by Nalini Singh
Her body alert to his every small movement, she was aware of Dmitri placing the head in the freezer, stripping off his gloves, and cleaning his hands. So when he appeared beside her chair without warning, the emotion he awakened was so bone-chilling, so vicious, parts of her mind just shut down. And when he lifted her hair off her neck to touch the sensitive skin of her nape, she—
Noise. A shattering metallic crash. Words.
The next thing she knew, she was standing several feet from Dmitri, a tall stool with legs of beaten steel lying on its side between them. A line of blood marked his cheek, but his eyes were focused on the door at her back. “Out!”
Only when the door shut did she realize that someone had attempted to intervene. Sweat dampened her palms, beaded on her spine. Remember, she told herself, remember. But the time was gone, a black spot drenched in the panic that was a vile taste on her tongue. “I hit you.”
Raising his hand, he rubbed a finger on his cheek, came away with a dark red slick on his fingertip. “Something about me seems to make women want to use knives.”
Oh, God. She looked down, realized she was gripping a blade in her hand, the tip wet. “I don’t suppose you’ll accept an apology.” It came out calm, her mind so shocked it was numb.
Sliding his hands into his pockets, Dmitri said, “No, but you can pay for your crimes later. Right now, I need what you can give me on this.”
“I want to consult some of the texts at the Academy library,” she said, forcing her brain into gear, though her hand refused to release the knife she’d apparently pulled from the sheath on her thigh.
“Fine. But remember, little rabbit, not a word to anyone.” He moved close enough that the dark heat of him lapped against her in a quiet threat that made her glad for the blade. “I am not a nice man when I’m angry.”
She held her position, a ragged attempt to erase the humiliation of the panic attack. “I’m fairly certain you’re not a nice man at all.”
His answer was a slow smile that whispered of silk sheets, erotic whispers, and sweat-damp skin. The unhidden intent of it had her heart slamming hard against her ribs. “No,” she said, voice raw.
“A challenge.” He wasn’t touching her and yet she felt caressed by a thousand ropes of fur, soft and lush and unmistakably sexual. “I accept.”
Dmitri made the call an hour later, having had to deal with another matter in the interim. “Sara,” he said when the Guild Director answered her cell.
“Dmitri.” A cool greeting. “What do you need?”
“To know why the hunter you sent me just sliced my face.” The wound had already healed, but it made the perfect opening gambit.
Sara sucked in a breath. “If you’ve done something to her, I swear to God I will get my crossbow and pin you to the side of the fucking Tower.”
Dmitri liked Sara. “She’s being chauffeured home as we speak.” The blood debt was between him and Honor; it would be settled in private. “I gave her a human driver.”
Sara muttered something under her breath. “She’s the best person for the task.”
He stared out at the jewel-bright skyline of Manhattan. “Who did that to her neck?” Cold burned through his veins, a vicious response to the scars of a woman he didn’t know and who would simply be another bedmate for so long as she amused him. Because while her resistance was intriguing, would make for an interesting diversion, he had no doubts that she would end up in his bed—and she’d crawl into it with pleasure.
Then Sara spoke, and the cold turned frigid. “The same bastards who kept her chained up in a basement for two months.” It was a brutal summary. “She was barely alive when we found her. They’d carried on with their sick games even though three of her ribs were broken and she was bleeding and feverish from wounds that—” Sara bit off her words, her rage a finely honed edge, but Dmitri didn’t need anything more.
He remembered the incident. The Guild had requested Tower assistance, been granted it at once. However, involved in the reconstruction of a Manhattan that had been badly damaged by the battle between Uram and Raphael—and, more important, focused on holding Raphael’s territory while the archangel spent the majority of his time in the Refuge, waiting for his sleeping consort to wake—Dmitri hadn’t taken personal control of the investigation. That was about to change. “Status of her attackers?”
“Ransom and Ashwini killed two of the four they found at the scene. The other two were turned over to the Tower, but they were hired muscle at best, allowed to—” A ragged breath. “The ones behind this were smarter. They left no forensic clues and Honor was always blindfolded. We’ll get them.” Icy words. “We always do.”
Ending the call on that, Dmitri looked out at a city that wouldn’t yet slumber for hours. Honor’s attackers would all die. That had never been in question. The only difference was, now that he’d felt her blade against his skin, now that he’d tasted the screaming depth of her fear, he’d take exquisite pleasure in personally cutting out vital organs from their bodies before he left them to heal in some hole . . . and then he’d do it over again.
His conscience wasn’t the least bothered by the idea of such sadistic torture.
“You shouldn’t have been so stubborn, Dmitri.” A slender female hand stroking down his naked body to close over his flaccid cock.
Rage bloomed in those eyes of a bright, mocking bronze.
Shifting her hold to his balls, she squeezed until he came close to blacking out, his muscles straining against the chains that spread-eagled his standing body in the center of the cold, dark room at the bottom of the keep. The position left every part of him exposed to her and those she commanded to do her bidding.
As dark spots lingered at the edges of his vision, she kissed him, her fingernails digging into his jaw and her wings spreading out at her back, white as snow but for the wash of shimmering crimson over her primaries. “You will love me.”
The first blow came a second later, as she continued to kiss him. His back was ground meat by the time she halted the punishment, the scent of blood ripe and thick in the air.
Lips against his ear, silk against his skin. “Do you love me now, Dmitri?”
A beep.
Turning, he shut down a memory that hadn’t come to the fore for centuries upon centuries, and answered the internal line. “Yes?”
“Sir, you asked to be notified if Holly Chang changed her pattern of behavior.”
Forty minutes later, Dmitri stood outside the small suburban home in New Jersey where Holly Chang lived with her boyfriend, David. Isolated from its neighbors by a generous yard and high fences, it was nothing she could’ve afforded if the Tower hadn’t stepped in and ordered her to relocate—from an apartment block where she’d been dangerously close to too many mortals.
The human woman had just turned twenty-three when she’d been abducted off the street by an insane archangel. She’d seen her friends butchered, their limbs amputated before the pieces were put back together in a macabre jigsaw puzzle; when Elena tracked her down she was naked and covered in the rust red of their blood.
Holly had survived the horror, but she hadn’t come out of it the same as when she went in. Quite aside from the fact that there was some question as to her sanity, Uram had either fed her his blood or deliberately injected her with some of the toxin that had fueled his murderous rampage. They didn’t know for certain, because Holly’s memories of those events were clouded to uselessness by the blinding fear that had turned her mute for days after she was found. What they did know was that the young woman was . . . changing.
“Remain by the gate,” he said to the vampire who had called him, before walking out of the shadows and up the drive to the house lit only by the flickering glow of a television in the front room.
Holly, petite and outwardly delicate, opened the door for him before he reached it. Blood stained her long-sleeved white shirt, rimmed her mouth. Raising her hand, she wiped the back of it over her lips, smearing the liquid. “Have you com
e to clean up the mess, Dmitri?” In those angry slanted eyes, he saw the stark knowledge that he would be the death that came for her if she lost the battle against whatever it was Uram had done to her. “It was a neighbor’s kid. Tasted sweet.”
“Careless of you to hunt so close to home.” Wrenching her forward with a hand on her left wrist, he shoved up the sleeve of her shirt before she could stop him. The bandage around her upper arm was wrapped tight. “I’m a vampire, Holly,” he murmured, reaching up to wipe away a smeared droplet of blood at the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “I know when the blood on you is your own.”
She hissed at him, pulling away her arm to stalk back into the house. Stepping inside, he closed the door at his back. He’d been here many times, knew the layout, but rather than following her to the kitchen where he could hear her washing off the blood on her mouth, he turned off the television and checked to make sure they were alone in the house.
When he did finally enter the kitchen, now lit by a bright bulb, it was to see Holly wiping her face on a dish towel, though she hadn’t changed out of the bloodstained shirt. “Death by Dmitri,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb with a laziness that would’ve fooled no one who knew him. “Is that what you were aiming for?”
A glare from eyes that had once been light brown, but were now ringed with a vivid green that was growing ever deeper into the irises. The same gleaming shade as Uram’s eyes . . . but not as dark as those of the hunter who’d used a knife on him earlier tonight. Honor’s gaze held the mystery of forbidden depths, of haunting secrets whispered deep in the night. Holly’s, by contrast, held only clawing anger and an overwhelming self-hatred.
“Isn’t that your job?” she asked. “To execute me if I prove a monster?”
“We’re all monsters, Holly.” Folding his arms, he watched as she began to pace up and down the length of the small kitchen. “It’s just a case of how far you push it.”
Back and forth. Back and forth. Hands through her hair, jagged shakes. Again. “David left me,” she blurted out at last. “Couldn’t take the fact that he found me awake and staring at him five nights in a row, my eyes glowing.” A giggling laugh that failed to hide a terrible pain that he knew had cracked her heart open. “I wasn’t looking at his face.”
“Have you been feeding?” Holly had a limited need for blood and Dmitri had made certain she’d been supplied with it.
Her response was to kick the fridge so hard she dented the polished white surface. “Dead blood! Who wants it? I think I’ll go for a nice, soft neck as soon as I can escape the fucking minders.”
Stepping into the kitchen proper, Dmitri walked around to grip her hands, still her pacing. Then he lifted his wrist to her mouth. “Feed.” His blood was potent, would fulfill any need she had.
As he’d known she would, she pulled away and slid down to sit, to hide, in a corner of the kitchen, arms locked around her knees and head lowered as she rocked her body. Because in spite of her words, Holly didn’t want to touch a human donor, didn’t want to believe she’d changed on such a fundamental level. She wanted to be the girl she’d been before Uram—the one who’d just secured a coveted position at a fashion house, who’d loved fabric and design, and who’d laughed with her girlfriends as they walked to the movies to catch the late show.
None of those friends had made it.
Turning to the fridge, he retrieved one of the bags of blood he had delivered on a regular basis and poured it into a glass before going to crouch down beside her. He pushed back a wing of glossy black hair currently streaked with cotton candy–colored highlights and said, “Drink.” Nothing else was necessary—Holly knew he wouldn’t leave until the glass was empty.
Strange, hate-filled eyes. “I want to kill you. Every time you walk through that door, I want to pick up a machete and hack your head off.” She gulped down the blood and slammed the empty glass on the floor so hard it cracked along one side.
Using a tissue to wipe her mouth, he threw it in the trash before standing up to lean against a cabinet opposite her. “A woman cut my face today,” he told her. “Not with a machete but a throwing blade.”
Holly’s eyes skimmed over his unmarked skin. “Bullshit.”
“I’m fairly certain she was going for the jugular but I was too fast.” And Honor had moved with far more grace than he’d have believed her capable of before that little demonstration. The woman was trained in some kind of martial art, trained at a level that meant she was no helpless victim. And yet she had been made one.
“Too bad she missed,” Holly muttered . . . before asking the question that had lingered in the air since the second he walked into the house. “Why won’t you let me die, Dmitri?” Her words were a plea.
He wasn’t certain why he hadn’t killed her the instant she began to show signs of a lethal change, and so he didn’t answer her. Instead, crouching back down, he tipped up her face with his fingers under her chin. “If it comes down to an execution, Holly,” he murmured, “you’ll never see me coming.” Quick and fast, that was how it would be—he would not have her go into the final goodnight drowning in fear.
“She died afraid, Dmitri. If only you’d given me what I asked for, she would still be alive.” A sigh, elegant fingers brushing over his cheekbone as he hung broken from iron cuffs that had worn grooves into his skin. “Do you want the same for Misha?”
“Don’t call me that.” Holly’s harsh voice fracturing the crushing memory from the painful dawn of his existence. “Holly died in that warehouse. Something else walked out.”
It was an attempt to erase herself, and that he would not allow—but it would do no harm to permit her to establish a line between her past and the present. Perhaps then, she would finally begin to live this new life. “What would you have me call you?”
“How about Uram?” A bitter question. “He doesn’t need the name anymore, after all.”
“No.” He wouldn’t let her harm herself in such a way, her name itself a poisonous shroud. “Choose again.”
She thumped her fisted hand against his chest, but her anger was permeated with pain and he knew she wouldn’t fight him in this. “Sorrow,” she whispered after a long silence. “Call me Sorrow.”
No joyful name that, no hopeful one, but he would give her this one choice when she’d had so many others stolen from her. “Sorrow, then.” Leaning forward he pressed his lips to her forehead, her bangs blades of silk against his lips, her bones fine, fragile, so vulnerable under his hands.
In that instant, he knew why he hadn’t killed her yet. Age notwithstanding, she was a child to him. A dangerous child, but a child nonetheless, scared and trying so hard to hide it. And the murder of a child . . . it left a scar on a man’s soul that could never, ever be erased.
4
Arriving back at Guild Academy after midnight, Honor put her laptop bag down on the small table tucked in beside the wardrobe in her quarters. The bed took up most of the remaining space. The room was adequate, and that was it—most hunters only used the quarters when they needed to do a short, intense session of instruction at the Academy. Honor had been here since the day they allowed her out of the hospital.
It wasn’t because she couldn’t afford anything better. Given the fees hunters commanded as a result of the high-risk nature of their work, and the fact that she hadn’t really had much downtime in which to spend that money, she’d built up a considerable nest egg before the abduction. None of it had been touched during her convalescence, as the Guild covered the medical costs of all its hunters. Truth was, she could move into a penthouse if that was what she wanted.
It just hadn’t seemed worth the effort to move out.
Except tonight, the room was suddenly a cage. How could she have been so numb that she hadn’t noticed the claustrophobic confines? The realization of the depth of her apathy was a slap, one that made her head ring—but not enough to settle her sharp response to the walls around her.
Beginning to sweat, she ripped of
f her sweatshirt and dropped it on the bed, but that did nothing to cool her down.
Water.
A few minutes after that thought passed through her head, she was dressed in a sleek black one-piece swimsuit, a toweling robe around her body. The night owls she ran into on her way to the Academy pool stopped only long enough to say hi before continuing on their way—and she was soon sliding into the pristine blue waters that promised peace.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
The rhythm was better than meditating. It took ten lengths, but by the end of it, she was calm. However, the feeling of suffocation struck again the instant she returned to her room—now that she’d noticed its tiny size, she couldn’t get it out of her head. And there was no way she’d be able to sleep even if she forced herself to bed. Her nightmares—malevolent, clawing things—were bad enough without adding claustrophobic panic to the mix.
Having showered at the pool, she pulled on fresh clothes and picked up her laptop.
The library was quiet at this time of night, but not deserted. There were a couple of instructors working on research papers, and a hunter who looked like she’d come in from active duty.
A single glance at that shining dark hair, those worn boots, and her lips curved in joyful surprise. “Ashwini?”
The tall, long-legged hunter put down the book she’d been examining and swiveled on her heel. Face cracking into a smile that turned her from beautiful to breathtaking, she gave a “Whoop!” and vaulted over a library table to grab Honor in a tight hug. No sign remained of the knife fight that had left her seriously injured not long ago.
Laughing, Honor hugged her back—Ash was one of the rare few people she’d never had trouble allowing close, even directly after the assault. Perhaps it was because the other hunter was her best friend . . . and perhaps it was because Ashwini was the one who’d ripped off her blindfold and shot off the chains that had held her trapped and helpless, her body a piece of meat for her captors.
