Archangel's Blade (42 page)

However, that wasn't the biggest discovery.

“Dmitri?” The questioning female voice came on the line as he stood with Illium and Honor surrounded by the dark scent of death. “I missed your call—I was at my brothers' music recital.”

A kick to his chest, radiating out through his body. “You're safe.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes.” He passed the phone to Honor, needing a minute to rebuild the emotional shields that had somehow crashed at the sound of Sorrow's voice.

It wasn't until evening the next day that they returned to New York, having stayed behind to ensure everything was processed and cleaned up, until no one would ever know what had taken place in that quiet spot surrounded by the bright green of hundreds of sugar maples. However, he didn't pilot the chopper to Manhattan and the Tower, but to a derelict condemned building not far from the New York–Connecticut border. “Are you sure?” he asked the woman with eyes full of mysteries he wanted to explore as she lay tumbled, pleasured, and smiling in his bed.

“Yes,” Honor said. Amos, she'd realized, wasn't the monster who haunted her.

It was the cage he'd put her in.

Getting out of the gleaming machine, she waited for Dmitri to join her and then she led them into the bowels of hell. The building was stickered with Do Not Enter signs, but she strode forward and through to an internal door that led to a cement-floored basement.

“He told me,” she whispered, nausea churning in her stomach, “that he planned to do up the place, turn it into an old-fashioned
salon
where only the privileged would gather, but first he had to make sure all his guests had the right appetites.” Appetites that meant Honor had almost died before Amos ever got the walls painted, much less replaced the mildewed carpet and broken floorboards.

A male hand closing over the doorknob. “I'll go first.”

“I need to—”

“Face your demons.” Dmitri brushed her hair off her face with unexpected tenderness. “That doesn't mean you have to do it alone and unshielded.”

Looking into that face that still bore remnants of the brutal gouges from the fight, she realized that he needed to do this, too, to protect her. She couldn't pretend his protectiveness, his care, was unwelcome. Not here. Not when it was Dmitri. But—“Together.” She touched her hand to his. “I won't hide from any part of this, not even behind your broad shoulders.”

A long, taut pause before he nodded and opened the door that led down into her own personal hellhole. But as she navigated the steps, Dmitri by her side, her nausea was wiped out by anger, cutting and bright . . . and then, as she stepped into the pitch-black room where she'd been held and tortured for two long months, by pride.

The thought had barely passed through her mind when the
thing
came at her out of the dark, teeth bared and fingers clawed, eyes glowing red.

She began to shoot, yelling, “No!” when Dmitri would've lunged past her. “I have it!”

The creature kept coming and she kept shooting, the noise deafening in the enclosed space. Finally it lay wheezing on the floor. Taking out her flashlight, she aimed the beam at whatever it was that had made this foul place its lair, never moving her gun off it.

“You.”
A bubbling, blood-filled word.

He no longer looked anything like the photos Dmitri had shown her, his elegance buried under animalistic hunger. The skin had retracted from his mouth to bare his gums, his fangs; his face was hollow, falling into itself. As was his body under the tattered remains of his shirt, his broken ribs not yet completely fused, other parts of his torso pulverized with bullet wounds.

“I had you,” Amos whispered.

“No,” she said again, speaking to Dmitri.

“He's no danger.” Walking to look down at Amos's emaciated form, she realized he'd somehow gotten himself here after Jiana carved him up. However, once safely hidden, he hadn't had the strength to go out to feed, even as his body cannibalized itself to heal his massive injuries.

A pitiful creature.

But one with a reservoir of strength.

He lunged up at her with a hissing roar. Not losing her cool, she emptied her clip into his heart, blowing it to smithereens. “Will he rise again?”

“No. He was too weak.” Dmitri's hand touched her hair. “It's done.”

Turning, she looked around the smoke-filled room and saw just that. A room. “Yes. It's done.”

 

Exhausted and emotionally drained, she didn't protest
when Dmitri flew them to the Tower and took her to his suite.

“I had a new bed delivered,” he told her as he drew her into the shower and began to help her strip. “You'll be the only woman who ever sleeps in it.”

He owned her heart, this vampire with his scars and his darkness. “Come here.” Cupping his face as he leaned down toward her, she rubbed her nose against his, felt his body stiffen for an inexplicable second before he took her mouth in a raw claiming of a kiss, the kind of sinful, debauched kiss no good man would ever give to his woman. The resulting shower was decadent and welcome, but her body gave out when she hit the bed.

 

 

 

 

“Honor!” Dmitri shook the woman who had slept so warm
beside him through the night, trying to wake her as she cried great, hiccuping tears.

Then she turned, burying her face into his chest, and he knew she was already awake. Her tears, they were those of a woman who had lost everything. Utter devastation in every hot, wet drop as she cried and cried and cried, her body shaking so hard, he worried she would shatter.

She wouldn't hear his words, wouldn't be gentled, so he simply held her, tighter than he ever had before. She didn't fight him, didn't do anything but cry—until his chest was wet with her desolation and he wanted to tear something apart. But he didn't tell her to stop. Amos's death, he thought, had been the catalyst for this, and if she needed it to complete her healing, so be it.

So he held this hunter whose midnight green eyes said she saw him, shadows and all, who touched him as Ingrede used to do, who made him imagine an impossible truth, held her so close that she was a part of his very soul.

Honor sat with her legs dangling over the side of the railingless
balcony outside Dmitri's office. It would be a terrifying plunge if she fell, but she figured one of the angels below would catch her. Of course, she wasn't about to take the chance—there was no way in hell she planned to die anytime soon.

Not after it had taken her so long to come back from the last time.

Her breath caught in her throat at her conscious acceptance of an impossible idea . . . except it wasn't. It was as real as the Manhattan skyline in front of her, steel against a cerulean sky streaked with white. The memories had cascaded one on top of the other since she woke in the early hours of this morning, crying so hard that her chest remained sore, her eyes swollen and her throat raw.

Perhaps not in law, but as far as her soul was concerned, Dmitri belonged to her.

When the door slid open at her back, she glanced over, expecting the man at the center of her thoughts. It wasn't. She smiled at the hunter who came to sit beside her. “How did you get up here?” Security was airtight.

Ashwini swung her feet. “I sweet-talked Illium.”

“I didn't know you knew him.”

“I didn't. Now I do.” Dark brown eyes full of liquid intensity settled on Honor. “He said you needed a friend. I knew that already, but I pretended it was news. What's wrong?”

Honor turned her face to the wind, letting it push back her unbound hair, tangle it into as wild a mess as Dmitri made of it in bed. “You'll never believe me.”

A long silence before Ashwini said, “Remember the first time we met?”

The memory was crystal clear. It had been in a raucous bar filled with hunters and mercenaries. They'd laughed over drinks, eaten deep-fried everything, sowed the seeds of a deep, abiding friendship. And then, as they were walking out the door—“You called me an old soul,” she whispered. “A lost soul.”

“Still so old you make my chest hurt”—Ash leaned in so their shoulders touched for a moment—“but no longer lost.”

Shuddering, she braced her palms on the rough surface on which they sat. There would be no more whispers, she knew, from a life long gone—there was no longer any need, the barrier between past and present wiped out in the storm of her tears until she saw the woman she'd been as clearly as the one she was now.

The reawakened memories caused her agonizing pain. The thought of losing Caterina and Misha . . . she couldn't bear it. But she'd remembered, understood something far more beautiful, too. Loved, she had been
loved
. And, she thought, remembering the arms that had held her so very tight this morning, she was loved again. He might never be able to say it, the lethal blade her husband had become, but she knew.

What she didn't know was whether her beautiful, wounded Dmitri was ready to hear what she had to tell him.

 

Dmitri watched the two women sitting out on the balcony
and checked for the third time to ensure the wing of angels waiting below were on alert to catch if necessary. “I should go out there and drag them both inside,” he said to Raphael when the archangel walked in to stand beside him.