“I can’t—” he began, because what she was offering, it was too much, a gift too painful.
“Shh.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay.”
“No.” It wasn’t okay, wouldn’t be okay until he had the answers he needed.
“So stubborn.” Kissing him slow and deep, she held him to her with her legs around his hips when he would’ve pulled out. “I should’ve expected it from the man who once clambered up a mountainside at dawn to bring me wildflowers.”
His entire body shuddered under the weight of the knowledge in her eyes, in her touch, in her voice. All the tiny things she’d done that had nudged at his memory, the echo of Ingrede’s joy breaking his heart when it was Honor who laughed, the way she knew him, it crashed against the chaos inside him, leaving only a raw need in its wake.
“Let me give you what you need, husband. I’ve waited so very long.” Haunting words tangled with an exquisite desire that sang to his blood. “Drink.”
The final thread of his control snapped.
Roaring, he drove into her again and again and again, until she was clenching around him with feminine power and he was coming with such satisfaction that he had no memory of sinking his fangs into her neck. Then the tart, wild taste of her blood hit him with the ferocity of a windstorm, and suddenly he was hard once more.
Honor felt her eyes grow wide as Dmitri began to move again, his fangs sending a wave of sultry pleasure through her system—languid, persuasive, tasting of sin and sex and everything deliciously bad . . . and so unlike what she’d experienced in the basement that a comparison would’ve been laughable.
Moaning at the opulent swell of it through whimpering muscles and a pleasantly shattered body, she felt herself coating the hard intrusion of his arousal in lush need. “Oh, God, Dmitri.”
The thick length of him pushed past swollen tissues, arcing ripples of ecstasy throughout her system, as he bent at her neck and fed. Thrusting her hand into his hair, she held him to her, the scorching sexuality of the moment cut with a wild tenderness. He sucked hard, and her body bucked.
Making a low, deep sound of satisfaction, he pulled out, pushed back in . . . and rode her to an orgasm that never seemed to stop.
Her muscles were still quivering from the erotic pleasure when, ending the blood kiss, he licked his tongue over the tiny wounds, sucked the skin again, and raised his head. “We’re not done,” he purred in her ear as her legs fell off his back, too exhausted to hold on. Reaching between them, he plucked at her clitoris with fingers that knew her far too well.
Another orgasm rocked through her, deep, so deep. “I can’t take any more.” It was a moan.
“Liar.” A rolling move of his hips, and she was rising toward him, her hands caressing his chest, his arms.
He had endless patience, and he wasn’t about to give her what she wanted this time. Not until half an hour later, when she was sucking on his throat, scratching his back, and threatening to use a blade on him. That was when he pulled out his cock to her frustrated scream, spread her thighs wide, and bent that dark head to suck her clitoris into his mouth.
The erotic shock was so intense, it seared her nerve endings, had lights exploding behind her eyes. She was fairly certain she lost consciousness for a blinding second. When she lifted her drugged eyelids at last, it was to feel her beautiful, dangerous Dmitri sliding into her in a primal thrust that was pure possession.
38
Freshly showered, they spoke sitting in bed, Honor lying against Dmitri’s chest, her body soft and warm and his. Absolutely, categorically his.
“I couldn’t hide this from you,” she said as he ran his fingers through hair he’d dried as she sat slumped against him, lazy and sated, “but I was prepared for utter disbelief, thought it might take me years to prove it to you.”
Taking her hand, he spread it over his heart. “Some part of me knew from the start.” She was inside him, her soul forcing his own back to life. “I just wasn’t ready to consciously accept it.” Honor was the brave one, the one who had taken that leap of hope.
Her hand fisted. “I know this will hurt you so much, but I need to have this question answered.” Eyes iridescent with tears, jewels in the rain. “Misha . . . what did they do to Misha?”
A searing burn on his chest, the scent of burning flesh and muscle and his body’s silent screams. But his mouth he kept shut, though it cost him a piece of his sanity.
“There now, lover. You will never forget me.” Isis’s red lips pressing over the burned and scarred flesh, her tongue digging into the still painful wound. “Always, you will carry me within.” Her flawless face stayed serene as she took up the branding iron and pressed it to his flesh a second time to make certain of her words.
Blackness engulfed him and when he woke, his chest was ridged with a scar so heavy and thick, he thought nothing would ever erase it. Looking up, he saw Raphael staring at that brand with a cold intensity that spoke of death. The angel said nothing, but when their eyes met he jerked the chain that held his left hand cuffed to the wall. It took Dmitri’s dazed mind a moment to see, to understand.
The stone was cracking. A year it had taken him, but Raphael had weakened his bonds enough to snap them—now, Dmitri simply had to survive, become strong again. So he did, though Isis had almost broken him. But he didn’t do it to kill her, though that need was a fever in his blood. He did it so he could hold his son again, the only one of his family who remained.
“Shh, Misha,” he said, his throat cracked and raw when his son screamed and convulsed, his tiny body attached to the wall by a cuff around his neck. “Papa will be there soon and he’ll make it all right.”
He’d kept his promise. He’d given his son peace.
The guilt of what he’d done clawed him bloody. “Isis tried to Make him.”
A horrified sound. “He was too young.”
“Yes.” Dmitri couldn’t put this pain into words, but when Honor’s hands came up to cup his cheeks, he bent his head toward her, let her press her lips to his closed eyes, to his lips.
“I understand.” Her voice was a husky whisper. “It is all right, Dmitri. It was the only thing you could’ve done.”
Dmitri hadn’t cried, not for near to a thousand years. But the remembered agony of cradling his son’s body in his arms, of looking into those trusting eyes fevered and full of suffering and a madness that had already made Misha gnaw at his own flesh, of holding that gaze until the very end, when he ended the life of his brave, beautiful boy . . . it tore through him now, creating cutting rivers of pain.
He would’ve drowned but for the woman who held him through the storm, whose tears mixed with his own, whose gentle hands gave him forgiveness for a crime for which he’d never forgiven himself. “I was their father,” he said at long last. “Caterina, Misha . . . I couldn’t protect either of them. I couldn’t protect you.”
Honor shook her head. “You fought for us. You surrendered your pride, your body, your freedom. But most of all, you loved us until none of us knew what it was to live without being adored.” Cupping his face again, she touched her forehead to his. “If I got a second chance, don’t you think our babies must have, too?”
Her whisper didn’t wipe out his grief over their loss, but it touched it with the glow of hope. And having this woman in his arms, that was a gift no one could ever take away. “Ingrede or Honor?” It mattered not to him, the essence of her indelibly inked on his soul.