Archangel's Blade

“Dmitri, come dance with me.”

“My feet ache from the fields, Ingrede. After I return from the markets?”

A smile that lit up the room, though fear lurked a silent intruder in her eyes. “After you return.”

Except Isis’s men had taken him when he returned. His last memory of his wife was of her holding their children and trying not to betray the terror that had turned her warm brown eyes an impossible ebony.

He could never go back, never dance with his wife while Misha laughed and the baby kicked her legs in the air, but he could kiss this woman who had somehow become a part of him, her gaze holding mysteries he was driven to solve. “It’s time, Honor.”

He saw the skin pull tight over her cheekbones, knew she wasn’t certain she wouldn’t panic, slash out at him in self-defensive violence, but her answer was a simple, powerful, “Yes.”

Honor took in her surroundings in silence as Dmitri led her up off the level painted that gleaming, dangerous black and to the top floor of the Tower. It proved to be carpeted in white with glittering threads of gold, the paint on the walls that same gold-flecked white, the artwork a mix of old and new—a brilliant tapestry of a place of mountain and sky, on which perched dwellings whose doors opened out into thin air; a gleaming sword sharp as a razor; a framed poster of the ridiculous television show Hunter’s Prey, complete with the muscle-bound lead and his “vampire vixen.”

“Illium bought it for Elena,” Dmitri said, following her gaze. “It should be interesting to see her reaction.”

Honor’s lips twitched. “They’re good friends.”

A shadow drifted across Dmitri’s expression, but all he said was, “Yes,” before adding, “Raphael’s suite occupies half the floor. The rest of the area is divided into quarters for the Seven, though mine takes up double the space of the others since I spend the most time in the city.”

She hesitated. “You don’t have another home?”

“It never seemed necessary.”

Honor heard a thousand unsaid things in that statement, understood that the idea of home held a pain for him he would never seek to re-create.

“Don’t worry,” he said before she could say anything, “the square footage of each apartment is larger than that of most stand-alone houses, and the walls are soundproofed to ensure total privacy.”

Honor had nothing against the setup and was quite certain his apartment was a sprawling space ten times the size of her own. But—“No, Dmitri. Not here.”

“Why?” A question asked with a cool sophistication that might’ve intimidated her once, but now made her wonder what Dmitri didn’t want her to see that he’d put up those silken shields.

“It isn’t right.” Honor stood her ground, the voice inside of her whispering that this moment was critical to how Dmitri would see her. “I refuse to be just another woman you take to your bed.”

Dmitri rubbed his thumb across her knuckles, no hint of any readable emotion on his face. “You think which bed it is makes a difference?”

There was, she thought, such cruelty in him at that moment. He could hurt her badly and walk away as if it mattered nothing. “Perhaps not for you,” she whispered, knowing the time for breaking things off, for protecting herself, had long passed, “but for me, yes.”

A silence. As taut, as dangerous, as the garrote worked into Dmitri’s belt.

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.