Archangel's Blade

28

It was the sound of the elevator opening down the hallway that seemed to decide Dmitri. “Yes, interruptions are far more likely here.”

Such a practical reason, but one she was willing to accept for the present.

Leaving the Tower, they drove to her building and headed up to the apartment that she was slowly, carefully making into a home. Hunters did that. Ashwini’s apartment was a lush place full of color—cushions of gold-shot silk, sculptures picked up here and there, postcards of spice-heavy stalls in faraway markets. Honor’s was less exuberant, but she’d taken her personal mementos out of boxes—items Ash had left as they were—started to unpack them.

Now, framed snapshots cascaded down one wall of her living room—a laughing grandmother snapped during a hunt in Mexico, a mountain storm captured in Colorado, a single elk against the snow in Alaska—while her battered but beloved camera sat on the dining table, ready to be checked after its time in storage. Her bedroom, too, she’d begun to make her own. The sheets were a fine blue cotton, the pale cream walls hung with more photographs from her personal collection.

“Wildflowers,” Dmitri said, halting on the doorstep. “Those weren’t here last time.”

Startled that he’d focused on the photographs when the sexual tension between them was at fever pitch, she said, “I just put them up. I was tracking a vampire across Russia a few years ago when I found this field.” The memory of it had haunted her for months, until she’d put up the photos where she could see them before she closed her eyes, again when she woke.

Dmitri walked to stand in front of the array of fine black frames, touching his finger to one particular shot with a bright blue flower nodding in the corner. “There was a ruin here once.”

Spine tingling, she crossed the carpet to join him. “I had the strangest feeling something had once stood there, even though there was no evidence of it.” She’d also had the insistent sense that she’d be disturbing something precious should she cross the border of tiny blue flowers that separated one small section of the riotous field of color from the rest.

“How did you find out, Honor?” Dmitri’s eyes were hard black stones, his tone the same one he’d used on Valeria, on Jewel Wan.

They’d stripped themselves of weapons as they entered, neither wanting a violent interruption, but now instinct had Honor calculating how fast she could get to the knife hidden down the side of the bedstand.

“I was,” she said, forcing herself not to act on the instinct, “driving through a fairly isolated area when I lost my way.” The truth was, she’d driven off the path and into an uncharted wilderness on purpose, unable not to follow the painful tug that drew her onward.

“I must’ve driven for hours, and this is where I stopped.” She shrugged, trying to make light of an experience that had pierced with such aching sorrow, she’d cried for hours after she finally returned to civilization. “I’d never seen a place as beautiful.” As eerie, as heartrending.

Dmitri continued to stare at her, such lethal calculation in his eyes that it took all her control to stay in position, to not lunge for the bed and the blade so close. “What do you see in the photos?” she asked instead, feeling as if she stood on a precipice, her entire life balanced on this moment. “Dmitri?”

Face stripped of all sophistication, until he was only the sleekest of predators, he reached up to tuck her hair behind her ears. “If this is a game, you won’t like the price you’ll have to pay.”

The hairs rose on the back of her neck. This time she stepped away . . . but didn’t go for a weapon. She couldn’t. She had to trust him, because if she couldn’t . . . if she couldn’t, then her world would simply shatter into a thousand fragments. “Threats aren’t sexy.” Don’t do this. Please. “Take your black mood and leave.”

He stalked her instead, trapping her against the corner, the body she’d looked forward to caressing suddenly a stifling wall. It took every ounce of her will to keep from striking out, from kicking and clawing. But when he bent his head and very deliberately put his mouth over her pulse, she couldn’t stand it anymore.

She stabbed her fingers into the exposed side of his neck.

Or would have, if he hadn’t manacled her wrist with a steel-strong grip. No, no, no! The restraint threw her back into the pit where she’d spent so many weeks, the pit she now realized she’d never escaped—but twined through with her terror was a crushing sense of betrayal.

Not my Dmitri. This isn’t him.

And then there was no more thought.

Dmitri had never been as angry as he was at that instant, riding a vicious edge where he hungered only to hurt the woman in his arms. He didn’t know what game Honor was playing, but he would get the answer out of her, even if he had to break her into a million tiny pieces. That field, what it represented, it was not to be touched, not by anyone.

Squeezing her wrist as she froze against him, he went to touch her with his fangs in an act that he knew was cruel, but then again, she’d been playing him from the start. There was no chance in hell that she’d just happened to come upon the field where his wife and baby girl had died, where he’d brought his son afterward, so that Misha wouldn’t be alone, where he’d stood vigil for an entire turn of the seasons.

“My beautiful Dmitri.” Big brown eyes filled with worry. “Don’t let her change you. Don’t let her make you cruel.”

Ingrede’s words had been unable to halt the change, not after she was gone. Nothing would reverse it. So he would make use of it.

A burst of movement from the hunter who had thought to make him a fool.

He had no trouble pinning her to the wall. But Honor didn’t stop fighting, twisting and wrenching her body with a strength that would break something soon if she didn’t stop.

When he pinioned her arms above her head with a grip on her wrists, and pressed her lower body against the wall with his own, she bit him on the neck. Hard enough to draw blood. Jerking away, he tightened the hand he had around her wrists. “Foreplay already, Honor?”

No response, only that furious twisting and pulling and fighting even though she had no hope of escaping him. She made not a sound, her breath tightly controlled.

That was when he looked into those eyes of mysterious green.

There was no one there.

No personality, no hint of the woman who had laughed and pleasured him with such sexual confidence that morning, nothing but the animal instinct to survive. And he knew she would kill herself trying to get free.

“Dmitri, I’m scared.”

“I’ll never hurt you. Trust me.”

Trembling under the whisper of memory, a memory that didn’t belong to Honor and yet spoke for her, he released her hands, lifted his body off hers. She came at him like a tempest unleashed, slamming her elbow into his face, her fisted hand into his larynx, her booted foot against his knee.

Crashing down onto the bed on his back, he blocked some of her most brutal strikes, but did nothing to halt her. Her rage rained down on him, bloodying his nose, his mouth, putting bruises on his body that healed almost as soon as they were made.

“Bastard.” It was the first thing she’d said since he’d trapped her in the corner. “You goddamn bastard.” A savage blow to his jaw that had his teeth snapping together.

Blocking her next blow, he looked into her eyes . . . and saw Honor looking back at him again. The brilliant green was washed in a sheen of wet, and her next blow when it came lacked the power of the others. She thumped both fists on his chest over and over and over again. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” It was a furious litany that turned into sobs so harsh they spoke of unimaginable anguish, her body crumpling over his own. “I hate you.” A whisper.

Right then, he hated himself.

Lying motionless until she stopped moving, those painfully raw sobs turning into heartbreakingly silent tears against his chest, he dared put a hand on her hair, stroking her now tangled curls. He didn’t know what to say to her, how to explain the rage she’d incited within him.

But there was one thing he could say, something he hadn’t said to a woman in near to a thousand years. “I’m sorry, Honor. Forgive me.”

Sitting perched up on the sink in the large bathroom off her bedroom, Honor watched in silence as Dmitri ran the disinfectant over her scraped and bruised knuckles. She bit back a hiss at the sting, her eyes lingering on the cut on his lip, the bruises on his face. Part of her, horrified by her own violence, wanted to cup that sinful masculine face in her hands, kiss each and every bruise in gentle apology. But the rest of her was curled up into a tiny ball deep within, watchful, wary.

The light glinted off the black of his hair as he ministered to her and she remembered the heavy silk of it against her palms. She remembered, too, the force of his grip as he’d pinned her arms above her head.

“I bruised you.” He slid his hands under her wrists, his skin darker against the paler hue of her own—now marked by bands of dull red.

Fairness made her break her silence. “I did worse.” She’d hit him hard enough that the bruises were going to take at least an hour to heal, in spite of his vampirism. More, the cut on his lip wasn’t a shallow gash. His shirt, ripped at the shoulder seam, betrayed faint red marks that were almost healed, but on the whole—“I came out of it better than you.”

Dark, dark eyes met her own. “The physical hurt isn’t the core of it, is it?”

Her stomach grew tight, acid burning her throat. “All of it,” she said in a voice turned rough from the force of her earlier sobs, “everything we’ve done to this point . . . I think it’s gone.” Lost under the shock and terror that had reduced her to a clawing animal, a biting, hitting, trapped creature who had once more been made a helpless victim.

Dmitri had made a mockery of her hard-won strength, crushed her faith in her own judgment, but most of all, he’d taken the pride she’d rebuilt scrap by scrap, and she wasn’t sure she could forgive him for that.

Not saying a word, he threw away the cotton swab after taking care of all the scrapes and made sure not to crowd her as she left the bathroom. Chilled deep within by a sense of loss that made her feel hollow, as if her entire existence had been wiped away, she stumbled into the living room and to the window that looked out over a city lashed by rain.

The lights were muted, hazy through the water, until it felt as if she was all alone in the world, trapped in a glass cage. It was a feeling with which she was intimately familiar. The friends she’d made, the relationships she’d forged, it had made the loneliness bearable, but it had always been there, inside of her, this strange “missing.” It was Dmitri who’d filled that hole, and Dmitri who’d made it even bigger.

A whisper of the darkest of scents and she knew he’d walked into the living room on silent feet. But he didn’t come to her, and a minute later she heard him in the kitchen area. Looking across the open-plan space divided only by the smooth curve of the counter, she saw him put together a plate and bring it to the table after clearing away her camera.

Walking around the table toward her, he kept a distance between them. It made the ice in her chest impossibly colder . . . and then she knew it was her heart that was frozen. “Eat, Honor,” he said. “You haven’t for hours.” There was something in his voice she couldn’t read, an element she’d never before heard from him.

Angling her body so she could look him full in the face, she saw only the walls of an almost-immortal who had lived longer than she could imagine. “You should go.” She couldn’t stand it, having him here with this impassable gulf between them. It was undoubtedly idiotic to feel this lost by the end of a relationship that hadn’t ever really begun, but it felt as if he’d reached inside her and crushed her soul, then ground it under his boot.

A bleak shadow in those eyes of so deep a brown they were almost black, and with such age in them. “You send me away.”

Would you send me away?

She blinked at the strange echo, focused on the man who stood so close and so distant. “I have to.” To survive, to scrape the tattered remnants of her pride, her self, back together.

Dmitri said nothing for long moments as the rain fell against the glass in a melody of sound she’d always before found soothing. Today the tone felt jarring, the beat too jagged against her oversensitized nerves. When Dmitri raised a hand, then dropped it, she felt the loss like a stab to the heart, and she understood he could hurt her worse than he already had. But then he did the one thing she’d never, ever have expected.

Holding her gaze, he closed the final distance between them and went down to his knees, that beautiful bruised face looking up at her.

When he placed his arms around her waist and pressed the side of his face to her abdomen, the tears started flowing again, slow and quiet, over her cheeks. Dmitri didn’t bow his head to anyone; he didn’t surrender or submit. But he was on his knees before her, vulnerable to a kick, a stab to the neck, the most violent rejection. “Oh, Dmitri.” Trembling, she ran her fingers through his hair, this man who had been scarred so badly that distrust was an instinctive response.

She knew the wildflowers had set him off in the bedroom, but she still had no idea why. However, now was not the time to ask. Now was the time to decide.

“Forgive me.”

Did she have that in her? The strength to forgive him for the horror he’d brought back to life just when she’d begun to believe she’d beaten her abusers after all, for the hurt he’d done to her heart, but most of all for the humiliation of being reduced to a scrabbling animal?

Honor’s hand fisted in his hair.

The rain continued to fall outside, but inside there was only silence—and an acuteness of clarity that told her the decision she made in this instant, about this man, would resonate throughout her life. If she stepped off the edge on which she currently stood, she could fall hard, perhaps shatter forever . . . or she could find her way home.

Home.

The idea of it was nothing but a fantasy built out of her intense and inexorable loneliness, many would say. But they didn’t understand the incomprehensible strength of what she felt for this man who knelt before her, giving her something he gave no one. All her life she’d searched for him, even when she hadn’t known his name. He wasn’t who she’d imagined him to be—was a far more deadly, hardened creature.

Still mine. Still my Dmitri. Wounded, changed . . . but not lost. I will not believe him lost.

Honor didn’t fight the voice that wasn’t her own and yet came from her soul. It was a familiar madness by now.

Dmitri’s hand spread on her lower back. “Don’t end this.”

“Would you go?” she asked, unclenching her hand, stroking her fingers through that black silk again as she wiped away her tears with her free hand.

A long, long pause. “Yes.” A single harsh word. “If you want your freedom, I’ll give it to you.”

So . . . the choice was hers and hers alone.