Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(24)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Too bad.” Said with the same lack of emotion with which he’d shot Valeria.

It scared her. A sane response. What wasn’t sane was that she wanted to reach out and touch the brutal angle of his jaw, soften him somehow. Impossible. “If it comes down to it, I’ll die to hold on to my freedom,” she said, letting the wind whip her hair off her face. “I won’t ever be a prisoner again, yours or anyone else’s.” It was a vow she’d made as she lay a broken doll in a hospital bed, one she’d spill the dark red of heart’s blood to keep.

Dmitri shifted gears with the ease of a man used to power. “I don’t intend to break you, Honor.” The harsh edge replaced by black silk, sinful and tantalizing as the rich scent of chocolate seeped into her very bones. “I intend to seduce you.”

A burst of heat low in her body, a pulse of attraction that followed no rules of rational behavior . . . and an obsession she couldn’t fight. “Ever had a woman say no to you, Dmitri?”

“Once.” He turned the corner with a smile that made her want to cup his face, trace those beautiful lips with her own. “I married her.”

Dmitri wasn’t certain why he’d told Honor that, when he spoke of Ingrede to no one. Raphael alone knew, and the archangel respected his wish to keep silent on the matter, on the wound that had never healed. “Tommy,” he said, changing the direction of the conversation when Honor opened her mouth as if to ask him about the only woman in his long, long life who had ever held his heart, “is Thomas Beckworth the Third.”

Honor’s gaze lay heavy on him but she took the cue. “Tommy is a common name.”

“Valeria confirmed.” When she’d realized that begging and pleading wasn’t going to work, the female vampire had attempted to hold the information hostage. It had only taken a couple of broken bones to end that. Dmitri had made certain those breaks echoed the half-healed fractures he’d seen on the X-rays taken after Honor’s rescue.

“Please, Dmitri,” Valeria had cried. “Don’t turn into a monster because of a mortal.”

It had made him smile in genuine amusement. “Dear Valeria, I was a monster before you were born.” He’d become one the instant the cottage burned, taking the best part of him with it.

“According to a search I asked Venom to run while you were upstairs,” he said, glancing away from a memory that would haunt him for all eternity, “seems like Tommy’s gone to ground.”

A whisper of scent, wildflowers in bloom as Honor shifted in her seat. “He can’t know we’re onto him.”

The scent of her wrapped around him, touching him on a level he didn’t permit any woman. “No,” he said, hand tightening on the steering wheel, “but he’s connected enough that he must have realized you were working for me.”

Honor caught the lines of tension around his mouth, had to curl her fingers into her hand to stop the urge to lean over and stroke them away. This madness, it might just get her killed.

“We’ll go to Tommy’s home,” he continued when she didn’t interrupt, “see what we can discover.”

That home proved to be as ostentatious within as Valeria’s had been elegant. Ornate scrollwork on the moldings, wallpaper so ugly it had to have been bought more with reference to cost than taste, the furniture clunky and covered in floral fabric as hideous—and undoubtedly as expensive—as the wallpaper.

But the bedroom was what took the cake.

“Wow,” Honor said, staring at the enormous circular bed covered in pink satin sheets as well as thousands of bloated pillows edged in white fur. “I didn’t think people actually had beds like this outside of a  p**n  set on steroids.” Unable to stop herself, she looked up. “A mirrored ceiling. I’m shocked.”

Dmitri began to laugh, and it was a wild, beautiful sound that cut off with harsh abruptness. “Honor, leave the room.” An order coated in frost.

Her stomach clenched. It would’ve been so easy to turn on her heel, to allow him to shield her—and that was what he was attempting to do, this dangerous creature who would never be human—but to do so would be to give in to the bastards who had tried to destroy her. “No more running,” she said, keeping her tone calm through vicious force of will. “Show me.”

A taut moment, dark, dark eyes examining her. “Honor.”

“Some battles,” she said softly, holding that gaze full of secrets so very old, “a woman has to fight on her own.”

His cheekbones cut against his skin as he said, “Behind you.”

The blown-up black-and-white photograph covered the entire wall facing the bed. It was of a na**d woman hanging from heavy chains by her wrists, her legs spread and manacled to the floor. Her head was slumped, her hair falling around her face, the side of her breast bleeding where a vampire had fed.

It was Honor.

Walking across to that image that threatened to catapult her back into a nightmare, she took out a blade and slowly, methodically, began to cut it to pieces. “I forgot,” she said, swallowing her rage when it threatened to drown her, “that he took pictures.”

Click. Click.

The sound had humiliated her anew when she had thought herself hardened to everything her abusers could do to her. “Then he began bringing the video camera.” Which meant there were recordings of her somewhere, recordings where she tried not to scream as Tommy hurt her. That was why she’d forgotten—because she couldn’t bear the shame of knowing others, perhaps her friends, would see her trapped and helpless and degraded . . . but of course, she had never truly forgotten.

“We’ll find the original images and recordings.” Dmitri began going through the bedroom with quiet, focused fury, ripping out drawers, emptying shelves. “He’ll have kept them for himself, a secret thing, because as soon as they got out, he knew I’d slit his throat.”

“You can’t know that.” A pain in her chest, so huge, so heavy.

Dmitri walked over to help her pull off the last piece, watched in silence as she tore it into even smaller shreds. “No matter what,” he said, when the last scraps fluttered to the ground at her feet, a thousand black and white moths, “those images will never see the light of day.”

In his eyes, she saw a chilling prophecy of death.

Tommy wasn’t the smartest of men—they found the memory cards holding the photos and videos in a wall safe. Dmitri said nothing when she disappeared to the car—and to her laptop—to check that the images gave no clues that could lead to the identification of the other members of this sick little group.