri had tasted every sexual pleasure there was to taste. He'd slid into empresses and queens, rolled out of beds with more than one other body in them, been pleasured by the most experienced of courtesans and the most dissolute of immortals. For a short, sharp instant of time, the depravity had made him forget.

  Then it had become a game, to see how far he could go, how much excess he could indulge in without destroying himself. However, for the past hundred years, even the erotic had failed to satisfy--he'd played the game, but with cold calculation, little heat. Yet at this moment, he couldn't imagine he'd ever been consumed with such ennui. It was all he could do not to fist his hand in Honor's hair, teach her exactly what he liked.

  Keeping his hands where they were was an exercise in the harshest self-restraint. He didn't dare look down, see that gorgeous mouth working him with lush confidence. Then Honor hummed in the back of her throat and his body arched, his spine curving as pleasure arced from his cock to crash through him in a brutal cascade.

  She didn't take her mouth off him as he came apart, lapping up his seed with a sensual openness that made him wonder who she would be when she was fully whole, no more fractures in her psyche. No longer breaks, he thought, chest heaving as she stroked her mouth off him with a final lingering suck, but fine hairline scars.

  Bracing herself with her hands on his thigh, she faced him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a deep, passionate green, her lips plump and red. Releasing his hold on her top to set himself to rights, he watched her watch him. The instant he finished doing up his belt, she twisted over the console between the seats to curl up in his lap, her head on one shoulder, her hand tracing designs on the other through the fine fabric of his shirt.

  He curved one arm around her, placed his free hand on her thigh. "The last time I made out in a car, there were no cars." It had been in a cart loaded with vegetables. Somehow he'd talked his scandalized new wife into the back, where he'd tumbled her most thoroughly and satisfactorily.

  But his favorite memory was of Ingrede turning up in the cart on her own one sunny day, an invitation in her brown eyes that she'd never enunciate. Not then. Later, when they'd been together several years, when Misha was walking, then his wife had sometimes whispered the most sinful of welcomes in his ear.

  As another woman now nipped at his earlobe and said, "I want your mouth on me, Dmitri," in a low, husky tone that was as good as a touch. "I dreamed about it, woke up with the sheets tangled around my legs and my hand between my thighs."

  Stroking his own hand higher up her thigh, he insinuated it between her legs. She trembled, but didn't fight him. Instead, she did that thing she did--sliding one arm around his shoulders, she used the other to cup his jaw as she tugged his head toward her.

  He made the kiss a slow, languid seduction as he pressed up with the heel of his hand, pushing the seam of her jeans against her clitoris. Just that. No other intrusion. A simple, inexorable pressure that had her breath changing, her body attempting to ride against his touch. "Want me to rub, Honor?" he asked, lessening the pressure. "Be a good girl and say the words."

  She bit down on his lower lip. Hard. Mouth curving, he began to rub--tiny, tiny up-and-down motions that had her squirming, the hot scent of her rising to infuse the air inside the car. Sensitive as he was to scent, he'd catch hints of her for days to come. He was fairly certain his cock would go rigid every single time.

  "Dmitri." Her hand gripping the side of his neck, she went stiff.

  He could almost see the ripples of pleasure rolling up over her body, made a note to watch her come as she lay naked in his bed one day soon. When she went limp against his arm, he propped that arm against the door, letting her sprawl across both seats, one long leg bent and braced on the passenger seat, the other on the floor. The flushed curves of her breasts rose up and down in a ragged rhythm that was the most potent of seductions.

  Seeing that her eyes were drugged to near blackness with pleasure, he spread his hand over her abdomen. No flinch, no hint of fear. So he slid that hand up to cup her breast, maintaining eye contact the entire time so she would know this was him, no one else. A jagged breath, her hand clenching on his side. "Like to push, don't you?"

  "If I don't," he purred, leaning down to kiss her while he plumped and shaped her breast with a proprietary hand, "how will I ever get you to a point where you'll let me tie you up and use a whip on you?"

  25

  Her nails dug into the back of his nape. "A whip?"

  "A velvet whip," he murmured, kissing his way up over her jaw, but not down her throat. She wasn't ready for that yet. "I'll stroke it so soft and easy over your skin, cause only the most exquisite pleasure-pain."

  Deep green eyes filled with a sense of age, of knowledge no mortal should possess. "You've always been like this, haven't you?"

  Fascinated by the enigma of her, he held that haunting gaze even as he stroked and petted her, getting her used to his touch, his body. "Like what?"

  "Ready to mix a little pain with your pleasure." She made a deep sound in the back of her throat as he rubbed his thumb over her nipple. "It doesn't have anything to do with your vampirism." Her words awakened another memory, wrenching him back to a past that no longer seemed content to remain buried.

  "Dmitri . . ." A nervous tremor in the voice of the naked woman laid out like a sacrifice before him, her breasts taut and high, her hips wide, her body all soft curves and temptation--and her hands tied to the posts of the bed he'd carved knowing she'd share it with him.

  "Shh." Lying down fully clothed beside her, he gentled her, his hand on her breast, his fingers tugging at her nipple with sensual knowledge gleaned over their courtship and marriage. "I'd never hurt you."

  "I know." The absolute confidence of her statement would have made him hers if she hadn't already owned his soul. "I just . . . No one ever talks about such things."

  Moving his hand down to push between her thighs, to discover her folds plump and wet for him, he touched her with leisurely strokes, felt her hips begin to rise and fall for him. "Are you telling me," he said, "that you discuss our bedroom play with the other wives?"

  Red filled her cheeks, but she continued to move against his hand,
as generous with her sensuality as she was with her heart. "Of course not. I'm not sure anyone would believe me about you."

  He laughed and kissed her, this woman who was willing to indulge his need to play games that might well have driven another woman to fainting hysterics. Of course, he'd never wanted to play such games with anyone else. Only Ingrede.

  Tangling his tongue with hers, he raised his hand from between her thighs and laid a soft, playful slap on that same delicate flesh. She whimpered . . . raised her hips for more. He gave it to her. Gave her everything. Because while she might have been the one with her hands tied, he was the slave.

  Her slave.

  "Yes," he said, answering Honor's question even as he curved his hand over her thigh. "The vampirism simply allowed me to refine it, indulge it to the nth degree." As the seasons changed, as the ruin of the cabin disappeared into the mists of time, the sexual playfulness had become touched with a deep vein of cruelty.

  His bedmates went home with whip marks more often than not and came back begging for more. Sometimes he tortured them in bed because it pleased him. Sometimes he did it because it amused him. But never did he do it because it gave him the same gut-clenching pleasure as when he'd tied up his wife in their simple bed in a cottage on a forgotten field where the wildflowers now bloomed.

  "What was her name?" Honor sat up, raw emotion burning her throat at the terrible bleakness she'd glimpsed. "The woman who puts that look in your eyes?"

  "Ingrede." Nothing in his voice, and that was an answer in itself. "We have to get going."

  She clambered back into her own seat, reaching up to redo her ponytail. "Ingrede," she said, unable to drop the subject, "she was your wife, wasn't she?"

  He stared out of the now-clear windscreen, but whatever he saw had nothing to do with the verdant grass beyond. "Yes." Then, when she thought he'd add nothing else, he said, "My wife . . . and mortal."

  Dmitri's business with Sorrow took only a few minutes, and Honor had the feeling he was checking up on the young woman more than anything else. "I haven't forgotten," she said to Sorrow when Dmitri stepped aside to speak to Venom. "About the self-defense lessons."

  "I can wait." Sorrow's expression was fierce, her eyes vivid with a ring of brilliant green. "I hope you find each and every one of the bastards who hurt you and make them scream."

  Back in the car, she turned to the vampire beside her--the vampire who had once had a wife. A wife he'd loved with such devotion that he protected her memory with vicious strength even now. His expression had shuttered the instant after he spoke of Ingrede's mortality. It was clear he regretted telling her even that much.

  His loyalty . . . it staggered her.

  Honor had never been loved like that, never even believed it possible. "Venom found something?" she said, conscious he'd give her nothing more about Ingrede. Not now.

  "The first one of the vampires Jewel named," he said, his tone once again that of the most sophisticated of creatures, "has a long-term male lover and has never shown any interest in women." A shake of his head that made his hair gleam blue-black in the piercing sunlight. "I'm not sure how that slipped past me, but quite aside from that, the vampire is far too 'bourgeois,' as Valeria would've put it, to have been offered an invitation."

  "Translation: he's happy with his lover and doesn't need to abuse someone else to beat the boredom."

  Dmitri gave a clipped nod. "The second individual did nothing of note while under surveillance, but from what I know of his habits, he may well have been involved. I've sent Illium to question him."

  "Illium seems far too pretty to be dangerous." Dmitri's male beauty, by contrast, was a darker, edgier thing.

  "No one ever expects him to take out a blade and slice off their balls," he said with lethal amusement in his tone as he drove them toward the George Washington Bridge. "He does it with such grace, too."

  Honor wasn't shocked, because while what she'd said was true, she'd long ago learned that appearances could be deceptive. "Did you cultivate your reputation on purpose?"

  He laughed and it was a thickness of fur across her breasts, her body seeming to have become more sensitized to the scent lure. "I was too busy soaking battlefields in blood and fucking women who were drawn to violence to cultivate anything."

  Honor didn't even consider letting it go, because as of this morning, they belonged to each other, even if that belonging would be a fleeting thing. "You're so angry." Honed and blindingly sharp, that anger was a cold, cold thing. "Tell me why."

  A long, still silence. "My memories are my penance, Honor. To share them is pointless."

  "I'm never going to be an ornament, or a bedmate content to stay in that sphere." She couldn't be, not when the depth of her draw toward him was nothing sensible, nothing rational.

  "And I," he said, reaching out to grip her thigh, "am never going to be--"

  "--manageable," she interrupted in a sudden burst of humor. "I guess I can't say I didn't know that going in."

  Dmitri gave her the strangest look as they stopped for a red light. "Why choose that word?"

  "It seemed to fit." Realizing there was no way he'd reveal any vulnerability until he trusted her on a level it would take time to develop, she decided to return to their earlier topic of discussion. "What about the third vampire?"

  Taking his eyes off her after another probing look, he eased the Ferrari onto the bridge. "That's who we're going to see--she's out in Stamford," he said, explaining why they were heading back into Manhattan. "It appears she's been bunkered down in her home for at least five days. Been feeding off blood junkies who come to her door."

  "I don't know that term." Though she'd heard "vamp-whore" used to describe those who were addicted to the kiss of a vampire.

  "Blood junkies come in pairs," Dmitri explained. "The only way they can get aroused enough to have sex is if a vampire feeds from either one or both in turn. So in effect it's a threesome--only a subset of the Made finds this even mildly attractive."

  Honor nodded. "The majority of mortals don't come close to the beauty bestowed by vampirism."

  "The deal breaker is that the vampire is relegated to being a conduit, not the center."

  No old vampire would enjoy that. "The woman we're going to see--"

  "Jiana. She's not known to be into the junkie scene, but there's no doubt she's been indulging lately," he said, making his way to the Bronx once they cleared the bridge. "Look in the dashboard."

  Reaching forward, she opened the compartment to reveal an envelope. Inside were a number of large, glossy black-and-white photographs. "When were these taken?"

  "Early this morning."

  The first one was of a fresh-faced twosome, blond and scrubbed, straight out of a casting call for the "All-American Couple"--the only thing missing was the dog. Hand in hand, they walked up the steps of a gracious old home, wisteria falling from the balconies and the world swathed in black.

  The next shot was of the two leaving the house. Both were flushed, their lips swollen, hair messed up--the man's shirt was buttoned wrong while the woman was missing her thin floral scarf. "Is this something a wife does for her husband and vice versa?"

  "They have their own subculture," Dmitri told her. "Marry within it. Makes everything go smoother."

  Putting away the photos, she tried to get her head around the idea as Dmitri drove them out of the Bronx into Westchester and toward Connecticut. It was as they were passing from Greenwich into Stamford that she remembered something she'd meant to mention about another strange subculture. "I had an e-mail from Detective Santiago," she said, realizing she felt no dread in spite of the fact that she'd been held and brutalized a bare hour outside of this city--the area was so different as to be on another planet. "They've already arrested someone for the murder yesterday morning."

  "The victim's boyfriend and another member of the club," Dmitri said. "I made it a point to keep an eye on the situation."

  Honor knew that that subculture would soon be getti
ng a visit from the scary kind of vampire. "Old-fashioned sex and jealousy, according to Santiago." All three had been involved in a sexual relationship with each other.

  "And a good dose of stupidity." With that pitiless statement, he turned in through a set of open gates that fronted a long, winding drive lined with mature sycamores. The Ferrari was almost to the door when it opened to disgorge another couple. Honor winced.

  Catching it, Dmitri laughed. "Appetites don't decrease with age, Honor. You should know that."

  "It's easier to accept with vampires," she murmured, watching the elderly pair get into their aging car. "I always think of the younger ones as having an extended adolescence." Stepping out after the couple drove away, she drew in a breath of the fresh spring air. "It's a pretty place." More trees backed the house, while the drive featured a delicate fountain. Landscaped lawns and gardens flowed off on both sides and into the distance, beds of colorful blooms nodding in the wind that whispered down the slight rise to the right.

  "Michaela, too," Dmitri said, coming around the car to join her by the fountain, "has the most gracious of homes."

  Honor had only ever seen the female archangel in the media, but there was no denying that Michaela was both beautiful and vicious. "What about Favashi?" she asked and it was only because she was looking right at Dmitri that she caught the tightening of his jaw.

  "That one looks soft and gentle, and all the while, she's grinding her enemies beneath her boot." A brutal summation.

  Not long ago, she'd discovered Dmitri had once had a wife he had loved. Now she realized he might have had an archangelic lover. "Bad breakup?" Jealousy turned her words razor sharp.

  A raised eyebrow. "Perceptive, little rabbit."

  Yes, he knew how to push her buttons. But oddly enough, she knew how to push his, too. "I guess being dumped by an archangel would bruise the male ego."

  "I didn't realize rabbits had claws."

  The door to the house opened before she could reply to that amused comment. Looking up, she saw a tall, thin vampire with the bones of a supermodel, the pillowy lips of a screen siren, and mocha skin that glowed in the sunlight--all of which was displayed to perfection in a lace and satin robe of exquisite bronze that barely hit midthigh. "Do none of these women own clothing?" she muttered.