Dressed in fresh clothes afterward, she picked up the phone and input a number she’d never expected to use at four a.m. on a cool spring morning, the sky a smoky black broken by a scattering of light-filled offices in the high-rises.
A dark male voice came on, asking her to leave a message.
Hanging up, she rubbed her palms over her face and went to spread the blown-up photographs of the tattoos on the small dining table beside the window. She’d made a breakthrough, or what she’d thought was a breakthrough, just before she’d fallen exhausted into bed. Now, her mind clearer, notwithstanding the nightmares, she began to retrace her line of thought.
Yes, that was definitely it. The key. Or part of the key.
She didn’t know how long she’d been working but her writing pad was covered with several pages of notes, when there was a knock on her door. Frowning, she glanced at the wall clock.
Half past four.
Body tensing with a strange exhilaration because it could only be one person, she picked up her gun and looked through the peephole.
12
She slid away the gun—odd, given who she was about to let in—and opened the door.
“You called?” Dmitri was wearing a white shirt open at the collar and black suit pants, his hair tumbled just enough to make her think he’d been running his hands through it.
It made her own fingers curl into her palms. “Come in,” she said, a vivid image of what he might look like sated and lazy in bed forming full-fledged in her mind. Though she knew Dmitri was far more likely to be a lover who would take total control even in the most intimate of dances, her mind insisted on seeing him sprawled relaxed on his back, a teasing smile on his face—the way a man might look at a familiar lover.
The idea was so tempting that she had to force herself to ignore it, to remember the truth of him as a sophisticated vampire who’d tasted every sin—and who wouldn’t stay with the same woman beyond the time it took to satisfy his curiosity.
“I married her.”
One woman at least, had awakened more in him than a fleeting sexual attraction. Honor had the most unquenchable desire to know everything about that woman, a hundred thousand questions she wanted to ask. However, for one question she needed no answer: it was patent that Dmitri had spoken his marriage vows long, long ago. That man didn’t exist anymore, had likely not existed for centuries.
“I have something to show you,” she said, unable to understand the strange ache inside of her.
He followed her to the table, listened in silence.
“I’m near certain,” she said after explaining the process by which she’d come to her conclusion, “this is a name.” She touched a particular grouping of symbols. “The sample I have to work with is so small that it’s possible I could be way off, but I think the sound is something like Asis or Esis.”
Dmitri went very, very quiet. “Isis.”
A skeletal hand gripped her throat, squeezed. “Tell me about her.” Dmitri’s face was all hard lines when she glanced up after making that demand, his eyes so remote that she saw nothing and forever in them. “Dmitri.” Somehow, her hand was on his forearm, his skin hot through the fine linen of the shirt, his tendons taut.
His face, however, showed nothing. “You shouldn’t be touching me right now, Honor.”
She jerked away her hand, but the fear she felt had nothing to do with him. It was in her very bones, brought to life by a name that meant nothing . . . and yet it incited not only fear but an anger beyond rage, beyond fury. “Tell me.”
Dmitri’s voice remained oddly flat as he said, “Isis was the angel who Made me. I stabbed her in the heart and cut her into pieces for it.”
Pleasure, vicious and wild, intertwined with a haunting despair, roared through her. Shocked, she dropped the pen she’d been using to explain her reasoning and stumbled backward from the table.
Dmitri’s eyes didn’t move off Honor as she shoved her hands into her hair, pulling it loose from the messy bun at her nape, and made her way to the kitchen with jerky steps. “That’s where I saw this code.” On Isis’s writing desk—at the start, when she’d taken him to her chambers. “She called it her little secret, but her courtiers and friends had to know it because she wrote notes to them using the code.” Too many immortals to single out a name, but he would set that line of investigation in progress.
Right now, it was Honor who held his attention.
As he watched, she began to make tea with the methodical motions of a woman who had often done the same task—and yet who now took care with each and every step of the process. The kind of thing Ingrede had done when she needed to calm herself.
“What,” he murmured, leaning on the bench that separated the kitchen area from the dining and living areas, “do you know of Isis?”
The space was open on both sides, so he couldn’t block her in, but Honor, skittish as she was, didn’t seem to want to run from him. At this moment, as she poured boiling water into a glass teapot, her bones pushing white against her skin, she seemed to be fighting only herself.
“Nothing,” she said, putting down the hot water jug and setting the pale red-orange tea to steep. “Yet I want to dance on her grave.”
The naked emotion in her voice found an echo inside him. “There is no grave,” he said, looking into those deep green eyes full of secrets. “We made sure nothing of her remained.” Except it seemed something had survived, some tainted piece now attempting to take root.
“We?”
He saw no harm in sharing the truth—it had never been a secret. “Raphael was there. We killed Isis together.” The bond forged in that pain-soaked room beneath the keep, and in the blood and viscera of Isis’s death, was one nothing would ever break.
Honor braced her hand on the counter. And then she met his gaze with those eyes that belonged to an immortal, and asked a question he would’ve never expected from the scared woman who had first walked into his office. “Who were you before Isis, Dmitri?”
“I broke it.” A disconsolate whisper.
“Let me see.”
“Will you tell Mama?”
“It’ll be our secret. There, it’s fixed.”
“Dmitri, Misha, what are you up to?”
“Secret things, Mama!”
Laughter, sweet and feminine and familiar, followed by Ingrede’s quiet footsteps. Heavy with child, she kissed first her giggling son, then her smiling husband.
“I was another man,” he said, put on edge by the forceful draw he felt toward Honor. He may have led a life of debauchery after his world burned to ash, may have blackened his soul and indulged in every vice there was in an effort to numb the pain, but he had never, ever betrayed Ingrede where it mattered. His heart, it had remained untouched, encased in stone.
“I will love you even when I am dust on the wind.”
This hunter shattered on the innermost level was not likely to tempt him to break that promise . . . but there was no denying that there were hidden depths to her. Depths he was compelled to explore. “You’re an excellent shot,” he said.
A shrug. “I practice, and Valeria wasn’t exactly a moving target.” Lines marred her forehead. “I should feel bad about taking advantage when she was pinned up like a butterfly, but I don’t. What does that make me?”
“Human. Flawed.”
“Strange how that actually makes me feel better.” She reached to open an upper cupboard. The motion pulled her gray sweatshirt a fraction tighter over her full breasts, but nowhere near enough to showcase a body that Dmitri was damn certain was meant to be showcased.