Archangel's Blade

23

A single push, a small tug, and she was naked in front of him, her back pressed to his chest still. Shuddering with possessive hunger, he stroked his hands over her thighs, along the soft curve of her abdomen and up to cup her breasts again, her skin creamy against his scarred hands.

Full and taut and topped with dark nipples he’d tasted when he’d seduced her into allowing him to tug down her top one hazy summer day, they made his mind spark with ideas he was certain the village elders would term extremely unacceptable. He didn’t care. When it came to exploring what felt good between him and Ingrede, he never had.

“I dream,” he whispered in her ear, “of sliding myself between your breasts.” Using his forearm to plump them up, he sucked his finger to wet sleekness, then inserted it into the warm valley of her breasts to illustrate his meaning.

His wife’s body shook in reaction, her hand clenching on his arm. “My mother warned me you wouldn’t be a manageable kind of a husband.” Turning, she rose on tiptoe to kiss him the way she’d discovered drove him to a glorious kind of madness.

Sucking on his tongue, she jerked when he ran his hand down to the delicate curls between her soft thighs, but refused to part her legs. Having played this intimate game with her before, he pushed in regardless, rubbing his finger over the hard little nub that he wanted to suck. She’d shoved away his head the last time, unable to stand the pleasure . . . but she wouldn’t be able to do that if her hands were tied.

“Spread your legs,” he ordered when she broke the kiss to breathe.

Shaking her head, she squeezed her thighs even tighter, a red flush high on her cheekbones.

His own pulse was thunder in his veins. Dropping his head, he sucked one of her nipples into his mouth without warning, drawing hard and deep. She cried out, thrust her hands into his hair, spreading her legs instinctively to maintain her balance. “I claim victory,” he said, releasing her nipple.

Her answer held a wickedness no one else ever saw. “Will you make me suffer?”

“Oh, yes.”

She was hot and wet to his touch—it would feel like heaven when he sank into her. But it would also hurt her. He’d had his fingers inside her as they lay alone and aroused on a sun-golden field one festival day and later in a dark corner of her father’s barn, knew how very tight she was.

His cock throbbed at the idea of the pleasure that awaited, but he would not have it entangled with her pain. “Lie down on the bed.” Picking her up before she could respond, he placed her on their simple bed, then—stripping off his own clothes—settled himself with his head between her thighs, pulling her legs over his shoulders.

Her fingers clenched in the sheets, but she didn’t stop him when he parted her soft folds to kiss her with a slow, intent ferocity he hadn’t dared unleash on her before they were man and wife. She screamed, squirmed, sobbed, but it was pleasure that colored her responses, pleasure that had her tugging at his hair with frantic hands.

Instead of stopping, he found that little nub of flesh he’d discovered the first time he slid his hand under her skirts, and he sucked. Her hands tore at his hair, but he continued the torment until the finger he’d inserted inside of her was drenched in the liquid heat of her need. “Now,” he murmured, rising above her, his cock a turgid length, “I will make you mine.” Fitting himself to the wet silk of her opening, he closed his hand over the curve of her hip.

Driving into her was the most excruciating pleasure he had ever felt. When she whimpered in pain, he tried to stop but he was young, his control shredded, and for an instant, he panicked that he would take her when she did not want to be taken. It froze the blood in his veins. Locking every one of his muscles, he tried to find his mind.

Her fingers on his chest, her hand on his shoulder, tugging him down to meet her mouth. “Don’t stop, Dmitri. Don’t stop.”

It was the only thing he needed. Pushing into her until he was buried to the hilt, her nails digging into his arms, he kissed her. And kept on kissing her as he began to move inside the hot, wet sheath that held him with such possessive tightness. She didn’t find her pleasure again before his own release thundered over him, arcing down his spine in a lightning bolt that had him spilling inside her, but he couldn’t curse himself for that. Not when his blood was seared with the liquid burn of pleasure. Not when he roused to find a woman with a wide smile lying under him, cupping his face with loving hands.

“I am now,” she whispered, “thoroughly debauched, husband.”

Dmitri’s eyes opened to see the wall of his Tower office. He rarely slept—it seemed a waste of time when he needed very little to survive. But after returning from Honor’s apartment, he’d sat down at his desk, his mind on the hunter who threatened to make him feel things that had long gathered dust in his soul. Minutes later, he was asleep and dreaming of the only woman who had ever owned his heart.

Though he had taken her as a man takes a woman on their wedding night, Ingrede had always been his, their families’ farms side by side. They’d tumbled in mud together as children, gorged themselves on summer fruit on lazy days gilded by the sun, and taught each other the things one knew and the other did not.

When she had smiled at him that day over the wildflowers, the emotion that had burst within him had been incandescent. And it had stayed true as the years passed, as they grew. Looking back, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been that innocent boy who’d gotten up before dawn to clamber up a mountainside, except that his love for Ingrede still felt as deep, as true.

A woman’s husky laugh.

It wasn’t Ingrede’s.

Pushing off his desk, he stalked to the plate-glass window that faced out into the hush of a Manhattan caught between night and day, the steel buildings soft gray shadows rather than glittering bulwarks. It was perhaps the only time the city was quiet, a mere two hours between the end of the nightlife and the beginning of the daylight rush.

He’d lived here for hundreds of years, seen it grow from nothing to a city whose heartbeat spoke to millions far and wide. He’d considered leaving it at times, had done so during his sojourn in Neha’s court, young and still filled with an anger that had had no outlet. And then, of course, there had been Favashi. Lovely, gracious Favashi who had been a queen in the making, her home filled with music and art and warmth—the perfect trap for a man who had sought solace for centuries and found none.

Why have you never asked me more about Favashi? he asked the angel he could see coming toward the Tower, his wingspan distinctive, the gold filaments bright even in the dull light.

Raphael’s reply was brutally honest. It didn’t seem a subject you cared to discuss.

You could at least have called me a fool, he said as Raphael landed on the balcony outside, beaten some sense into me.

“There was,” Raphael said, walking into the room even as he folded his wings to his back, “no need. Favashi was a good choice of mate for someone of your strength.”

Favashi had never wanted a mate. “If I wanted to be turned into her personal menace.”

“You are mine after all.” A slight curve of his lips.

“That’s just a bonus.” As he spoke, he realized more had changed in Raphael than simply his wings. The archangel had been his friend for centuries, but he’d become a remote, distant being over the past two hundred years.

Dmitri hadn’t really paid attention to the transformation because he’d been on the same path. But now the blue of Raphael’s eyes was touched with humor and he spoke to Dmitri as they once had on a field far from civilization, two very different men who’d found common ground. “She came here while you were away,” he said, wondering what it said about him that he’d not just noted the difference in Raphael, but responded to it.

“As she is not injured or dead, I take it you controlled yourself.”

“Without difficulty.” The truth was, while his pride had been pricked by the way Favashi had played him, his anger toward her had always been a cold thing. If Honor did anything similar, he realized, told him lies of love with such a sweet face, there would be no cold, only the most deadly of blood fury.

A rustle of wings. “If we are asking questions,” Raphael said, “then I have one of my own. Why have you never blamed me for Isis’s interest in you?”

“Because,” Dmitri said, “Isis’s madness was her own. And if there was any penance to be paid, you paid it in that room beneath her keep.” Chained to the wall opposite Dmitri, Raphael had been forced to watch Dmitri’s violent, forced conversion, to witness Isis’s other atrocities, to listen to Dmitri’s shattering scream as Isis whispered of what she had done to Ingrede and Caterina.

And he’d been there at the end, a silent guard, when Dmitri had held his son’s tiny body in his arms and cried until he had no tears left inside him, his self that of a hollow man. “I thought I died in that room,” he said, his hands fisting with the memory of how very fragile Misha’s bones had been, how effortless it had been to snap them.

The archangel said nothing for a long time. When he did speak, it was nothing expected. “I thought you had, too.”

Dmitri met those eyes of pitiless blue. “Why keep a dead man walking, then?”

“Perhaps I knew what you would one day become.” The cold answer of an archangel. Or perhaps it was because you weren’t the only one who made a vow in that place of horror.

Dmitri shoved a hand through his hair. “You should laugh at me, Raphael. I warned you against becoming involved with a hunter, and yet I find myself in much the same position.” Honor was becoming too important, a compulsion that wasn’t only sexual, wasn’t only physical.

“It is no hardship,” Raphael said. “To have a hunter by your side.”

But she wasn’t simply a hunter. She was the woman who awakened memories of a life he’d lost an eon ago. Ingrede’s laughter . . . it had been so very, very long since he’d heard it, but when Honor laughed, he felt as if he could almost reach out and touch his wife. A strange madness and one he had no will to fight—his heart ached with a need that had survived immortality, survived his every depravity, survived his own will.

“Have you had her blood tested?” Raphael’s question was pragmatic. “A sample should be simple to acquire, given that the Guild keeps units of stored blood for all its hunters.”

Ignoring the pain in his chest, Dmitri glanced at the archangel. “So certain?”

Raphael didn’t answer, because no answer was needed. They wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation if Honor wasn’t important. “I would not,” he said instead, “have you lose another mortal.”

“Sometimes there are no choices.” He thought of Illium, who continued to be drawn to mortals, though he’d lost the human woman he loved, seen her marry another man. The blue-winged angel had watched over her family until she passed, and then he had watched over her children and her children’s children . . . until they spread out across the world, and the small mountain village where his love had been born ceased to exist.

There are always choices.

“No, Raphael,” Dmitri said in response to that ice-cold tone in his mind. “I’ve stood by you for centuries, but if you touch her, it will cost you my loyalty.” And I will do my best to kill you.

A hint of some unnameable emotion in the inhuman depths of those eyes that had seen a millennium and more pass. “So, she is not only important. She is yours.”

Stalking closer to the glass, he stared out at a city beginning to shine silver bright in the dawn light. “I don’t know what she is.” But she is compatible. He’d obtained her blood, had the test done days ago, driven by unknowable need. The toxin that turned mortal to immortal would not drive her insane; it would not leave her a broken shell of the fascinating, compelling woman she was today.

You know you have but to ask. There will be no Contract for your chosen.

I know. He and Raphael had fought over the centuries, had fallen out, but they were tied by bonds so deep that the bindings had held even as they became ever older, ever more inhuman. The problem is, I think the last thing Honor would ever want to become is a vampire.

Another silence between two men who had known each other long enough not to fear it. Dmitri was the one who broke it. “What did Naasir say?” The vampire, one of the Seven, was currently posted in the newly risen city of Amanat, once a jewel in the archangel Caliane’s crown, now her home.

“That my mother treats him as a beloved pet.” Raphael’s tone held a dark amusement threaded through with something more dangerous. “It appears likely she has realized what he is.”

“It’s no secret.” Though Naasir’s origins and abilities were not widely known beyond a small, tight circle. “At least she’s accepted him.” Giving them a constant flow of information from Amanat without Raphael having to be there. “And the angel Jason left in his stead?”

“Caliane ignores Isabel, which is as good an outcome.” The archangel’s wings glittered in the first rays of the sun. “You’ve always been my blade, Dmitri. Tell me—should I have killed her?”

Dmitri met the inhuman blue of those eyes, centuries of friendship and pain between them. “Perhaps,” he said, his mind on a woman with a husky laugh and a smile that haunted his memory, “there are second chances.”

Honor sat at her small dining table, the notebook Dr. Reuben had given her now closed, dawn shimmering on the horizon beyond. A few buildings still sparkled with light-filled offices, but the day was coming, the sun a warm glow in the east. The Tower stood outlined against it, appearing somehow softer in this strange, fragile twilight.

Dmitri, she thought, would never appear soft.

Her body continued to smolder from the slow burn of his kiss, his touch. Not even the fact that they’d gone little further after her flashback could mute the impact of it. His sensuality was potent, as raw as it was sophisticated, as dark as it was patient.

Lulling her. Seducing her.

Honor knew full well he was managing their encounters, accustoming her to his touch, his kiss, his strength. She had no quarrel with exploring her sensuality with a man who knew more about pleasure than she could imagine; she trusted him in bed. Of course, she thought with a smile as she got up to prepare breakfast, she had no intention of allowing him to continue to lead the dance once they became lovers in truth.

She’d finished her cereal and was walking to refill her tea when someone knocked on the glass wall that fronted her apartment. Twisting on her heel, she went for the gun tucked into the back of her jeans . . . and saw wings of silver-kissed blue backlit to brilliance by the rising sun. Illium jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the Tower.

Nodding, she watched him drop down, then sweep over the city in a breathtaking show of color even more startling against the dawn sky. When his wings were joined by those of midnight and dawn, she drew in a stunned breath, still utterly fascinated by Elena’s transformation. Rather than holding a hover beside Elena, Illium executed a sharp vertical dive that had Honor’s heart in her throat, before he turned to rise, then fly back up at the same speed to circle around and beside Elena, a playfulness to his movements that said the two of them were friends.

That was one wake-up call she’d have to share with Ashwini, she thought with a grin as she headed to change into a less ragged T-shirt, having showered when she woke. But when she stepped into the bedroom, she found herself discarding the T-shirt in favor of a short-sleeved, scoop-necked top that painted itself to her body and was a bright, stop sign red. It wouldn’t impede her movements, didn’t even show much cleavage, but it was the sexiest thing she’d worn since after the assault. It felt good. Brushing on a bit of makeup, including poppy red lipstick over her mouth, she pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail and strapped on her weapons.

It was too hot to cover the shoulder holster with a jacket, the temperature having spiked overnight, so she shrugged and left it at that.

There was a topless red Ferrari idling at the curb when she stepped out of her building. “I didn’t realize I rated the pickup service,” she said to the vampire in the driver’s seat.