Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(10)
Author: Nalini Singh

Flaring out her wings, as if to expose them to the night’s languid caress, Favashi turned her face toward the diamondstudded nightscape that was Manhattan. “Such a stunning place, but so hard. My land is gentler.”

“A man could burn to nothing in your deserts without ever being found.” He had no doubts that Favashi had buried many a body beneath those rolling sand dunes. He didn’t have a problem with that—he’d buried a few bodies himself. What he did have a problem with was the fact that she’d not only fooled him into believing in her, but that she’d expected to lead him on a leash, her own personal guard dog cum assassin.

Once, so long ago it was another life, Dmitri had been turned into a thing to be used. Never again. “Why are you here?”

“I came to see you.” A simple answer, but her voice held a soft, exotic music that turned it into an invitation. “Let the past lie where it belongs. I would court you again.”

“No.” He captured her wrist as she raised her hand to touch his face, squeezing so hard he’d have fractured a mortal woman’s bones. “The last time an angel tried to court me,” he whispered, leaning down to speak with his lips brushing her neck, “she ended up in bite-sized pieces I then fed to her hounds.” It was he who had courted Favashi before—or at least she’d allowed him to believe he was the one leading the dance. The one good thing that had come out of the experience was that he’d never again make the mistake of believing a woman’s sweet lies.

Running his lips along the sensitive edge of her ear, he sucked lightly in the way he knew turned her weak, while rubbing his thumb over the escalating pulse in the wrist he still held. “I watched the dogs feed,” he murmured, reaching out to run the fingers of his free hand over the curving arches of her wings in the most intimate of caresses, “and I wished I had taken longer to carve her with the 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 na**d 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.”