Nalini Singh: Archangel's Blade

Favashi ripped away her wrist and stepped back from him. It mattered little—her eyes were dilated, her skin flushed. He smiled, touched his finger very deliberately to the rapid pulse in her neck. “The bed isn’t far if you wish to be serviced, my Lady Favashi.”

No flinch at the mocking appellation. She was an archangel, after all. But her tone held a concern that might’ve once fooled him into believing she cared. “You are not who you once were, Dmitri. I would not have a man such as you in my bed.”

“Pity. I have so many things I’d enjoy doing to you.” None of it would have anything to do with pleasure. “Now,” he said, having had enough of games, “tell me the real reason you’re here.”

A strand of mink-dark hair played across her face before falling as the wind fell. “I spoke the truth.” Her face flawless in profile, she watched a group of angels angle in to land on a lower balcony, their wings cupped inward to lessen the speed of their descent. “Raphael and Elijah both have consorts and are stable, unlike the others in the Cadre.

“I have decided it’s time to join them—you were the only one who seemed a suitable choice.” The cool calculation of an immortal. “Whether or not I would ever trust you in my bed, the invitation stands. Consider how much power you would have at your command as my consort.” With that, she flared out wings he’d once caressed as she arched naked above him, and swept off the balcony.

Making a call to ensure she’d be tracked out of the country, Dmitri turned his face into the cool night winds that held strands of the Hudson intertwined with the frenetic beat of this wild, living city of steel and glass and heart. Favashi didn’t understand and likely never would. The fact was, Elena was weak, far too weak to be consort to an archangel, and yet Raphael loved her.

While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael’s Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he’d once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown . . . that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.

Scorching heat.

Charred flesh.

Screams.

Words she should understand but couldn’t.

Pain, searing, blinding . . . but overwhelmed by anguish.

“No, no, no.”

Jerked out of the nightmare by the sound of her own voice, Honor touched her face to find a single tear splashed on her cheek. It startled her. Most of the time when she dreamed of the basement, she woke up rigid with terror, nausea churning in her gut. Sometimes she surfaced enraged, her hand bloodless around a weapon. The one thing she did not do, hadn’t done since the rescue, was cry. Not when awake, not when asleep.

Rubbing her sleeve over the wetness to eradicate the evidence of her loss of control, she took a self-conscious look around the library. It lay deserted, and a glance at her watch showed her why—it was five a.m. Ashwini and Demarco had left her and Ransom here sometime after one, and she remembered muttering “Bye” to the other hunter as he, too, went to bed after about an hour.

Now, packing up her laptop and the photocopies she’d made from a number of texts, she headed back to her room. Her small, stifling cell of a room—exhaustion or not, she knew sleep was going to be an impossibility. Figuring Ashwini would be up, since the other hunter had left after being called in for a local hunt, she picked up her cell phone.

“Honor, what do you need?”

“Can you talk?”

“Yeah, just got home after pulling in the idiot vamp.”

“Already?” That had to be some kind of a record.

“He had the bright idea to—get this—hide at his mom’s. Like that isn’t the first place we’d look.”

It was at times like this that Honor was forcibly reminded that vampires had once been human. The echoes could take decades to fade . . . though she was sure none remained in Dmitri. “You said something about an apartment being free in your building last time you were here,” she said, angry at herself for being unable to stop thinking about the lethal, sensual creature who’d looked at her with eyes full of unhidden intent. “Don’t suppose it still is?”

“Nope. Because I put your name down for it.”

Honor’s butt hit the bed. “You knew.”

“It’s open plan,” Ashwini said, instead of answering the implied question. “Glass everywhere, and while that would be a security hazard lower down, you’ll be on the thirty-first floor. I might’ve sort of picked the lock on your storage unit and moved all your stuff in last week, but if you tell anyone, I’ll say the gremlins did it.”

At any other time, with any other person, Honor would’ve been angry, but this was Ash, who had understood that Honor needed to escape before she had herself. “I owe you one.”

“Want me to come pick you up? I still have the car I signed out for the hunt.”

Honor glanced around her room. “Give me a couple of hours to pack up here.” She didn’t have much, but it was an unspoken rule that the bed was to be stripped, the floor vacuumed, and any trash removed, before departure. “I’ll meet you by the front gate.”

“Honor?”

“Yes?”

“It’s good to have you back.”

He’d lied to Favashi.

Dmitri maneuvered the Ferrari back into Manhattan, having made an early morning trip across the river to the Angel Enclave—to Raphael’s home.

During the time he’d been caged, he had once threatened to feed Isis to her hounds. But in actuality, after he’d stabbed the angel so many times that her heart had been nothing but thick, bloody pulp, Raphael had wrenched off her head with a single vicious pull. Then together, the two of them had cut the bitch up into small pieces, but not to throw to her hounds. No, they had burned her to ash in a blaze set in the center of her courtyard. Unlike an archangel, Isis hadn’t been powerful enough to return from that.

Dmitri had never regretted the brutality of what they had done. It had been necessary to make sure she would never again rise. He only wished they could’ve taken longer, made her scream and beg and plead . . . as his Ingrede must have. But Misha had been alone and scared in the cold, lightless place beneath the keep, returning to him Dmitri’s number one priority.

“Papa! Papa!” His son, attempting to crawl across the stone, small hands swollen and bruised from his futile attempts to claw away the manacle around his neck, the unspeakable thing neither Dmitri nor Raphael had been able to remove without hurting him.

“Shh, Misha.” He tried to keep his voice calm, to not allow his agony to show through as he took those broken hands into his own, brought them to his lips. “It is only a scratch. Papa is fine.”

Having taken the key from Isis, he unlocked the iron that held Misha bound, threw it far away. “I’m here now.” His eldest child’s small, feverish body in his arms, holding on tight, so tight. “It’ll be all right.”

Chest taut with a pain that had never lessened, Dmitri pushed the remote that allowed him access to the sprawling parking lot beneath the Tower. Silent and fast, the gate opened at once. The Ferrari purred into its usual spot, and a couple of minutes later, he was out and heading toward the elevator, his memories contained behind walls no one had ever breached.

Just as the doors opened, his cell phone rang, the receptionist advising him of Honor’s arrival. A dark anticipation hummed through him, intense enough that there was no chance he’d set her free before satiating his hunger. “I’ll escort her up,” he said.