Her body pressed a fraction into him as she leaned over to pick up another photograph. “The place is a bloodbath.”
Weaving a curl of sin, rich as brandy and just as heady, around her was as natural to him as breathing. “I’ve got a team examining it.”
“Dmitri.” Husky censure, but no anger. “I’ll get ready to head—”
“You’re exhausted.” He took in the black circles under her eyes, the pallor, felt the ice of ruthless anger. “If you came up against one of them today you’d end up their blood pet all over again.”
Streaks of color high on her cheekbones. “You might order your people around, but don’t even try it with me.”
Some men liked women who knew how to submit; others, women who fought back. Dmitri didn’t have a preference either way. To do so would be to care for a female beyond a fleeting sexual connection. Yet when it came to Honor, he wanted to strip her bare in more ways than one, unravel the mystery of who she was to him. “A single phone call,” he murmured, gaze lingering on the full curves of her mouth in conscious provocation, “and Sara will deem you unfit for duty.”
That mouth flattened. “You think that’ll stop me?”
“No. But the fact that you have no idea of the location of Tommy’s cabin will.” His lips curved when he caught the calculation in her. Such an expressive face, had Honor, one that would never be able to hide anything from a man who knew how to read her. “Don’t bother to ask Vivek to dig it out for you unless you want him to become a permanent guest of the Tower.”
“Threats now, Dmitri?” It was somehow an intimate question, his name pronounced with an accent so perfect, it was a caress.
“You always knew I wasn’t a nice man,” he said, wanting to hear that voice in bed, in the warm hush of a pleasure-drenched night. “Go home. Sleep. Be a good girl”—he leaned close enough that their breath mingled, close enough that kissing her would take only the dip of his head—“and I’ll let you come on the chopper tomorrow morning.”
“If what you told me about Isis wasn’t bullshit,” Honor said, her voice vibrating with the force of her emotions, “then you know exactly how I feel right now. You know.”
Dmitri’s response was pitiless. “I also know that if the bastards slip through your grasp because you’re too weak, the regret will make you bleed worse than any wound.”
Folding her arms, Honor stalked to the window. “Could you have slept?” It wasn’t about reason, about anything so sane.
“I didn’t,” he said, walking to stand behind her, dangerous, muscled, immovable. “But I wasn’t mortal.” No emotion in his voice.
Isis, she thought, had done far worse to Dmitri than a forced Making and bedding. “I came to tell you,” she said, feeling a deep, inexorable anger that had nothing to do with their fight and everything to do with a long-dead angel, “that I figured out the tattoo on the way back from Sorrow’s home.”
Turning, she looked into that sensual face that had haunted her since the first time she’d seen it and knew there was no way to protect him from this. Why she felt a desperate need to try, until it was a tearing agony within her, she didn’t know. “It says, ‘To remember Isis. A gift of grace. To avenge Isis. A rage of blood.’ Someone’s out to take vengeance for the death of a monster.”
Honor didn’t go up to her own apartment when she arrived at her building. Her emotions were a kaleidoscope of shattered pieces—anger, pain, aggravation, that strange, piercing desolation . . . and a need that seemed to be growing ever stronger. Realizing Ashwini might still be in the city, she knocked on the other hunter’s door and found herself invited in for ice cream and a movie.
“Hepburn,” Ashwini said, digging into the quart of mint chocolate chip she’d threatened to defend to the death with her spoon if Honor so much as looked in its direction. “Classic.”
Frustration churned within her at being forced to wait to continue the hunt, but though it galled, Dmitri was right. Her bones were tired, her mind fuzzy after days of nightmare-ridden sleep. So she dug around in Ash’s fridge for the butter pecan that was her personal favorite, and, boots abandoned by the door, sprawled on the ridiculously comfortable armchair her friend had had for as long as Honor had known her. “We’ve seen this one before.”
“I like it.”
“Why are you in your pajamas?” The other hunter was dressed in an old gray T-shirt and a pair of faded fleece pants with dancing sheep on them. “It’s two in the afternoon.”
“I’m on vacation today.”
No sounds except that of ice cream being seriously eaten and the repartee on the screen. It would surprise many people how tranquil being with Ashwini could be. Most had never seen the other woman without the prickly emotional armor that Honor had recognized the instant they met at a Guild bar in Ivory Coast, didn’t understand that she was one of the most accepting people Honor had ever met. Flaws, scars, none of it scared her.
Scooping up more mint and chocolate, Ash said, “You won’t believe what Janvier did this time.”
“Can’t be too bad since you’re not inviting me to his funeral.” Ashwini and the two-hundred-something vampire had a complicated relationship.
Reaching over to the side table, Ashwini picked up and passed a small box to Honor. It proved to hold a stunning square-cut sapphire pendant set in platinum, the setting a little jagged, a fraction off center . . . as if the person who’d commissioned it knew that nothing too smooth, too perfect would’ve suited Ash.
Point to you, Cajun. “Are you going to wear it?”
“It’ll only encourage him.”
“Oh, so it’s okay if I ask him out?” she teased. “He is hella sexy, cher.”
“Funny.” Ash stabbed her spoon at her. “Tell me about Dmitri.”
Of course her best friend had figured it out. “I feel like a moth drawn to the flame.” Contact would hurt, might be fatal, and yet she couldn’t stop herself. Obsession or compulsion, she didn’t know, but she did know that before this was over, she’d either end up in Dmitri’s bed . . . or one of them would bleed darkest red.
16
Dmitri wrapped Elena in tendrils of whiskey and night-blooming roses, rich and seductive, as the Guild Hunter walked into the library of the home she shared with Raphael in the Angel Enclave, the white-gold tips of her wings brushing along the carpet.
Her jawline firmed, pale eyes narrowing. “Weak effort, Dmitri.”
It had been, his attention on another woman. “I was being polite.” Elena was more sensitive to his ability than any other hunter he’d ever met, likely as a result of the horrific massacre that had ended her childhood.
Dmitri would have sheltered and protected the child she’d been, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, have mercy on the adult—because he wasn’t the only vampire who could lure with scent. The other members of the Cadre wouldn’t hesitate to use Elena’s vulnerability to this most insidious of weapons against her. And Elena was Raphael’s heart.
“I heard about H—Sorrow.” A solemn expression, quiet words. “How is she?”
“Uncertain.” The girl’s future remained a fragile thing that could be destroyed with a single, brutal act. “She acted in self-defense today, but she seems unable to harness or channel the violence.”
Elena’s head turned toward the door an instant before Dmitri sensed Raphael’s approaching presence. Spreading out those wings of midnight and dawn behind her, she walked to touch her hand to Raphael’s chest, something silent and powerful passing between the archangel and his consort.
It remained incomprehensible to Dmitri how Elena, an angel with a weak mortal heart, had formed such a bond with Raphael. But he had taken a vow and he would defend that bond to his last breath. “Sire,” he said when the two drew apart, “I would speak to you.” It’s about Isis. He didn’t know how much the archangel had told his consort.