Archangel's Blade

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, elegantly 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.