“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?
She 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.