by Nalini Singh
“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.
And Dmitri knew it.
Those beautiful lips setting in the slightest curve, he angled his head toward the elevators. “Come, little rabbit.”
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to follow—though her heart threatened to punch out of her chest at the thought of being trapped in an elevator with him. Unfortunately, escape wasn’t an option. There was nowhere she could go in this city where he wouldn’t track her down.
And he would, because she had what he needed. The fact that he wanted to sleep with her was an adjunct, a diversion. “Did your people discover anything else about the victim?” she asked, sweat beading along her spine as they reached the elevator.
“He died perhaps a day before the head was discovered.” Dark, dark eyes lingering on every curve and shadow of her face. “You need to slow down your pulse, Honor. Or I’ll take it as an invitation. And we both know just how much you’d enjoy my fangs.”
Her stomach clenched, roiled. “Carmen was right. You are a bastard.” In the pit, one of the vampires had used his fangs to pump something into her bloodstream that was meant to make things pleasurable for the donor, forcing her to orgasm over and over again—a wracking rape of her senses that she couldn’t fight.
She’d vomited after he finished, much to his disgust. Ice-cold buckets of water thrown over her had been her punishment. “I’d rather eat nails than let you near me.”
“A colorful analogy, but I don’t have to force my food.” Extending his arm to keep the elevator doors from closing, he waited. “As you saw, it comes begging to my door.” He continued to hold the elevator even when it began to beep.
No way in hell would she let him win.
He smiled when she stepped in, and again, it was the smile of a predator. Without warmth or any hint of humanity. “So, the quivering rabbit has some spine left.”
The doors whooshed shut.
“How’s your face?” she asked, hand itching for a blade.
He turned so she could see the cheek she’d cut. The dark honey of his skin was smooth and warm with health once more, the kind of skin that invited touch . . . if you forgot the fact that he was as dangerous as a cobra watching its prey.
“The tattooed vampire,” he said, leaning lazily against the wall, his voice a languid stroke, “was barely-Made. Two months old at most. He shouldn’t have been out of containment.”
Frowning, she bit the inside of her lip. “Hunters don’t usually have anything to do with vampires that young. I’ve heard they’re relatively weak.”
“Weak is one word.” Glancing toward the doors as they opened, he nodded at her to step out.
She locked her feet into place. “After you.”
“If I wanted to go for your throat, Honor,” he said in that same deceptively lazy voice, “you’d be pinned to the wall before you saw me move.”
Yeah, she knew that. Didn’t change things. “I can stay here all day.”
Once again, Dmitri held out his arm to block the door from closing. “Who were you before they got to you?”
It ripped at the pride Honor hadn’t thought she still had that he knew how she’d been debased and degraded, how she’d been made less than an animal, but she found her voice in a rage that had grown in brittle silence since the day she stumbled out of the pit. “I have a question of my own.”
A raised eyebrow.
“Why the fuck are the worst of them still out there walking around?” While she was trapped in this body that couldn’t forget the bruises, the broken bones, but most of all, the agonizing loss of her right to make a choice, to allow or not to allow a touch.
A cold, cold something swam behind Dmitri’s dark eyes. “Because they don’t know they’re dead yet.” Icy words. “Would you like to watch when I make them scream?”
Her blood froze in her veins.
Dmitri smiled. “What fantasies have you been having, little rabbit? Stabbing out their eyes, perhaps, letting them grow back so you could do it again?” A terrible, sensual whisper. “Breaking their bones with a hammer while they’re conscious?” Not waiting for an answer, he stepped out of the elevator.
Following, she stared at the black suit jacket that sat so very perfectly over broad shoulders graceful with a liquid kind of muscle. Nothing about Dmitri was less than sophisticated. Even his violence. And yet he’d come scarily close to guessing at the vicious dreams she entertained when she thought of having her attackers at her mercy—in a cold room devoid of light as they’d had her.
“I know,” he said, as if he’d read her mind, “because I once cut out the tongue of someone who had held me prisoner.”
Something slumbering in her stretched awake, some waiting, old part that hungered for his answer to the question she was compelled to ask. “Was it enough?”
“No, but it was satisfying nonetheless.” Pushing through the door to his office, he walked over to the windows. “Those who say vengeance eats you up are wrong—it doesn’t, not if you do it right.” Glancing over his shoulder, he gave her a razored smile that both fascinated and terrified. “I’ll make sure to invite you when I track them down.”
>
“You sound certain you will.”
He didn’t answer—as if it was a given he’d hunt down his prey. “Come here, Honor.” A command twined with the faint taste of some exotic spice that made her breasts swell, her breath catch.
It was a good thing she appeared to have only the merest drop of the hunting bloodline. “Even before the attack,” she said, digging her nails into her palms, “I wasn’t the kind of hunter who played with vampires.” While she had nothing against those of her brethren who took vampiric lovers, she knew herself well enough to know she needed commitment of a kind the almost-immortals couldn’t give. Their lives were too long, love an amusement, fidelity to a mortal laughable. “Being food has never appealed to me.”
Dmitri turned to lean against the plate-glass wall that looked out over Manhattan, his masculine beauty starkly outlined by the piercing light of the sun at his back. “Ah, but I think you’d be a delicious snack.”
Dmitri watched the hunter across from him tug her laptop bag off her shoulder and place it on his desk before pulling out the slim computer. Her face was flushed, her breasts pushing against her sweatshirt, but there was nothing less than unyielding focus in her words. “We can play games all day, or I can show you what I’ve found.”
“Dmitri, stop playing games.”
Words spoken in a distant language, as clear to him as the sunlight. She’d been angry with him that day, his Ingrede. And yet in the end, he’d tumbled her into bed, stripped her down to her skin, and kissed every inch of her small, lush body. He’d loved sinking into her, of having his hands full of her breasts, his thighs wedged between her softer, plumper ones as he sucked and licked at her mouth, her neck. That was the day Caterina had been conceived, or so Ingrede had always maintained.
“That’s why she is such a bad-tempered child, your daughter.”
“Dmitri?”
Lashes lowering, he fought to hang on to a memory that held nothing of the pain or horror that was to follow, only to have it flitting out of reach. “I’m listening,” he said, eyes on Honor.
Her gaze lingered on him and, for an instant, he felt the most disconcerting sensation—as if he had been in this moment before—but then she blinked and looked down and it passed. “The tattoo isn’t in our database. However, I’ve sent out some discreet feelers along the international hunter network.”
Dmitri had also put out the word amongst the network of high-level vampires who either worked in or with powerful courts. The cooperation at that level was much more prevalent than believed by most people. It was only when issues of territory and power became involved that things got problematic. “Have you had any success deciphering the lines of text?”
Her eyes sparkled, the first time he’d seen such a light in them. It fascinated him, the sudden, brilliant life of her. This, he thought, this was who she had been before she’d been broken . . . before she’d learned to taste fear in her every breath. He understood what it was to break, better than she could imagine.
“Watch, Dmitri.”
“No, don’t!” Pulling against his chains until his wrists bled. “I’ll do whatever you wish—crawl on my hands and knees!”
Laughter, beautiful and mocking. “You will anyway.”
“No! No! Please!”
6
“The language”—Honor’s voice intertwining with one of the most painful moments of his hundreds of years of existence—“is close to Aramaic, but not quite. It’s almost as if someone took Aramaic as the base, then wrote their own . . .” A puff of breath that lifted the fine tendrils of hair that had escaped the clip at her nape. “I’d call it a code. The lines are a code.”
Drawn by the softness of her, he walked closer, saw her stiffen. “Can you unravel it?”
“It’ll be difficult with so small a sample,” she said, holding her position, “but yes, I think so. I’ve already begun.”
He was about to ask for more details when his cell phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he saw it was Jason, Raphael’s spymaster and a member of the Seven. “You’ve found something,” he said to the angel, his attention on the curls in Honor’s hair.
“In a sense—I’ll be there in five minutes to discuss it.”
Hanging up, Dmitri glanced at the skies beyond the glass, searching for Jason’s distinctive black-winged form. He didn’t find it—not a surprise, given that Jason had a habit of flying high above the cloud layer and then descending in a burst of speed. Looking back to Honor, he caught her staring at him. “Usually when a woman looks at me like that,” he murmured in deliberate provocation, “I consider it an invitation to take whatever I want.”
Hand clenching around the pen in her grasp, she stood to her full height. “I was thinking that you looked like a man who could break my neck with the same inhuman calm as you might a cell phone.”
Dmitri slid his hands into his pockets. “I’d be more worried at losing my cell.” He said it to shock her, but part of him wasn’t certain it wasn’t in fact the truth.
Honor’s gaze lingered on his face, those midnight green eyes full of secrets too old to belong to a mortal . . . except this one had lived an eon in the months she’d spent trapped at the mercy of those who had none. “Everyone,” she now said, “knows vampires were once human. I’m not sure you were.”
“Neither am I.” A lie, made so by his awakening memories, memories that incited the same rage, horror, and anguish he’d felt so long ago that the time was nothing but an ancient legend to mortals. However, Honor had no right to that knowledge. Only to Ingrede would he have laid his soul bare, and his wife was long dead, ashes on the unforgiving wind.
Dmitri.
I’ll meet you on the balcony, Jason. Though their ranges and specific abilities varied dramatically, every member of the Seven could communicate on the mental plane, an incalculable strategic advantage in certain situations. “Don’t leave just yet, Honor. I wouldn’t want to have to chase you down.”
Honor watched Dmitri prowl out through the small door that led onto the balcony. An angel with wings as black as the endless heart of night swept down to land with quiet grace on the very edge of the open space an instant later. Honor sucked in a breath as she saw the tattoo covering the left-hand side of his face—swirling lines, dots arcing along the curves to create a striking piece of art. Beautiful and haunting, it suited a face that carried the compelling strength of the Pacific intermingled with other cultures she couldn’t quite identify. His hair, tied back in a neat queue, reached to midway between his shoulder blades.
Dmitri, with his flawlessly cut black suit paired with a vivid blue shirt, his hair just long enough to invite the thrust of a woman’s fingers, was as urbane and sophisticated as the angel was rough around the edges. But one thing was clear—both were honed blades, blooded and ruthless.
Jason glanced through the plate-glass window. “Honor St. Nicholas,” he said. “Found abandoned as a newborn on the doorstep of a small church in rural North Dakota. Named after the nun who discovered her and the patron saint of children. No known family.”
Dmitri wasn’t surprised at Jason’s knowledge—there was a reason the angel was called the best spymaster in the Cadre. “I assume you didn’t come here to talk about Honor.”
The angel tucked his wings in tighter as a swift wind swept across the balcony suspended high above the frenetic beat of the city. “There’s something in your voice, Dmitri.”
It was odd how good Jason was at picking up cues about people, though he was an angel who preferred to keep to himself. “Unless you have intentions toward Honor,” he said, “it’s not something you need to worry about.”
Jason didn’t speak for a long moment unbroken by any sound but for the wind whispering over his wings. “Do you know what was done to her?”
“I can guess.” Unlike Jason, he had intimate knowledge of the bloodlust that lived within the Made. Dmitri had had control of his from the start—perhaps because he’d stabbed his rage into Isis’s body, or perhaps b
ecause he’d been determined never to become a slave to anyone or anything—but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. “She’s stronger than she appears.”
“Are you certain?”
“Why the sudden concern about a hunter?” Jason saw everything, but preferred to keep his distance from those he watched.
Jason didn’t answer. “I’ve had some news from Neha’s territory.”
The Archangel of India was powerful and, ever since the execution of her daughter, walking the edges of sanity. “Is it something we need to worry about?”
“No. It doesn’t seem connected to anything else.” He tracked a chopper coming in to land on a roof outside Tower territory. “An angel appears to have gone missing. A bare two years from the Refuge.”
Dmitri frowned. “She can’t know anything about it.” Angels that young were habitually put under the command of a senior vampire or angel.
“No. The vampire—Kallistos—who did have a care of the angel, says he assumed the young one went back to the Refuge.”
That wasn’t suspicious in and of itself. A senior vampire in an archangel’s court had a lot on his plate, and it wasn’t unusual for young angels to bolt to the security of the hidden angelic stronghold after their first taste of the wider world. “You’ve alerted the Refuge?”
“Aodhan and Galen are making inquiries,” the black-winged angel said, naming two of the Seven.
Dmitri nodded. Territorial borders aside, the young ones were always looked after. “I’ll speak to the other seconds in the Cadre, see if they can shed any light on the matter.”
“Angels do not just disappear.”
“No, but I’ve known the occasional youth to go a little wild after first leaving the Refuge.” Jason dealt mostly with the oldest of the angels, archangels included, but Dmitri continued to have contact with the younger angels because he liked to take a look at everyone coming into Raphael’s territory. “I once tracked a young male to a ‘party island’ in the Mediterranean.” He shook his head at the memory. “The boy was sitting there in a tree, watching the revelers—he’d never imagined that level of hedonism.”
