by Nalini Singh
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.
Dmitri had never been as angry as he was at that instant, riding a vicious edge where he hungered only to hurt the woman in his arms. He didn't know what game Honor was playing, but he would get the answer out of her, even if he had to break her into a million tiny pieces. That field, what it represented, it was not to be touched, not by anyone.
Squeezing her wrist as she froze against him, he went to touch her with his fangs in an act that he knew was cruel, but then again, she'd been playing him from the start. There was no chance in hell that she'd just happened to come upon the field where his wife and baby girl had died, where he'd brought his son afterward, so that Misha wouldn't be alone, where he'd stood vigil for an entire turn of the seasons.
"My beautiful Dmitri." Big brown eyes filled with worry. "Don't let her change you. Don't let her make you cruel."
Ingrede's words had been unable to halt the change, not after she was gone. Nothing would reverse it. So he would make use of it.
A burst of movement from the hunter who had thought to make him a fool.
He had no trouble pinning her to the wall. But Honor didn't stop fighting, twisting and wrenching her body with a strength that would break something soon if she didn't stop.
When he pinioned her arms above her head with a grip on her wrists, and pressed her lower body against the wall with his own, she bit him on the neck. Hard enough to draw blood. Jerking away, he tightened the hand he had around her wrists. "Foreplay already, Honor?"
No response, only that furious twisting and pulling and fighting even though she had no hope of escaping him. She made not a sound, her breath tightly controlled.
That was when he looked into those eyes of mysterious green.
There was no one there.
No personality, no hint of the woman who had laughed and pleasured him with such sexual confidence that morning, nothing but the animal instinct to survive. And he knew she would kill herself trying to get free.
"Dmitri, I'm scared."
"I'll never hurt you. Trust me."
Trembling under the whisper of memory, a memory that didn't belong to Honor and yet spoke for her, he released her hands, lifted his body off hers. She came at him like a tempest unleashed, slamming her elbow into his face, her fisted hand into his larynx, her booted foot against his knee.
Crashing down onto the bed on his back, he blocked some of her most brutal strikes, but did nothing to halt her. Her rage rained down on him, bloodying his nose, his mouth, putting bruises on his body that healed almost as soon as they were made.
"Bastard." It was the first thing she'd said since he'd trapped her in the corner. "You goddamn bastard." A savage blow to his jaw that had his teeth snapping together.
Blocking her next blow, he looked into her eyes . . . and saw Honor looking back at him again. The brilliant green was washed in a sheen of wet, and her next blow when it came lacked the power of the others. She thumped both fists on his chest over and over and over again. "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!" It was a furious litany that turned into sobs so harsh they spoke of unimaginable anguish, her body crumpling over his own. "I hate you." A whisper.
Right then, he hated himself.
Lying motionless until she stopped moving, those painfully raw sobs turning into heartbreakingly silent tears against his chest, he dared put a hand on her hair, stroking her now tangled curls. He didn't know what to say to her, how to explain the rage she'd incited within him.
But there was one thing he could say, something he hadn't said to a woman in near to a thousand years. "I'm sorry, Honor. Forgive me."
Sitting perched up on the sink in the large bathroom off her bedroom, Honor watched in silence as Dmitri ran the disinfectant over her scraped and bruised knuckles. She bit back a hiss at the sting, her eyes lingering on the cut on his lip, the bruises on his face. Part of her, horrified by her own violence, wanted to cup that sinful masculine face in her hands, kiss each and every bruise in gentle apology. But the rest of her was curled up into a tiny ball deep within, watchful, wary.
The light glinted off the black of his hair as he ministered to her and she remembered the heavy silk of it against her palms. She remembered, too, the force of his grip as he'd pinned her arms above her head.
"I bruised you." He slid his hands under her wrists, his skin darker against the paler hue of her own--now marked by bands of dull red.
Fairness made her break her silence. "I did worse." She'd hit him hard enough that the bruises were going to take at least an hour to heal, in spite of his vampirism. More, the cut on his lip wasn't a shallow gash. His shirt, ripped at the shoulder seam, betrayed faint red marks that were almost healed, but on the whole--"I came out of it better than you."
Dark, dark eyes met her own. "The physical hurt isn't the core of it, is it?"
Her stomach grew tight, acid burning her throat. "All of it," she said in a voice turned rough from the force of her earlier sobs, "everything we've done to this point . . . I think it's gone." Lost under the shock and terror that had reduced her to a clawing animal, a biting, hitting, trapped creature who had once more been made a helpless victim.
Dmitri had made a mockery of her hard-won strength, crushed her faith in her own judgment, but most of all, he'd taken the pride she'd rebuilt scrap by scrap, and she wasn't sure she could forgive him for that.
Not saying a word, he threw away the cotton swab after taking care of all the scrapes and made sure not to crowd her as she left the bathroom. Chilled deep within by a sense of loss that made her feel hollow, as if her entire existence had been wiped away, she stumbled into the living room and to the window that looked out over a city lashed by rain.
The lights were muted, hazy through the water, until it felt as if she was all alone in the world, trapped in a glass cage. It was a feeling with which she was intimately familiar. The friends she'd made, the relationships she'd forged, it had made the loneliness bearable, but it had always been there, inside of her, this strange "missing." It was Dmitri who'd filled that hole, and Dmitri who'd made it even bigger.
A whisper of the darkest of scents and she knew he'd walked into the living room on silent feet. But he didn't come to her, and a minute later she heard him in the kitchen area. Looking across the open-plan space divided only by the smooth curve of the counter, she saw him put together a plate and bring it to the table after clearing away her camera.
Walking around the table toward her, he kept a distance between them. It made the ice in her chest impossibly colder . . . and then she knew it was her heart that was frozen. "Eat, Honor," he said. "You haven't for hours." There was something in his voice she couldn't read, an element she'd never before heard from him.
Angling her body so she could look him full in the face, she saw only the walls of an almost-immortal who had lived longer than she could imagine. "You should go." She couldn't stand it, having him here with this impassable gulf between them. It was undoubtedly idiotic to feel this lost by the end of a relationship that hadn't ever really begun, but it felt as if he'd reached inside her and crushed her soul, then ground it under his boot.
A bleak shadow in those eyes of so deep a brown they were almost black, and with such age in them. "You send me away."
Would you send me away?
S
he blinked at the strange echo, focused on the man who stood so close and so distant. "I have to." To survive, to scrape the tattered remnants of her pride, her self, back together.
Dmitri said nothing for long moments as the rain fell against the glass in a melody of sound she'd always before found soothing. Today the tone felt jarring, the beat too jagged against her oversensitized nerves. When Dmitri raised a hand, then dropped it, she felt the loss like a stab to the heart, and she understood he could hurt her worse than he already had. But then he did the one thing she'd never, ever have expected.
Holding her gaze, he closed the final distance between them and went down to his knees, that beautiful bruised face looking up at her.
When he placed his arms around her waist and pressed the side of his face to her abdomen, the tears started flowing again, slow and quiet, over her cheeks. Dmitri didn't bow his head to anyone; he didn't surrender or submit. But he was on his knees before her, vulnerable to a kick, a stab to the neck, the most violent rejection. "Oh, Dmitri." Trembling, she ran her fingers through his hair, this man who had been scarred so badly that distrust was an instinctive response.
She knew the wildflowers had set him off in the bedroom, but she still had no idea why. However, now was not the time to ask. Now was the time to decide.
"Forgive me."
Did she have that in her? The strength to forgive him for the horror he'd brought back to life just when she'd begun to believe she'd beaten her abusers after all, for the hurt he'd done to her heart, but most of all for the humiliation of being reduced to a scrabbling animal?
Honor's hand fisted in his hair.
The rain continued to fall outside, but inside there was only silence--and an acuteness of clarity that told her the decision she made in this instant, about this man, would resonate throughout her life. If she stepped off the edge on which she currently stood, she could fall hard, perhaps shatter forever . . . or she could find her way home.
Home.
The idea of it was nothing but a fantasy built out of her intense and inexorable loneliness, many would say. But they didn't understand the incomprehensible strength of what she felt for this man who knelt before her, giving her something he gave no one. All her life she'd searched for him, even when she hadn't known his name. He wasn't who she'd imagined him to be--was a far more deadly, hardened creature.
Still mine. Still my Dmitri. Wounded, changed . . . but not lost. I will not believe him lost.
Honor didn't fight the voice that wasn't her own and yet came from her soul. It was a familiar madness by now.
Dmitri's hand spread on her lower back. "Don't end this."
"Would you go?" she asked, unclenching her hand, stroking her fingers through that black silk again as she wiped away her tears with her free hand.
A long, long pause. "Yes." A single harsh word. "If you want your freedom, I'll give it to you."
So . . . the choice was hers and hers alone.
29
In the end, the decision wasn't so difficult after all, because when it came to Dmitri, she had no sense of self-preservation. And that, too, was a madness, as relentless as the need she had to touch him, hold him . . . love him. "Stay," she said, and felt the shudder in the powerful body of the man who'd offered her freedom.
It broke her a little.
Sliding down to her knees, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck and buried her face against the heated warmth of his skin. His own arms came around her an instant later. Fear, that insidious intruder, that silent shadow, she waited for it . . . but it didn't come, as if the raw brutality of their fight had purged it out of her system, leaving her bruised and battered but whole.
"Never again," Dmitri whispered into her hair, his voice naked, his shields stripped to nothing. "I swear to you."
Cupping his neck at the nape, she caressed him with tender strokes, and it was an act of gentling for both of them. For this harsh, dangerous man who was her own, and for the ragged, lonely girl within her. "Tell me why." She needed to understand, to see into the shadows of his heart.
One of his hands fisted in her hair. "It's a memorial," he said, his voice so rough, it was difficult to understand. "No one other than Raphael knows of its existence."
Her heart thudded, a huge wave of knowing pushing at her mind, but it slithered out of her grasp to fade away like so much mist when she tried to reach for it, to hold it. Letting it go for the moment, she thought of the wildflowers, so many colors, so many shades, all of them bobbing their heads in welcome as she parked her vehicle far off in the distance to avoid crushing them. She'd walked, slow but certain, through the riot of color, drawn to the invisible ruin--as if her body were a compass and the ruin true north.
The melancholy of the place had weighed down her limbs, but she'd been certain she heard the echo of laughter, too . . . of a child's delight. "It's a place with memory," she whispered. "There isn't only sadness, Dmitri. You must remember." The words weren't her own, and yet they were. "You must."
"I remember everything." A laugh created of jagged metal and broken glass. "Sometimes I wish I didn't. But those memories, they're set in stone, never to be forgotten."
Honor thought of what it must be like to carry such sorrow through the ages, to mourn for nearly a thousand years, and felt an ache so vast it had no end. "She wouldn't have wanted this for you," she said, so certain that she didn't stop to question it. "You know that."
Honor was right, Dmitri thought. Ingrede would have been horrified to see who--what--he had become, how he'd let the loss of her and the children twist him. But he also knew another thing. "Some things, no man can resist. Some losses, no husband"--no father--"can ever forget."
"Dmitri--"
"I don't know what I can give you, Honor," he said because she deserved honesty, "but I know I've felt nothing like this since the moment she died."
Honor cupped his face. "It's all right." The gentlest of kisses.
He didn't know how she'd become the one to offer comfort when he'd caused the harm, but his soul, cold for so long, basked in the warmth of her.
"I once fed Elena," he told her a long time later, as her lips closed over the forkful of rice he'd lifted to her mouth, as she allowed him to take care of her in a way he hadn't earlier.
Curiosity turned the deep green of her gaze to sparkling gemstones. "Were there knives involved?"
"No, but she was tied up at the time." It seemed an eon ago that he'd taunted Elena while she remained restrained for her own safety. "She'd shot Raphael." The others in the Seven had been ready for blood, Dmitri bound by a vow to keep her safe.
Honor leaned forward, brows lowering. "I heard rumors . . . she really did?"
So he told her the story, and managed to get most of the food into her at the same time, wondering if she'd noticed the fruit and honey he'd added to the table.
"I do have hands, husband."
Lifting a slice of fruit up to those beautiful lips as she sat on his lap, one arm around his neck. "You can use those hands to thank me for taking such good care of you."
Small white teeth biting into the fruit, slender throat swallowing the juicy flesh. "Dmitri?"
"Yes?" He ran the fruit down that throat, licked up the juice.
She shivered. "I hope I'm sitting in your lap when I'm a toothless crone and you a wrinkled old man."
Putting down her wineglass, Honor rose to slide into his lap and memory and reality collided in a kaleidoscope that made his head spin. Her lips touching his only escalated the fracture of time, the taste of her hot and sweet and painfully familiar even as it was not. Stroking his hand up to the back of her neck, he forced himself to hold her with conscious gentleness as she opened her mouth over his and explored him with slow, sinful decadence.
The tenderness of the moment destroyed him, singing to parts of him he'd thought long dead. The scent of her, wildflowers in bloom, the feel of her under his hands, the way she laughed, it all fit him like a key into a lock. Ingrede had been so
very different on the surface--a woman who loved home and hearth, who wouldn't know how to use a blade except in the kitchen, but she'd had the heart of a lion, his wife.
So did Honor.
"Yes," he said to her when she broke the kiss on a soft suck of sound.
Honor angled her head in a silent question.
Locking his eyes with those the shade of mist-laden forests, he very deliberately ran his hand down to close it over her breast. "Now, Honor."
Her heartbeat thudded against his hand, her voice raspy with the storm that had just passed . . . and with a passion that flushed her full lips until he wanted to use his teeth on her. "The windows," she whispered.
This high up, there was no chance of being overlooked . . . except, of course, by immortals with wings. "Close the blinds." The quiet command slipped out.
Honor's lips tugged upward at the corners. "As you wish."
Knowing he was being teased and quite content with the state of affairs, he watched her rise and walk to shut the blinds, enclosing them in the soft intimacy created by the quiet shield of rain beyond the glass. "What do you need?" he asked when she turned back to face him.
It was the first time in centuries upon centuries that he'd put a lover's needs above his own. Oh, he'd never left a bedmate unsatisfied, even if the pleasure he'd been inclined to give had been a razor-edged thing almost brutal in its intensity, but care . . . no, he hadn't taken care of a lover since the day he left his wife with a promise to return.
If Honor asked him to temper himself, he'd find a way to do it. But what she said was, "I won't break," and it was a solemn statement.
He thought of how she'd gone mad in his arms, her mind trapped in a nightmare. Fractures existed inside of her, and tonight, bastard that he was, he'd helped widen them. But they would heal--because Honor had come out swinging. Raising his hand to his jaw, he rubbed the tender bruise. "You almost broke me."
A smile, slow and heartbreaking in its beauty. "You deserved it."
He felt his own lips curve. "I did." Scanning his eyes up and down her body, he said, "I still intend to have my wicked way with you," in a deliberate attempt to gauge how far she'd allow him to go.
"No kinky stuff till later."
